Talk:Proto-Romance language/Archive 1

Archive 1

Acute accent as a stress marker

This article uses the acute accent as a stress marker in order to avoid having to make syllable divisions (as one is forced to do with the ˈ symbol). None of the sources give an overview of this issue, so any attempt at making a syllable division is mere guesswork unless one copies over one of the (very few) transcriptions that actually show it. This usage of the acute accent is in line with Americanist phonetic notation, which is used throughout Hall (1976) and (1983).

Incidentally, the DERom states that Proto-Romance did indeed have a high tone (which is what the acute accent conveys in IPA) on stressed vowels, giving ['páː.t̪ɾè] 'father' as an example. (Gouvert 2014, pp. 18-9) --Excelsius (talk) 22:30, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Xavier references unclear

Xavier is referenced many times both as Xavier (2014) and Xavier (2016). While Gouvert Xavier is in the bibliography as the co-editor of the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (2016 edition), it's not clear if the 2016 references are to this. Xavier is not listed as a co-editress of the 2014 edition. If "Xavier" is code for something, that's beyond me. 94.21.252.238 (talk) 02:14, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@94.21.252.238: For some reason I used his first name, it should be Gouvert. He co-edited both editions. Should be all fixed now. --Excelsius (talk) 00:45, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 17 May 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) ~SS49~ {talk} 14:16, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

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Proto-Romance Language → Proto-Romance language – The reason I'm requesting a move to the new article, along with its associated talk page, is because I want the word 'language' to be in lower case, in line with the other language's and proto-language's articles. PK2 (talk) 10:43, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• Support per WP:SENTENCECASE and WP:CONSISTENT. The lede unnecessarily piped to use initial caps on "Language" and "Languages", so I changed it. 94.21.252.238 (talk) 01:54, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
• Support. Sounds good to me.--Excelsius (talk) 00:47, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
• Support or alternatively move to Proto-Romance (since the reconstructed language is the primary topic anyway, without potential disambiguity). –Austronesier (talk) 14:19, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Huh?

As conceived in the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman, Proto-Romance most closely reflects Latin as spoken around the sixth century AD. This should not be confused with the actual attested speech of that era, which is generally called Vulgar Latin.

How can "Latin as spoken" be different from "actual attested speech"? If the idea is that attested speech is not representative, then how can it be Vulgar Latin? Or is this just an error for "actual attested Latin", i.e. written Latin? Srnec (talk) 01:28, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree, the statement saying how not to confuse them is confusing. It's probably best just to cut the whole of the second sentence. 94.21.219.127 (talk) 03:41, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. It wasn't helpful.--Excelsius (talk) 08:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. The article does need to make clear what the difference is between this and Vulgar Latin. Srnec (talk) 18:46, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Also, the sixth century AD sounds unrealistically late. In fact, the divergence with which the Proto-Romance stage ended could have started as early as the early first century BC – or even the late second century (in view of the lexical archaisms specifically found in Sardinian), after the merger of [eː] (< [eɪ̯], as in DEIVOS > dīvus) into [iː] and the first attestations of the monophthongisation of [ae̯] > [ɛː], perhaps under Umbrian or other Sabellic influence –; I'm specifically thinking of the period after the Social War, as the Sardinian-type vocalism could plausibly have been due to Koine Greek influence, but the Italian/Spanish-type (Western Romance) and asymmetric Romanian-type vocalism could each have arisen under Sabellic influence, and in view of the Lausberg zone, still in central and southern Italy, in fact. Compare the discussion here.

In view of its archaic traits, Sardinian might have even diverged directly from Old Latin in the second century BC, when quality differences between long and short vowels were only incipient; Romance dialects probably still influenced each other in the following centuries, or converged independently, muddling the picture. We know from literary texts that in the 11th century, Sardinian was more archaic than most of its modern dialects, except Nuorese, especially in Bitti and the Barbagia; and half a millennium or even a full millennium earlier, it could possibly have been even much more archaic, looking a lot like Old Latin, and later losing these traits either independently or as a result of contact with mainland Romance languages, so that now only few tantalising traits pointing to Old Latin are left that indicate that Sardinian split off early.

In any case, Sardinian must have diverged from the remainder of Romanian by the third century AD, per this source. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:22, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

@Florian Blaschke: I agree that the stated date is speculative at best, and open to revision. However, I do not consider it likely that the (incipient) varieties of Romance trace any of their major divisions to the 1st century bc. My view on Sardinian is close to that stated by Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger in The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages:

"Scholars from the nineteenth century onwards (e.g. Gröber 1884:210f.) claimed that, because of the early conquest of Sardinia, Sardinian conserved elements from archaic Latin. Yet the survey in Mensching (2004b) shows that this hypothesis cannot be maintained, since most of the relevant features (e.g. lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before /e/ and /i/) were still common in Latin during the first centuries AD. It thus seems that the Latin of Sardinia was not significantly different from that spoken elsewhere until at least the end of the third century AD. The striking conservative elements of Sardinian are not sufficient to classify it as archaic, since it also shows numerous innovations."

Your comment on vowel quality alludes to an ongoing debate between the Allen model, which is the one this article uses, and the Calabrese model, which posits the following vowels for classical Latin: /i ɛ a ɔ u/ ± /ː/. According to this view, Sardinian and Southern Lucanian (presumably also African) kept this system intact- except for abandoning phonemic vowel length- while other Romance varieties merged /i/ and /ɛː/ to /e/; later on of course a parallel merger occurs in the back vowels, except in (Proto-)Romanian and Lausberg's 'vorposten'. The majority of romanists continue to support Allen's model though, as the evidence he presents for quality differences in Classical Latin is difficult to dismiss.

A partial reconciliation can be had by positing a modified Allen model, such that Classical Latin had /ĭ/ [i~ɪ], and likewise /ŭ/ [u~ʊ]. (Whether there would already have been significant regional differences already in the distribution of these allophones is hard to say.) Later on, speakers in different would have merged the allophones in different ways, such that /ĭ/ came to always be [i] in Sardinia, S. Lucania, Africa, and always [ɪ] in the rest of 'Romània'; likewise for the back vowels. I'll admit that's just a pet theory of mine, though. Excelsius (talk) 12:23, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

@Excelsius: In the discussion with Benwing linked above, he notes: "Possibly the development of the Sardinian and North African vowel systems were independent: Early Latin apparently pronounced its short and long vowels with the same quality (this is noted in Ringe's newest book)." This would mean that Sardinian split off prior to Classical Latin, still in the Old Latin period, as I suggested above. The differences between the Latin of Sardinia and the Latin on the mainland may have been slight in the 3rd century AD, but they were there, and thus significant, regardless of how small. Similarly, the differences between North, West, and East Germanic were still small at the time, yet they were not insignificant. If there were differences, however tiny, Sardinia's Latin had effectively split off (even if it kept interacting with mainland Latin – which it kept doing throughout its history). The idea that Sardinia's Latin had to diverge so starkly as to be mutually unintelligible with mainland Latin until it could be said to have split off makes no sense.

Also, Benwing notes: "There are words in Spanish that pre-date Classical Latin (cueva "cave" < Old Latin cova, cf. Classical cava), and a bunch of words in Sardinian that stem from [lexemes that] were already obsolete in Classical times. In the Harris/Vincent "Romance languages" it's claimed that Sardinian may have split off as early as the 1st century BC. The claim that Proto-Romance cannot be derived completely from Classical Latin is common BTW."

The Corsican situation is even more complicated, as laid out here (with detail in the following comments), and Corsican cannot simply be described as a descendant of Old Tuscan (of Pisa) with a Sardinian-like substratum. Rather, the vocalism of the various dialect groups is so bafflingly diverse, even exhibiting a type that fits neither of the three well-known main types of Romance vocalism (Italian-type, Romanian-type, Sardinian-type), that "Proto-Corsican" may be effectively identical with Proto-Romance. I haven't ever seen the Corsican evidence discussed anywhere else.

In any case, the sixth century is definitely implausibly late a dating for Proto-Romance. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

@Florian Blaschke: Regarding the supposed archaism of Spanish, I will quote Adams (The Regional Diversification of Latin, p. 714):

"It is mainly in Spain that investigators have claimed to find archaisms. I went through the evidence at VI.2 and dismissed almost all of it; note too the discussion of acina at VI.2.13. There remained as likely Spanish archaisms the adjective cuius (VI.2.2), and the frequentative incepto (VI.2.11). Couus for cauus is possibly another such case. [This is the example that you mentioned.] Vaciuus, an early Latin equivalent of uacuus, disappears after Terence but turns up again in Romance dialects away from the centre, including Ibero-Romance, and it is to be assumed that it reached some provincial regions before falling out of use at Rome (VI.2.10). These regional archaisms do not amount to much. In the history of Latin they are no more than a curiosity, like their equivalents in other Imperial languages. The date of colonisation of (e.g.) Spain did not determine the character of Spanish Latin or of Ibero-Romance, though one or two early usages did linger on."

Other than Africa, the 'Sardinian' type vocalism can also be found in Lucania, as you mentioned; Sardinia isn't unique in resisting an ĭ-ē merger. Notably, solid evidence of said merger only accumulates from the fourth century AD onwards (Social Variation and the Latin Language, pp. 51, 61-2), and the corresponding back-vowel merger appears at an even later period (pp. 65-7). That evidence is consistent with the fact that the latter merger failed to penetrate not only Sardinia, Africa, and Lucania, but also Lausberg's 'vorposten' and Eastern Romance in general.

I agree that a sixth century cut-off is too late. For now I will replace it with the approximate date given by Mensching & Remberger, which Adams' data agrees with. Excelsius (talk) 20:04, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

No doubt Sardinia wasn't the only region not reached by the early vowel mergers in question. It's not completely clear what happened; I've wondered if the earliest dialectal splits within Romance didn't all occur in mainland Italy and were then imported to other regions from there.

In the discussion with Benwing, I noted:

"[...] If nom. pl. *-ās, as noted in Romance plurals#Origin of plural -s, is indeed an archaism, this would, along with the occasional appearance of specifically Mainland or Italo-/Western-Romance traits in Pompejan and other Imperial Latin inscriptions, such as Z for /j/ and the disappearance or assimilation of final /t/, make the traditional view that Romance as a whole evolved from post-classical or "Vulgar" Latin, in any case something substantially younger than Classical Latin, finally obsolete[.]"

The Pompejan evidence alone suggests that Proto-Romance unity ended already before the first century AD. The vocalic changes and mergers may have happened later, it doesn't really matter. (That said, considering the likely Osco-Umbrian triggers, it probably wasn't very late, and probably already started before the end of the third century AD.) In any case, it doesn't matter if there are archaisms in Hispania; the Sardinian archaisms alone suffice for the conclusion that Proto-Romance unity likely ended before the Classical Latin period. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:40, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

"The striking conservative elements of Sardinian are not sufficient to classify it as archaic, since it also shows numerous innovations." I also missed the occasion above to point out that this is a fallacy, in more than one way. First off, only languages that literally represent a temporarily older stage are considered archaic. Classical Latin, as an ancient language, is archaic; Plautus' Old Latin is even more archaic, especially compared to modern Romance languages. Sardinian is a modern language and therefore cannot be archaic. However, it is a conservative Romance language. All conservative languages show innovations alongside conservative traits; this is not specific of Sardinian, but even true of Modern Icelandic. It's the conservative traits we're interested in this context, however. And the (so far) uncontested observation that Sardinian shows strikingly conservative traits, so conservative that they point back to Old Latin, even if they're only a few lexemes, are those that the conclusion that Sardinian already began to diverge from mainland Romance as early as the first or perhaps even second century BC is based on. It doesn't matter one whit how many millions of innovations Sardinian otherwise has. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:40, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

The origin of nom.pl -as as an archaism (rather than an innovation) is, at best, possible. There isn't substantial evidence for it, and the almost universal <ae> of the Classical Period argues against it.

The occasional Pompeian graffito dropping a final -t does not indicate that the phoneme was completely erased. In fact it is was still present in Proto Italo-Western Romance, considering the following points: it survived in Old French, it survived in Old Spanish, and traces of it survive to this day even in Italian and Neapolitan (which, notably, is spoken in the immediate vicinity of Pompeii) in the form of radoppiamento sintattico. At most, sporadic -t loss would have been an allophonic phenomenon in Pompeian speech.

The use of the Greek zeta in Latin words is hard to interpret phonetically. It may have been an attempt to render something like [ɟ] in writing. That isn't actually incompatible with the evidence from Sardinian, where all inherited examples of an original intervocalic /dj/ lenited, leaving e.g. oi < CL hodie.

Osco-Umbrian triggers are far from "likely", in the opinion of e.g. Adams, who wrote what is probably the most celebrated work to date on the evidence for regional differences in Imperial Latin. I have already provided some quotes from him.

The archaisms in Sardinian do not imply that it must have split off from the rest of Latin~Romance as early as 0 AD or earlier. As the quote from the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages states, its supposed "archaic" features were common throughout the Latin-speaking area in the first few centuries AD. That includes both lexical items and features such as the lack of palatalization of /k,g/ before front vowels. And, needless to say, the fact that Sardinian participated in many Romance innovations of all types, such as the palatalization of /tj/ and /kj/, the use of e.g. caballus for equus, or loss of Latin's synthetic future tense (and replacement with habere ad + inf.) argues against an early split. If needed, I can provide far more examples from any of these three categories (phonological, lexical, or grammatical changes in common with all other Romance languages). --Excelsius (talk) 04:18, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

I also assume that -t was still present in Proto-Italo-Western-Romance. In fact, that's exactly why the loss or assimilation of final -t found in Pompeian inscriptions is so telling: It indicates that Western Romance had already split from Italo-Romance in the first century AD.

In Ibero-Romance, /j/ remained as such at least in certain positions. This indicates that Proto-Romance still had /j/.

Well, that's his opinion, and his opinion only. Others do consider Osco-Umbrian triggers plausible.

The point that Sardinian has at least a few lexemes that had already dropped out of use by the Classical Latin period does indicate an early split. Again, innovations are completely irrelevant. There could be trillions and it wouldn't matter; they can perfectly be due to later contact with mainland Romance dialects. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:00, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

So not only do you think that Sardinian had split off by the 1st century AD, you also imagine that Western-Romance and Italo-Romance had also split from each other by then, on the basis of an occasional failure to write -t in Pompeiian graffiti. I've already stated that that could only have been, at most, an allophonic phenomenon, given that a reflex of final -t survives to this day in Neapolitan. Moreover, I doubt that any scholar supports a split between Western and Italo-Romance dating back to the first century AD.

Note that nowhere in this article is it doubted that Proto-Romance /j/ existed. In Modern Spanish, word-initial /j/ is realized as something like [ɟ͡ʝ], which is perfectly compatible with the [ɟ] posited here.

What Sardinian lexemes had supposedly "dropped out of use [on the mainland] by the Classical Latin period"?

If you admit that Sardinian shared in numerous Pan-Romance lexical, phonological, and grammatical changes- which are evident even in the earliest Sardinian texts, before e.g. significant Iberian influence could have taken hold- how can you maintain the claim that Sardinian had split from the rest of these languages as early as the year 1 AD?

--Excelsius (talk) 03:49, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Look, this is not my own position – it's that of Harris/Vincent. The "allophonic phenomenon" does not happen in Western Romance, which preserves final -t unchanged word-finally – a situation completely unlike Neapolitan. Have you actually read my discussion with Benwing and the other links?

Wow, this is getting bizarre. Are you even aware that in Spanish, /j/ develops differently depending on the following vowel? See here. Old Spanish /j/ and /ʒ/ cannot both descend from a [ɟ]. And your assumption that the Modern Spanish pronunciation – specifically the affricate pronunciation, which is a mere allophone found after a pause, nasal or lateral – goes back all the way to Proto-Romance is simply absurdly fringe.

I don't know which words these are specifically; you'll probably have to check Harris/Vincent for that.

Easy enough: These influences are the result of secondary convergence during the first millennium AD. More than 1000 years are plenty of time for influences from mainland Romance to reach Sardinia. In fact, it is widely held that some distinctively Ibero-Romance influences are found in the most conservative dialects of Sardinian.

How can you maintain the claim that Romance displayed absolutely no regional variation throughout the Roman Empire as late as the third century AD, when many Pre-Roman languages had probably already died out or were on the brink of extinction, especially in Italy? How can you maintain that Latin should have been spoken on the islands of Sardinia and Corsica with absolutely no distinctive local developments emerging after 500 years? This contradicts everything we know about language change. North American English was distinctive already by 1800, less than 200 years after the beginning of settlement. Early Modern Spanish has likewise split into multiple regional dialects after less than five centuries. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:22, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

@Florian Blaschke: Fact is, Neapolitan has a reflex of the /t/. One could even analyze it as still having (almost two thousand years after Pompeii) a word-final /t/ which undergoes deletion or assimilation to a following consonant, depending on the phonetic environment. (It is still realized as [t] if the following word begins with [t] as well, needless to say). A comparable allophonic phenomenon does, by the way, exist in French, with [t] being preserved only in liaison with a following vowel.

Anyway, the point here is that a minor allophonic phenomenon (which is the most that a handful of missing <t>'s in Pompeii could indicate) is hardly evidence for a decisive split between language varieties.

"Old Spanish /j/ and /ʒ/ cannot both descend from a [ɟ]" ? Of course they can. That is, in fact, exactly what the sources that I cited for [ɟ] imply.

"And your assumption that the Modern Spanish pronunciation...goes back all the way to Proto-Romance is simply absurdly fringe" It's not the same pronunciation, first of all. Second of all, to use your own words, it's not my assumption- it's that of my sources. Thirdly: what is "absurd" about that? Simply saying it does not make it so.

"Easy enough: These influences are the result of secondary convergence during the first millennium AD. " Alright, let me ask you another way: what evidence, exactly, points to a split by the year 1 AD? So far you have claimed that Sardinian's vocalism was distinctive, which it most certainly was not (viz. Africa, Lucania; also, i brevis and e longa hadn't even merged elsewhere by the third century). Next you claim that some words survive in Sardinia that "went extinct in [mainland] Latin by the first century AD", which I highly doubt; I suspect you misinterpreted something that Harris/Vincent said.

"How can you maintain the claim that Romance displayed absolutely no regional variation throughout the Roman Empire as late as the third century AD" Easy: I don't maintain that at all. My position is that, by that date, there was almost zero visible variation (from region to region) in the texts and inscriptions that we have, certainly nothing that indicates a decisive split between future branches of Romance. Faliscan or other Italic languages are irrelevant, as they have no surviving descendants.

I'm still waiting for you to source your claim that Western and Italo-Romance had split by the 1st century AD, by the way. --Excelsius (talk) 21:25, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Nominative Plural of Feminine Nouns (Class I)

Why is *kápras reconstructed for both nominative and accusative plural? Shouldn't it be *kápre for nominative plural (and *kápras only for accusative plural)? Making *kápras the nominative ignores e.g. Italian, which has "capre" as plural of "capra". The -e ending in Italian is a reflex of Latin's -ae, which is the nominative plural suffix in this declension. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brunoczim (talk • contribs) 00:24, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

@Brunoczim The Italian feminine plural /-e/ derives from an earlier /-as/. The reasoning for this, other than comparison with other Romance languages, is that feminine nouns with a velar consonant stem do not palatalize in the plural; cf. the classic example amica 'girlfriend' > amiche 'girlfriends' (not *amice /aˈmitʃe/). That suggests that, during the Late Latin palatalization of velars before front vowels, the nominative plural feminine ending was /-as/ still, hence without a front vowel. Later, [as] > [ai̯] > [e]. For the sound changes, compare Latin portās 'you (sg.) carry' > Old Italian porte (Maiden 1995: chapter 2, §12).

• Maiden, Martin. 1995. A linguistic history of Italian. London: Routledge.

Nicodene (talk) 07:52, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Confused on some points

I was surprised by these bullets about the vowel system:

• In unstressed position, there was no distinction between /ɛ, ɔ/ on the one hand and /e, o/ on the other.
• In intertonic (unstressed word-internal) position, there was no distinction between /i, u/ and /ɪ, ʊ/ respectively.

In particular, I'm confused about what the second bullet is saying. Since Latin long /iː/, /uː/ in the penultimate syllable attracted stress, there shouldn't be any inherited examples of words with original /i, u/ in penultimate syllables: is the second bullet point simply pointing out that historical gap in post-tonic syllables? Inherited /i, u/ and /ɪ, ʊ/ do not appear to have generally merged in unstressed syllables between the first syllable and the stressed syllable, based on examples such as French engloutir, nourrisson, Spanish antigüedad, amistad.

The following bullet points are contradictory about whether intervocalic /b/ does or does not exist:

• /b d ɡ/ may have been realized as fricatives or approximants between vowels or after /r/ or /l/.
• /b/ did not occur in intervocalic position, having previously spirantized to /β/.

Is the reference to /b/ between vowels in the first meant to apply to word-initial /b/ in sandhi contexts (in which case I'd say "intervocalic position" in the second should be revised to read "word-internal intervocalic position")?

If palatalized consonant phonemes such as /rʲ/, /mʲ/ are being reconstructed, shouldn’t they go in the consonant table? Or if it’s possible to analyze these as phonemically being clusters /rj/ /mj/ (which is an analysis I think I have seen), then it might make more sense to add mention of that possible analysis and use square brackets [rʲ] [mʲ].--Urszag (talk) 07:20, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Urszag.

The first bullet-point is, to the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial. No Romance language reflects, in atonic position, an original distinction between /ɛ/ and /e/, nor between /ɔ/ and /o/.

————

Due to Latin stress-rules, as you've noted, the second bullet-point is only relevant for pre-tonic, not post-tonic position. The cited source simply states the rule, without elaboration, but it points to Lausberg 1970 (§§292–296), where a fair amount of examples are provided, at least for the front vowels. Here are some of them:

• Latin vestīmentum, suspīciōnem > Old French vestement, sospeçon (/ə/)
• Latin cīvitātem, *venīre-hábeō > Italian città, verrò (∅)
• Latin vestīmentum, ōscitāre, rādīcīna > Romanian veșmânt, ușta, rădăcină (∅, /ə/)

The overall pattern is that /i /and /ɪ/ have a shared outcome: a 'weakened' sound that may reduce to zero, depending on the environment- even in Italian.

What your example nourrisson shows is that this weakening may subsequently be reversed by analogy with related forms with stressed /i/, such as nourrir. Note that Old French originally had norreçon (/ə/).

All of the preceding examples, as well as the others that I have not copied here (dormitorium, latrocinium, catenionem...), are four-syllable proparoxytones. (Here one has to account for /i/ > /j/ in hiatus and *venīre-habeō, despite the highly etymological spelling, standing for *veniráyo.) The prototypical example that Lausberg provides for this type of word is 'càntatóre', where he uses the grave to indicate secondary stress. Neither *amīcitātem nor antīquitātem fit this type, hence they are not subject to the same rule.

In retrospect, I should have provided a better description than 'intertonic'.

————

For possible lenis allophones of /b d ɡ/, there are two relevant environments: intervocalic and post-liquid-consonant. The bullet-point is not meant to imply the existence of /b/ in both environments- that is an unfortunate byproduct of the concise phrasing. I had tried to think of a decent unambiguous way to explain it, but nothing came to mind. Here is the sort of mess that I kept recreating:

• /b d ɡ/ may have had lenis (fricative or approximant) realizations after a liquid consonant and, for /d/ and /ɡ/, in intervocalic position as well.

The possibility of sandhi /-b-/ lenition may be worth noting, now that you mention it. I'll have to add another citation since, if memory serves, the current ones do not cover it. I believe Lloyd (1987) discusses the matter somewhere.

————

It is possible to analyze the palatalized consonants as phonemically /Cj/. Then, however, one has to add a rule stating that, whenever /j/ is found after a consonant, it palatalizes and is 'absorbed' into that consonant and hence has no independent realization. I find that the representation /Cʲ/ (per e.g. Lausberg, who consistently uses palatalization diacritics) simplifies matters and helps prevent the misreading of a palatalized consonant as a sequence of [C] + [j].

Following this approach, the palatalized consonants should indeed go on the consonant table. If I could find a way to fit them in elegantly, that is, without making a hopeless mess of the table, I would. From memory, palatalized variants would need to be added for all of the labials (except, I believe, /f/*), all of the coronals, and the 'plain' velars /k ɡ/.

* /fʲ/ is not found in any reconstructed lemma that I'm aware of, and very few Classical or Late Latin words come to mind that have the sequences required to produce /fʲ/. Only specific conjugations of fiō- which do not appear to have been carried over into Romance- and suffiō, a verb that didn't survive anywhere.

Nicodene (talk) 12:11, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, I was hoping to hear about examples like vêtement.--Urszag (talk) 00:29, 13 February 2022 (UTC)