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Jan van Steenbergen a skr^ipt: > --- Carl Edlund Anderson skrzypszy: > > > I would have thought a stressed short /o/ in Latin should become /ue/ in > > Spanish, but it seems to me that the /o/ in /rosa/ escapes this. Is this > > an effect of the following -s-? Have I misunderstood which is the tonic > > vowel? Or is something else at work to keep /rosa/ from becoming /**ruesa/? > > Well, I know v�ry little about Spanish, but my guess is that it should rather > be the /r/ that prevents /o/ from turning into /ue/. No. It easily became _rueda_ < _rota_ 'wheel'. _rosa_ is an early borrowing from Latin. Yes, yes. Romance langs have two or three strata (layers) in their vocabulary: 1) derived directly from VL and thus subject to all phonetic changes; 2) early Latinisms that experienced mutations in limited way depending on the time of borrowing; 3) later "bookish" Latinisms, that could, btw, substitute already existing "vulgar" words, e.g. It. _gloria_ < L. =, while Old It. > _groglia_ or _grora_. -- Yitzik