Re: nu alltr e gw alltr?

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

At 9:26 pm -0500 16/11/98, John Cowan wrote:
>Andrew Fferreir yscrifef:
>
>> I am reluctant to state that a(b)
>> survived in Brithenig, the only place in greater Romania that it did
>> survive is in Italian 'da', otherwise it becomes obscured with a(d) and
>> replaced with other prepositions.
>
>Ah, but in B. there is a clear separation between "a(d)" and "a(b)"
>based on the different mutation: spirant (reflecting gemination)
>vs. null or at most soft (reflecting no gemination).  The other
>Romance languages didn't have this advantage.

I agree with Andrew on this one.

<soap box>
Brithenig may be conservative but it must be conservative in that way that,
e.g. Sardinian is conservative, i.e. conserves forms of the _spoken_
language.  The basis for all Romancelangs must be the Vulgar Latin of the
legionaries, merchants and common folk of the Empire, not the written Latin
of Cicero & Ceasar - otherwise we'll be reviving Ciceronian 'abs' if we're
not careful.

The mutations were post Romanic developments - gemination was part of all
Vulgar Latin dialects, so in this respect proto-Brithenig was no different
from the rest.

In the Classical language 'a:'/ 'ab' could remain distinct from 'ad' because:
a) a/ab governed the ablative while ad governed the acc.
b) the /a/ in the the shortened form 'a' was long with no gemination of
following consonant, while the /a/ of ad was short and the the {d} was
completely assimilated to following consonant giving geminated consonants.
c) the  prevocalic forms were /ab/ and /ad/ respectively, both with short /a/.

In Vulgar Latin we know the first 'casualty' among the cases (apart from
the already moribund vocative & locative cases) was the loss of the
ablative which merged with the acc. *at an early date* - the others held on
a bit longer.

Vowel length ceased to be phonemic in the early Empire; while it was
replaced by difference between high & low varieties of other vowels in
stressed positions, both long and short /a/ fell together completely.

The theoretical difference between a+gemination (to) and a+no_gemination
(from) applies to the whole Romance world, not just Britain.  It clearly
was not enough to keep 'a' (from) alive; indeed, the evidence of Italian
'da' (<-- de a(b)) suggests that when vowel length ceased to phonemic a
compansatory gemination of following consonant may have taken place, at
least in some areas.

The fact is, neither 'a/ab' nor 'e/ex' survived in the spoken language,
both being replaced by 'de'.

Also Vulgar Latin was clearly fond of compound prepositions and compound
adverbs which often took on prepositional roles, e.g. in Italian we have
'da' from de+a(b) and in French 'dans' is derived from de+inde = from
within.  With the latter the from meaning diminished in importance as the
'within' meaning dominated and it became a preposition. (The additional -s
was a latter medieval development).  This type of development must have
been going on in Brito-Romance which, we must remember, was an actual,
living language at one time.

I'm afraid the idea of "reviving" 'ab' as 'af' seems to me more on a par
with Jeffrey Henning's Montinoro.  One reason I declined his offer to
collaborate on the project is that I just don't think the alt-history/
alt-language scenario is plausible.  One of the main things that attracted
me to Brithening was Andrew's obvious meticulous observance of what is
plausible.  It would be so easy to pick one's favorite bits of Welsh &
Latin and jumble them together and then derive some scenario to 'justify'
the result.  Andrew has not done that.  He has researched his sources well
(better than I :)  and derived forms that can be backed up with scholarship
and are plausible.  This, I repeat, is probably the feature of Brithenig
that appeals to me the most.  IMHO plausibility must always remain the
over-riding criterion.

<off the soap box>

>> >   "parlÚ chiaro" comes out as
>> > [par lok kja ro].
>> >
>> Interesting feature.  I wonder how it would work in Brithenig.
>
>It corresponds to spirant mutation, I think.  Also, final stress
>is exceptional in It., not typical.

Yep - Italian didn't lose final vowels; antepenultime, or 'dactylic',
stress is still quite common in Italian.

But I was thinking only of other prepositions which might have caused
gemination in the Roman period & thus would give rise to spirant mutation
in Brithening.

Ray.