Romance Addenda

Two new Romance resources to add to pg. 503:

(1)  Oxford Online Database of Romance Verb Morphology

I haven't used it yet but it looks valuable.

(2) The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Vol. 1: Structures, edited by Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith and Adam Ledgeway, Cambridge University Press.

This book offers a pan-Romance perspective on various phonological, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic and lexical processes and patterns.  There are essays by Michele Loporcaro (Syllable, Segment and Prosody, and Phonological Processes), Arnulf Stefenelli (Lexical Stability), and Steven Dworkin (Lexical Change) among others.

More Verification of Fibula Praenestina

Through the kindness of Professor de Simone:

Missing Reference

Professor Angelo Mercado of Grinnell College alerts me to a missing bibliographical item. On pg. 479 n. 6 I quote Leumann 1968 which is not to be found in the references.  The corresponding datum is:




Leumann, Manu. 1968. "Die Eingliederung entlehnter griechischer Verben ins Latein." Studii Clasice 10:7-12.


Thanks, Angelo!

Goth. aleina

On pg. 169 fn. 11 I claim that Go. aleina 'ell' which would normally be phonologized as /ali:na/ is a mistake for *alina with a short medial syllable.  This may indeed be correct but there is some evidence that might support the reality of long i, viz. MW elin 'ellbow' which points to a proto-form *oli:na:. I see there is an article that I will have to read by Dirk Boutkan in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik Vol. 41, 1995 that seek to justify *ali:na for all Germanic.


Update: Boutkan makes a good case that the Germanic forms can be derived from a Proto-Germanic *ali:no:. He further argues that the word is a loan from Proto-Celtic *oli:na: which come from *ole:na: a derivative of the hysterokinetic n-stem continued in Gk. ὠλήν (usually ὠλένη). I'm not sure if that is the best way to handle these complicated data.

Addenda to Bibliography:

To pg. 12 fn. 7 add to the general bibliography for Celtic Ball and Muller 2009 which refers to the second edition of Ball, Martin and Nicole Muller (eds.), The Celtic Languages. Routledge: New York. This edition is a significant improvement over the first in that it has essays covering the Medieval stages of the Celtic languages by David Stifter (Early Irish) and David Willis (Old and Middle Welsh). Joe Eska discusses "The Emergence of the Celtic Languages" and (together with D. Ellis Evans) "Continental Celtic."

Another second edition which should be added is Horrocks 2010 (Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. Chichester/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell) replacing Horrocks 1997 on pg. 18, fn. 53. See the review at BMCR.

My Cliched Cover Image!

All I can say is "oy!" Strangely, I happen to know to varying degrees the authors of these other books with Poussin on the cover.  Peter Bing was my first Greek teacher and Mario Erasmo was a grad student at Yale when I taught there, though I never taught him. I had no idea that these covers were out there.  I guess the image is just too good to pass up. Sorry, guys! I should have gone with David's Oath of the Horatii.

 

Corrigenda

An email from Malte Liesner alerts me to an imprecise formulation.  On pg. 58 in discussion the pronunciation of Latin /t/  I write "t was probably a true dental stop and not an alveolar as in English, to judge from the evidence of the Romance languages." In fact, the way I use dental vs. alveolar, although traditional, is not quite correct. In Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian  /t /and /d/ are generally produced as denti-alveolar laminals.  The primary place of articulation is the alveolar ridge, but the active articulator is the blade (lamina) of the tongue not the tip.  Because the blade is used to make the closure the tip of the tongue may be visible at the teeth.  In English, in contrast, for most speakers the tongue tip is used for 

/t /and /d/ and hence these are alveolar apicals. Since the Romance languages agree on this laminal articulation I assume that it was simply inherited from Latin.

Also on pg. 55 I give the date of Sturtevant's The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin as 1920, but that is the first edition.  In the bibliography I give the 1940 date of the second edition.

Image from http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Constriction_Location/index.html