🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <memo.842603@cix.compulink.co.uk>, petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian) writes:
> In-Reply-To: <1993Jan5.085724.4860@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
> 
>> The phonology of *all* of these, and of their
>> German analogues, points to borrowing during the period of the Roman
>> conquest.

Let me refine this: during the period of early Roman *contact*.

>>  A later borrowing of _vinum_ would have yielded *_vine_,
>> _strata_ > *_strate_, etc.
> 
> I didn't understand the phonology here, Leo. Do you mean they would
> have been borrowed from some late Latin forms with reduced vowels?

No.  _Wine_ with [w] reflects the pronunciation before 200 AD.  Later
the inscriptions and manuscripts confuse consonantal <v> with <b>,
indicating that both had become labial fricatives in at least some
environments.  The fricative is, of vourse, what we find in Italian
_vino_, French _vin_, etc.

The vowels are another matter.  The Latin vowels were (mostly) borrowed
in their classical form.  _Stra:ta_ (with a long a:, I should have
noted) was borrowed as such by the Germanic peoples, and thus we find
German _Strasse_, Dutch _straat_ etc.  But inherited long a: appears
in West Saxon Old English as [ae:], in other dialects as [e:] -- in
both native words and old borrowings.  (The conventional explanation
is different: that Proto-Germanic had long [e:], which turned to
[a:] in Scandinavian, Dutch, and German.  Maybe so if we go farther
back; but only a shift of [a: > e:] in English and Frisian can
explain the treatment of Latin loanwords such as _street_ and
_cheese_ (Dutch _kaas_; German _Kaese_ has Umlaut)).

--Leo Connolly