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On 06/02/2007 00:21, Henrik Theiling wrote:
Padraic Brown writes:... A similar phenomenon can be heard in Spanish, where -s and even -s- are lost, usually becoming H. So you might hear "loh barrioh". I recall it being common in PR and maybe Cuba(?).And even Tenerife. I know a Spanish girl from there who pronounced it that way.
I hear it in a lot of Colombian Spanish, especially on the coast. The higher register dialects (like, among educated speakers in Bogota) normally maintain the -s, but I suspect it starts to slip when the let their guard down :) But my understanding is that this loss of -s and -s- is widespread in many non-Peninsular Spanish dialects.
Turning back to Latin .... I'm sure I've sometimes read things about "loss of final -s" in popular Latin, and I've occasionally believed it, but I'm not really sure. Clearly, masculine nominative singulars with final -s survived into Occitan, so any loss of the 2nd declension masc. nom. final -s couldn't have been a general thing for Western Proto-Romance. My sense is that the masc.nom.sing. -o in Italian and Spanish is (as already noted) mostly the result of loss of final -m in the masc/neut acc. sing., though perhaps what we're really looking at is an analogical leveling of the masc.nom.sing. from a 2-case system (nom: -os; obl: -o) as -s increasingly becomes analyzed as a plural marker. There was, after all, no -s in the 1st declension nom. (or acc.) sing., but there was in the acc. pl. (and I think I've read that some scholars think the Proto-Italic a-stem nom. pl. -a:s ending may have remained in use dialectically, or have come back into some popular Latin dialects via "Sabellic" influence, or something like that; if so, this might have strengthen analysis of -s as a marker of plurality ...).
I have read that the Italian masc. pl. -i is not necessarily a survival of the 2nd declension nom.pl., but could rather be the result of loss of final -s from the acc.pl., perhaps something like -os > -oh > -oi > -i? Perhaps there was loss of -s in the acc.pl. and corresponding influence from the regular nom.pl. -i? I'm not really up on the Italo-Romance situation though!
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@hidden.email http://www.carlaz.com/