Sunday, October 24, 2010

Bibliographical Addendum

To the basic bibliography for Romance given on pg. 503 add the new book by my Cornell colleagues Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen: 

Alkire, Ti, and Carol G. Rosen. 2010. Romance languages: a historical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Linguistics Professor/Movie Star

How many professors of historical linguistics have also been the lead actor in a major motion picture? To my knowledge only one: Carlo Battisti (1882-1977), the co-author of Battisti and Alessio 1950–7 Dizionario etimologico italiano and a professor of glottologia at Florence, was also the star of the Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D, a  neorealist classic about an old man (Umberto D.) and his dog (named strangely Flaik). Battisti plays the part marvelously.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

pons, pontis

Filip De Decker alerts me to a confusing formulation on pg. 316 where I identify a subclass of -ti-stems with o-grade including frons, frontis; fons, fontis; mons, montis and pons, pontis. Synchronically this is of course true, but in the case of pons the root is *pent- (cf. Gk. πόντ-ος ‘sea’ and PDE find) and hence the morpheme boundary was originally after the t (pont-) and not before it (pon-t-).

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

inserinuntur and solinunt

Michiel de Vaan points out that on pg. 386 fn. 39 where I list the OL alternative 3rd plural forms in -nunt, e.g. danunt, redīnunt, etc. I give the forms inserinuntur and solinunt with long i's, but this is incorrect. There is no positive evidence for a long vowel in either case and a long i in inserinuntur might  adversely affect the scansion of the Saturnian in which it occurs.