Re: nu alltr e gw alltr?

["Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@clara.co.uk>]

At 1:36 pm -0500 13/11/98, Padraic Brown wrote:
>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.

If we want to emphasize exclusivity, just as in English it's not uncommon
to say "we other" /"us others" or "the of us" and if we want to be
inclusive we say "we all" / "us all" or "all of us".

>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).

All the Romance-langs, except French, have developed polite 3rd person
forms for "you" which contrast with the familiar 2nd person forms derived
from Latin 'tu' and 'vos'.

But both neither French & modern Welsh have developed polite 3rd person
substitutes for "you".  Both languages retain the old 2nd singular (tu/ ti
respectively) as informal or intimate form of singular address, and use the
old plural (vous/ ch(w)i) as the polite singular as well as the general
plural.  Therefore, I think it likely that Brithenig would've done the same.


>>
>> >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
.......
>
>If the final /d/ became [h] (like Andalucian and many Lat. Am. dialects
>(la ciuda de Madri, for ex.));

I thought it was in fact silent in such cases.  Voiced fricatives (which is
what Spanish /d/ is in such positions) have a tendency to disappear, cf.
final -f [v] in modern Welsh.  Oddly, however, final [D] maintains itself
in Welsh, so much so that when the final -f of Caerdyf became silent the
fricative was restored as the modern Caerdydd.

>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?

No, except that in the Brittonic languages the spirant mutation was caused
_only_ by a preconsonantal [s] which had become [h] before disappearing.  I
find it difficult to imagine a [D] becoming [h], though it could become a
_voiced_ glottal fricative like the Afrikaans /h/, indeed the Gaelic 'dh'
and 'gh' are similar.  But the problem still would remain that we would
have imagine the Romano-British _restoring_ a /d/ which had become silent
in Latin some time even before J.Caesar paid his two summer visits to the
island.  This I find very difficult to imagine.

No, IMO Andrew was quite right when he spoke of geminated consonants.  But
I don't see why this should lead to spirantization; it certainly didn't in
the Celtic languages.

Ray.