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Re: [romconlang] deus > Spanish dios: whence the /i/?



Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

On 15 Aug 2004, at 17:32, Padraic Brown wrote:
As I understand it, ie reduced to i before a and
o in Spanish, so deus > dieos > dios. Compare
with E(G)O > ieo > yo.

Daniel Bengoa wrote:
La vocal "e" de la palabra "Deus" es una "e" breve.
Tenemos, pues, que "Deus" (con "e" breve) en latín clásico se ha convertido en "Deos" (con "e" abierta)
en latín vulgar.

D'oh! I should have thought more along those lines myself if I had simply remembered that the e in deus is short and subject to diphthongization to ie in Spanish.

I guess what had confused me is that I had been thinking about the
derivation from PIE *deiwos and had been imagining a resulting /e:/ from
the diphthong ... but going back to look at Sihler, I am reminded that PIE /ei/ normally goes to /i:/ in Latin, though possibly through some monothong between /e:/ and /i:/, and further w-deletion in some parts of the paradigm split it into /deus/ and /di:vus/ ... or something like that.

But if I retain /ei/ and /w/ in my "alternate Latin" (which I've given the English name Qurese), I need not split the paradigm, and can keep /deiwos/ as is (failure of /o/ > /u/ before /s/ and /m/ in final syllables is another of my intended archaisms :), which I kinda like.

Then i just need to figure out what to do with an /ei/ diphthong when I hit the Vulgar Latin changes .... my feeling is that it should probably turn into /e/, and thereby resist the short-e > /E/ > /ie/ style of diphongization in Spanish. But the /w/ would go on to /B/ and I'd end up with /deBos/. Unless I could think of another cunning way to get rid of the /w/ in VL ... eh, but at least it's interesting and different this way.

In any case, my Qurese are going to have named gods drawn from a Roman-style pantheon, and I was going to try to continue a PIE-style name with /djew-/ straight through. I could keep an semi-Old-Latin-style "Diows" > /djoBs/ > /joBs/, and then assume that -Bs- like -ps- becomes /ss/ > /s/, so /jos/. Though /Bs/ would only appear in the nominative, and some dialects, at least, might remodel a new nominative as /joBes/. That's not so far from "Iovis", so perhaps a Spanish-style descendant would simply be "jueves" :) and Catalan/Occitan-style "jous" :)

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/