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Re: [romconlang] Re: Plurals in -s / loss of final s



--- Carl Edlund Anderson <cea@hidden.email> wrote:

> 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.

Could be! I saw a good written example recently,
where the -s had disappeared entirely, leaving
1pl forms in -amo. The text also exhibited b/v
confusion (estube).

> 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.  

This might be of interest:

<http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_histromlit_1_1.htm>

Note especially: "There is little to remark about
the other letters, except that S, N, and M became
very weak when final and were often entirely
lost. S was rehabilitated in the literary dialect
in the time of Cicero, who speaks of the omission
to reckon it as "subrusticum"; but final M is
always elided before a vowel."

Had -s note been "rehabilitated" in the literary
language, one wonders what the results could be
in modern times...

> 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? 

Honestly, that doesn't sound very likely. But I
could be wrong!

> Carl

Padraic



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