Re: nu alltr e gw alltr?

[Padraic Brown <pbrown@nova.umuc.edu>]

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> 
> Maybe - but almost unknown in European languages.  Although the Spanish
> nosotros & vosotros may have developed from some suc distinctions, they are
> not used that way in modern Spanish.  It's certainly not a feature either
> of insular Celtic or of Gallic Romance so if the aim is still to present
> Brithenig as a _plausible_ development from Brito-Romance then the evidence
> is surely against any such development.

That sounds reasonable (for B not to make an inclusive/exclusive
distinction).  What do you think about its manifestation in other ways, as
for example, emphasis or perhaps politeness.  Such as the older Spanish
distinctions of tu (intimate s.) / vos (polite address of the monarch, now
an intimate s. in some places) / usted (polite s.) / vosotros (intimate
pl. in Lat. Am. where used, common in Spain) / ustedes (formal pl. in Lat. 
Am. where vosotros is used, gen. pl.  elsewhere, not too common in Spain). 

> 
> >some other thoughts going on at the moment:
> >
> >1. on the evidence of germination in Italian, should Brithenig prep. _a_
> >be followed by aspirant mutation;
> >
> >ad + C > a + CC > a + Ch
> 
> Modern Italian merely perpetuates the habits of spoken Latin of more than
> 2000 years ago.  It's quite clear from spellings in Roman authors and from
> what graffiti remain that the the -d at the end of ad was fully assimilated
> to the following consonant, the /d/ being retain only before vowels.  This
> is exactly the modern Italian practice - the only difference is that the
> Romans & Italians used different spelling conventions.
> 
> So the question is: Do Latin geminated plosives generally shift to
> fricatives?  I'm not aware of that in Romance generally or in Brithenig.
> 
> I thought the spirant mutation was caused, as in the modern Brittonic
> languages, by the loss of syllable final /s/ which became [h] (as in modern
> Andalusian & medieval French) before finally disappearing.  The prevocalic
> [h] caused the mutation in both the modern Brittonic langs & in Brithening.
> 
> Thus Latin 'trans' would give 'tra'+ spirant mutation.  But I don't see how
> a(d) would have caused that mutation (or, indeed, any mutation).

If the final /d/ became [h] (like Andalucian and many Lat. Am. dialects
(la ciuda de Madri, for ex.));  I would think that that [h] would cause
the mutation as well as the other.  Or is there some mechanism that
determines which kinds of [h] will spawn mutations?

Padraic.