From: Eric Christopherson (rakko@charter.net)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 07:01:19 EST
On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 12:10:18PM -0700, Barry Garcia wrote:
>
> I'm wondering something. What verb form in Vulgar Latin spawned "tengo" in
> Castillian, and "tenho" in Portuguese?
Teneo -- 1st person singular indicative present of tenere.
The Portuguese form is a pretty straightforward development from Latin. The
unstressed /e/ would have ended up /j/, which palatalized the /n/.
The Spanish form is more complicated. I just looked this up in _From Latin to
Spanish_ to refresh my memory. According to that book, the -g- probably had
something to do with verbs whose stems ended in -ng in Latin, such as
<frangere>. Apparently those verbs developed such that the first person
singular had /ng/ but other forms had /nj/ because of the following front
vowel. So:
frango *franjemos
*franjes *franjetes
*franjet *franjent(maybe *frangont)
According to the hypothesis, people began mixing up the /ng/ and /nj/ forms
of these verbs, sometimes saying /frango/ and sometimes */franjo/. Now at
the same time there were verbs that ended in -/njo/ derived from Latin words
ending in -/nio/ or -/neo/; since people vacilated on whether to say
/frango/ or */franjo/, they extended that pattern to other -/njo/ verbs,
yielding */tenjo/ alongside /tengo/. For some reason /tengo/ won out.
Then there are words such as <valgo> and <salgo> whose /g/s might have been
extended from there.
-- Furrfu! r a k k o at c h a r t e r dot n e t
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