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On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 12:10:18PM -0700, Barry Garcia wrote: > > I'm wondering something. What verb form in Vulgar Latin spawned "tengo" in > Castillian, and "tenho" in Portuguese? Teneo -- 1st person singular indicative present of tenere. The Portuguese form is a pretty straightforward development from Latin. The unstressed /e/ would have ended up /j/, which palatalized the /n/. The Spanish form is more complicated. I just looked this up in _From Latin to Spanish_ to refresh my memory. According to that book, the -g- probably had something to do with verbs whose stems ended in -ng in Latin, such as <frangere>. Apparently those verbs developed such that the first person singular had /ng/ but other forms had /nj/ because of the following front vowel. So: frango *franjemos *franjes *franjetes *franjet *franjent(maybe *frangont) According to the hypothesis, people began mixing up the /ng/ and /nj/ forms of these verbs, sometimes saying /frango/ and sometimes */franjo/. Now at the same time there were verbs that ended in -/njo/ derived from Latin words ending in -/nio/ or -/neo/; since people vacilated on whether to say /frango/ or */franjo/, they extended that pattern to other -/njo/ verbs, yielding */tenjo/ alongside /tengo/. For some reason /tengo/ won out. Then there are words such as <valgo> and <salgo> whose /g/s might have been extended from there. -- Furrfu! r a k k o at c h a r t e r dot n e t