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On 07/02/2007 12:31, Padraic Brown wrote:
But my understanding isthat this loss of -s and -s- is widespread in many non-PeninsularSpanish dialects.Could be! I saw a good written example recently, where the -s had disappeared entirely, leaving1pl forms in -amo.
Ooo, that's turning into Italian! ;)
The text also exhibited b/v confusion (estube).
So, occasionally, does my wife when typing fast (online chat with her sister or something). Although a speaker from an educated register, in her head <b> and <v> are just arbitrary spelling variants for /B/, presumably invented to make elementary school quizzes more painful :) I'm not sure I've actually seen her confuse <ll> and <y> yet, but it can only be a matter of time. She usually pronounces the intervocalic /d/ in things like -ado endings, but we've a Venezuelan neighbour of Cuban parentage, and his intervocalic /d/ quickly disappears unless he's thinking pretty hard about it.
I sometimes catch myself imitating the loss of final -s, especially from -as for some reason, more than from -os.
I think I've learned a lot of phonology from listening to our various Spanish-speaking friends, actually :) I had never understood things like transformations of /s/ to /h/, like in Brittonic Celtic, but now can some similar processes happening around me. Better than a jillion IPA symbols :)
I have read that the Italian masc. pl. -i isnot 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!
I consulted my book on Italian (Martin Maiden, _A Linguistic History of Italian_), and whether it's right or not, you're not wrong :) I think I had remembered Maiden's argument in a confused way.
In any event, he suggests that Italians inflectional -e and -i in Italian plurals from Latin 1st/3rd declension nouns is the phonetic development of acc.pl. endings -as and -es:
acc.pl. TERRAS > /tErrai/ > /tErre/, <terre> acc.pl. CANES > /kanei/ > /ka:ni/, <cani>Then he suggests the -i ending from masculine nouns from the 3rd declension was analogically applied to masculine nouns from the 2nd declension. (Perhaps because the a similar development in the 2nd declension acc.pl. would have gone -o:s > -ui > -u, which in Tuscan > -o, and that would make it indistinguishable from the singular unless you replaced it with something more distinctive ... like the convenient -i from 3rd declension masculine nouns.
He makes several points on why the -e/-i don't look like survivals of the 1st/3rd declension nominative plurals, such as them not seeming to cause palatalization (never before -e and rarely before -i), and he suggests the change of -as/-es to -e/-i happened after palatalization had taken place.
He suggests the same phonological process created the 2nd person singular verb endings.
Anyway, that's my quick summary. And so I had the -os > -i completely wrong :) but at least remembered loss of final -s for _something_ :)
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@hidden.email http://www.carlaz.com/