From: Padraic Brown (pbrown@polaris.umuc.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 08 2001 - 06:35:55 EST
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Dan Jones wrote:
>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".
>
>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?
Let's see. Off hand, Kerno has l' omen, il colums and la colunnea.
So, it seems they either add a schwa between them (thus ensuring the
survival of both nasals), the second one gets the chopper or the
first one dissapears into a [nj] before -ea.
Let's see. There's la famen and la femen, so perhaps there is some
influence caused by whatever follows the -mn- group. It seems that
-mna, -mnem > -m@n; -mnos > -ms; and -mnia > -nyea (that's rare!).
[Note that colums is an individual column; la columen is a collonade.]
The -ea (< -ia) group is generally proof against palatalisation,
unlike -io.
I guess that doesn't count as laziness.
Padraic.
>Dan
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