[YG Conlang Archives] > [romconlang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On 2011-08-11 16:36, thomasruhm wrote:
I did only see now, that that was on topic. I am interested in Vulgar Latin palatalization much, but I find it very strange.
You have to bear in mind that the process probably differed a lot in time and space and even between individual speakers, and the outcome certainly differed in space.
It looks like if 'tSi' for 'ti' and 'tsi' for 'ci' are the oldest forms. Old High German already took 'ts' from french Latin for older 'tSi'.
Mind you that in Old French, and Western Romance generally //tiV\// and //ki// actually did merge totally, and probably quite early at that. It isn't even certain that //ki// went through a [tS] (or rather [tSj]) stage everywhere (though Picardie was an island of [tS] deep in [ts] territory!)
The descriptions one can read about it are so obscure.
Well, it *is* complicated. Simplification e.g. by the common strategy of just listing the reflexes in word- initial position may be simpler, but it's also uninformative to the point of verging on falsification, since it hinders rather than helps understanding of the detailed reality. Meyer-L�bke has several pages detailing the different outcomes of palatalization not only in different areas, but also in different positions in the word, relative surrounding sounds, the number of syllables and last but not least the position of stress. I too found such descriptions hard to follow before I had studied phonetics -- a necessary study if you want to understand *why* things happened. You don't have to go to university (or rather, nowadays you only have to go to Google University) to get an introduction in phonetics: <http://www.unc.edu/~jlsmith/pht-url.html> You can skip the acoustic stuff on the first round about, although scribes of course wrote similarly what they heard as similar! <http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184.html> Keep following the links and you will eventually come to sound file links! <http://wso.williams.edu/~jdowse/ipa.html> Full color-coded chart <http://www.archive.org/details/ComprehensiveArticulatoryPhonetics> Free as in beer! <http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html> Shows only the grosser distinctions, but very informative none the less -- step from velar forwards to dental and remember that the positions intermediate between those shown are quite possible and occurring, and that most of them can be produced with slight variations in tongue shape and more or less palatal coarticulation.
Retic latin, at about the ninth century often got 'ci' for 'ti' even though Retoromance has 'ts' as often as Italian.
One has to remember that ancient writing is no exact phonetic transcription! Moreover all the sounds resulting from palatalization lacked a letter of their own, and were written with letters and letter combinations which, apart from <z>, were used for other sounds too. Moreover spelling of Romance languages, at least west of the Adriatic, was always influenced by the spelling of Latin, and the way Latin was pronounced at the time and place of the scribe, and by older vernacular texts which the scribe had copied or read. Some scribes were happy with a gross approximation, using <c> for both /tS/ and /ts/, or <ch> for both /k/ and /tS/, or <z> for both /dz/ and /ts/, or even for /dZ/ (especially in Imperial times). The scribes more concerned with accuracy had a hard time, since it was hard to come up with spellings for all necessary distinctions. A scribe may have used <ti> for /ts/ because he thought (with some reason) that <z> was proper only for /dz/, and he might not have wanted to use <tz> or <zz> for /ts/ because /tts/ with a long /t/ actually existed in the language. He may also have been intending to write Latin, where <ti> was simply the normal spelling for /ts/ according to the current pronunciation. The difference between Latin- influenced vernacular and vernacular-influenced Latin can be hard to tell sometimes, especially early on, and the difference might not even have been clear to the scribe; what looks like vernacular to us may have been intended as Latin, only the scribe wasn't any good at Latin. There are even those who think that people before ca. 800 didn't make a conceptual distinction between Latin and vernacular: everything was Latin, only written/spoken with more or less skill! :-) /bpj