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romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com writes: >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. Ahh, one of the smaller things i hadn't yet looked at for Montreiano. I think the verb form for both verbs like tener and valer will be as in Portuguese, a palatalization; tener > teño > teñio /teNjo/ valer > valio >vauio /vawjo/ A lot of the irregulars in Spanish make sense if you know the VL roots, or understand sound change history. But for most people they don't make sense ;) __________________________ Communication is not just words, communication is...architecture because of course it is quite obvious that the house that would be built without that desire, that desire to communicate, would not look as your house does today.