From: Christophe Grandsire (christophe.grandsire@free.fr)
Date: Fri Sep 07 2001 - 22:44:33 EST
En réponse à Dan Jones <feuchard@2crfm.net>:
> I've encountered some trouble with Medolian. I just can't decide what to
> do with the Vulgar Latin cluster -mn-. First thought was excrescence,
> along the lines of Spanish: *homne > ômbre > oambre /'wambr@/. However,
> "feambra" /'fjambra/ doesn't sound like a good word for "woman".
>
Well, Spanish does have "hembra" < femina, but it's not used for "woman".
> We get to the Crunch:
> How do other (con-)romancelangs deal with this cluster? Spanish does
> excrescence, French assimilates, Italian does nothing (laziness...), so
> what does everyone else do?
>
Narbonósc assimilates into /n/ (which in turns disappears with nasalisation of
the preceeding vowel if the ending had disappeared), thus hom /O~/ and
fêne /fEn/. As for my future Arabo-Romance conlang, I've already decided that
there the cluster /mn/ will undergo nasal dissimilation (the first segment
losing its nasal component), thus: /mn/ > /bn/, leading to the cluster /bn/
which is not unusual for a language influenced by Arabic. Of course, you could
after that have again assimilation: /bn/ > /bm/. I'll stop at /bn/ though :) .
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
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