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Pete and Carl, I just read your posts, but I don't have them before me, as I read them in Opera mini but write this in Mobile Gmail sitting on the train back to Gothenburg. Hence no quoting or interspersed answers but an old-fashioned reply letter. As you may know voiceless stop to voiceless fricative lenition of the kind Pete suggests did occur in Irish, so it's not implausible per se. Within Romance an unconditioned and subphonemic fricativization of voiceless stops occurred in Tuscan. However I have problems seeing such a lenition occur connected to the Western Romance voicing lenition. Also fricativizing lenition is not as commonplace a phenomenon as voicing lenition. Moreover if you follow Hall's chronology the Western Romance lenition would be too late: the High German consonant shift was already (pre)history when OHG writing in Latin script began early in the ninth century. This means that the split between Gallo-Romance and Germano-Romance must have occurred some centuries earlier. It may however well be that Hall's absolute chronology is in error. I don't know how Hall would have reconciled his late dating of lenition with the fact that confusion of voiceless and voiced stop letters PB, TD, CG occurs in late imperial age inscriptions! Even in Rome itself, whose modern dialect is not leniting. This means that voicing of intervocalic stops was already then so widespread that a stonecutter coming from the west could find employment in Rome in spite of making such spelling mistakes! I'm worried however by the thought of a language which first undergoes lenition and then the High German consonant shift: the combined result of fricativizing lenition plus HGCS would practically be that you get voiced fricatives corresponding to Latin voiced stops and voiceless stops corresponding to Latin voiced stops, which of course may be what you want. The combined results of voicing lenition and HGCS would cancel each other out, since you would get t > d > t! Or do you want to abandon HGCS? /BP -- / BP