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On 11 Jan 2008, at 17:59 , Peter Collier wrote:
I have come by a copy of Hall's 'Proto-Romance Phonology' and so I'mrevisiting my GMP in light of that, as it means I can better develop my langfrom VL/PRom rather than having to rely too heavily on CL.
I also have a copy of Hall, the Morphology volume as well -- good stuff, though hard to find!
In my particular conlang setting, one of the things I've been interested in doing is sort of ... _blurring_ the VL/CL divide, or establishing a some things as historically VL as standard in what would be my settings "CL", if you see what I mean. On the other hand, I occasionally decide that I'd like to preserve some CL-style features in my version of "VL". (I've been musing over keeping direct developments of CL-style adverbs, for example, and comparative and superlative adjectives.)
Anyway ....
In very broad overview, he seems to suggest the timing of the main changesin consonants to be: Assimilation (/ps/ >/ss/, /pt/ > /tt/ etc), beginning way back in BCE Palatisiation, circa 1st to 6th centuries CE Lenition (voicing), circa 7th/8th centuries CE+ Does that sound about right?
Being more familiar with Spanish than most other Romance languages, I tend to go also go to Ralph Penny's _A History of the Spanish Language_ for quick summaries of Latin > Proto-Romance developments. He doesn't give an absolute chronology, only a relative one, though it seems to differ slightly from Hall's (or perhaps is simply being less detailed in some cases?)
Penny doesn't really talk about a lengthy process for the assimilation of consonant groups, though he does seem to see them as connected with the process of lenition. He seems to suggest the assimilation of consonant groups to geminates (e.g. /pt/ > /tt/, etc.) created an unbalanced consonantal system which was then resolved by simplifying the geminates (e.g. /kk/ > /k/). This is turn may have put pressure on existing intervocalic consonants to distinguish themselves (the geminates and their simplified descendants being generally intervocalic, of course), and they could do this by voicing (if they were voiceless, e.g. /k/ > /g/) or fricativizing (if they were already voiced, e.g. /g/ > /G/), though in the case of voiced fricatives, these seem to have been simply eliminated (at least in Spanish).
This last instance sort of has implications for the relative dating of palatalization, for which Penny notes several stages, but generally sees as having occurred _before_ assimilation and lenition. For example, he sees intervocalic velars as having been palatized before assimilation, such that /regina/ > /red_Zina/, with / d_Z/ then deleted either by assimilation to the following vowel or by lenition to produce Spanish /reina/. (On the other hand, Latin /dj/ and /gj/ produced a geminated /d_Zd_Z/ which was then simplified like other geminates to /d_Z/, as in Latin "plagia", /plagja/ > / plad_Zd_Za/ > /plad_Za/: Spanish "playa".)
I'm just doing my best to summarize Penny here to add extra info, rather then expressing any strong opinion of my own! :)
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/