The Incidence of -S in Proto-Romance and Latin

7/30/2019 The Incidence of -S in Proto-Romance and Latin

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The Incidence of -S in Proto-Romance and LatinAuthor(s): Clifford S. Leonard Jr.

Reviewed work(s):Source: Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications, No. 20, For Gordon H. Fairbanks (1985), pp.77-85Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20006712 .

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THE INCIDENCE OF -5 INPROTO-ROMANCE AND LATINby Clifford S. Leonard, Jr.

The University of Michigan

Wartburg (1 950: 2Off.) once suggested that the Eastern Romance loss of-s and compensatory alteration of the thematic vowel might have originated inthe well-known Old Latin alternation of -s with zero before consonant.1 He notesthat, as Cicero informs us, -s was reintroduced by the leading Romans into thecontexts which formerly had had zero, and he reasons that this reintroductionwould not have affected all regions at the time of dialectalization. WesternRomance would thus perpetuate the regeneralized -s, and Eastern Romance, avocalic adjustment of the zero-pole.2 While Wartburg did not attempt to speculateon the mechanism of the latter change, his suggestion has the two merits ofinvolving pre-Classical Latin structure in the rise of Romance and of seeing the

developments of -s as the differential leveling of a Latin morphophonemicalternation.

Lausberg (1956: $?534ff.), while retaining the device of analogical levelingto account for the Eastern Romance effacement of -s, rejects Wartburg's earlydating and starting-point in the Early Latin alternation of -s and zero. He seesthe regeneralized -s as having indeed had the time to reach even the East, butas having been subject to assimilative voicing in close syntactic juncture witha following voiced initial consonant. The [zl allophone then vocalized to NI andthis glide formed diphthongs with the preceding vowel. Simplification usuallysupervened in suffixes, and -ai yielded -e, while -ei and -oi yielded -i. Differentlevelings then took place in the two regions, but each has retained some trace

of the rejected allomorph: in the West, Gascon shows, for example.[craX~d?o?-rr?dos] < ill?s du?s rot?s (without simplification), while in the Eastthe Roman placename Trast?vere < trans Tiberim preserves -s. Lausberg'sstrategy is thus 1) to reintroduce -s everywhere, 2) to cause it to splitphonemically, 3) to level the split, and 4) to simplify the resultant diphthongs.He sees only the first of the four steps as having taken place in Latin beforeRomance separated from it. His ideas have found wide-spread acceptance.3

Lausberg's explanation can be attacked on a number of grounds, however.The first is the coincidence of the simplification of a strikingly similar set ofknown IE diphthongs in Old Latin, yielding similar results.

The earliest change affecting the diphthongs of the set was the pre-Latinmerger of IE oi with ei in final syllables. Thus, for example, the dat. plural oto-stems, Gk., Ose. -ois > ELat. -eis (CLat. -Ts) (Buck 1933: ?90). Next, IE ei,now with increased incidence, simplified and merged with T during the first halfof the 2nd century B.C. For example, early deicO >CLat. dTc?, early f?cei > t?cT,etc. (Buck 1933: $89). An analogous simplification of -ae occurred, it wouldseem, somewhat later. In initial syllables ae was from IE ai; in final syllables.


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78from secondary -? + i (Buck 1933: $233). The monophthongization of ae cannot

be dated. It is usually taken to be post-Augustan and can be seen as fait accompliin 79 A.D. in the reversed spelling aedo for edo 'Ieat* at Pompei (Lausberg 1956:

$242). But the graphy aa replacing the ai attested before the 2nd century B.C..thus possibly masked a monophthongal tc:l even for the classical poets. The

Romance fate was merger with CLat. ? and a secondary diphthongization, whenstressed, in various languages: Lat. caelum > Fr. ciel. Span., Ital. cielo just likeLat. mel > Fr., Span, miel, Ital. miele. In unaccented syllables, older ae yieldede as in Lat. dat. sing, caprae > Rum. oblique capre, etc.

The coincidence that a sound change (oi > ei > T, ai > c, e) documented inLatin should repeat itself in early Romance is not only against the acceptedunderstanding that each change is a unique event occurring in a unique contextof causes, but also against descriptive economy. The comparativist is motivatedto draw the two sets of results together and attribute them to a single set ofchanges operating at a single time on two doubtless somewhat differentiated,certainly closely related sister stocks, urban Latin and early (rural) Romance.4

A second line of attack on the Lausberg explanation arises from a strongsuspicion that the so-called Eastern Romance vocalic compensation for the lossof -s may have found its way already into Early Latin morphology.

Attention focuses on the nom. plural of mase, o-stems, which ended in IE-?s. Ose. -?s, but ELat. -ei (> CLat. -T). The traditional question is.Why this shiftin suffix? But we may also ask. Why this loss of -s? The shift has been attributedto analogical redistribution of a counterpart pronominal suffix (Buck 1 933: $240),but the fact remains that it looks just like an earlier stage of the later-attestedopposition of WRom. -os and ERom. -i: Span, muros vs. Ital. muri. Or again, the?- declension has two identical endings, gen. sing, -ae and nom. plur. -ae, bothfrom ELat. -at However, the expected IE shape for both is -?s: Greek and Oseanboth have -?s in the genitive; only Osean preserves -as in the nom. plural. Yetin Latin there was also a fossilized genitive in -?s: pater familias beside familiaa

The shift to the -ai ending (whence -ae) has been explained (e.g.. Buck 1933:$$2 33ff.) as an analogy with the corresponding o-stem forms, which arethemselves difficult, though again it looks like an earlier stage of the juxtapositionof WRom. -as and -e in the East: Span, cantas, cabras vs. Oltal. cante (mod. anal.

canti), capre.If we concede that these altered Latin suffixes might have come about

through a version of the mechanism supposed by Lausberg O.e., -s > -z > -i), weare acknowledging that Early Latin had a morphophonemic alternation between-s and IN. If so, there is no need for us to view the rise of the alternation asrequiring a specifically Romance diachronic explanation. - though its collapsestill needs one.

A third attack arises from consideration of the cumulative requirements ofRomance chronology. Contemporary diachronists in general reject a latepost-Classical dating for the rise of Romance. Weinrich (1958: 12) begins hisphonological explanations from Old Latin. Hall (1 950; 1974: 16) dates the splitof Latin and Romance to a period between 250 B.C. and 14 A.D. Pulgram (1958:319, Fig. 2; 1975: 253, 263, 288ff.) sees differentiation beginning well before


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79the 4th century B.C. AH these, arguing from different premises, agree that it is

necessary to shift the formative, so-called Vulgar Latin period backward in timefrom the orthodox 19th century ascription of it to post-Classical times. Sucha revision has in any case seemed desirable in my own research on Romanceumlaut (Leonard 1978).

In brief, umlaut, the patterned morphophonemic instability of the stressedvowel, is found in all Romance dialects (except Standard Italian), either as abothersome phonological residue or as a prominent morphological process. Theextremes may be illustrated, for example, by the anomalous French differencein vocalism (from the same stem) seen in il/elle and by the S. Lucanian regular

pluralizaron (among umlaut's many grammatical roles) seen in Nova Siri[m?:sMm?:s] 'month-months' (Lausberg 1939: Index, s.v.). Because of the allbut universal occurrence of umlaut. Ihave argued that the phenomenon must bevery old - in fact, Proto-Romance. To account for its grammatical and lexicaldistribution at that node, one must be able to assume an incidence of theconditioning factor -I (or of its predecessor form, -ei) in pre-Romance alreadynearly as great as that of modern ERom. -i. and specifically in noun plurals and2nd sing, verbs. Ifone accepts Lausberg's late dating, the pre-Romance gestationperiod of umlaut could begin no earlier than the lifetime of Cicero. Yet, on othergrounds, Italy was already dialectalized by 264 B.C. (Leonard 1978: 23ff.).Therefore, my attempt to incorporate the rise of umlaut into Romance diachronyshowed it to be closely tied to the fate of -s and to require an early pre-Classicalcontext from which to begin its chain of structural changes. Thus Imust add myvote in favor of a dating of Romance genesis considerably earlier than Lausberg's.

Finally, Lausberg and others may, Ibelieve, be faulted for their insistenceon only two allomorphs. Wartburg speaks of the alternation of -s and zero; zeroturns out to have been after a short vowel. Lausberg and those who adopt hismechanism of change in posttonic suffixes talk of an alternation of -s with f?)

alter, - it turns out, - the class of long stem vowels. Complementarymorphophonemic alternations! The Latin evidence lends itself to the support ofeither claim because it attests to both alternations. Therefore the originalmorpheme marker must have had three variants, not two.

Combining the evidence, and our deductions therefrom, from both Latin andcomparative Romance, we ought to be able to reconstruct the three allomorphsof -s for the latest common source of Roman city Latin and Romance countryLatin. There are four phonological environments to be discussed.

1. Intervocalic position. In Latin, -s before a vowel is unremarkable inbehavior in either inscriptions or prosody, and since it regularly prevents elisionfrom the time of the earliest hexameters (shortly before 200 B.C.), itmust havebeen pronounced. There is no reason to view it as anything but [si.5

On the evidence of the Sard dialects, which are unlikely to have been affectedby any conceivable Ciceronian restoration of -s. as well as that of French,Spanish, and Portuguese, intervocalic -s has always been pronounced. Nothingin the voicing to which the sibilant has been subject (devoicing is secondary inSpanish) speaks against the antiquity of the shape. We must therefore assumethe relatively late analogical effacement of -s in this position in Eastern Romance.


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802. Between Latin short vowel and consonant. Lausberg's scansions

beforeinitial voiceless p, t, k, s show the retention of -s and its making of metrical

position (Lausberg 1956: $534). He cites r?bus par?tTs , pauperibust? .avis simul ~ - w w . on the other hand, before voiced consonants,

where the resulting clusters would have been unfamiliar because not occurringword-medially, the -s does not make position and was. by implication, elided(zero): dignus locOque ?molestusne* sTs

w , tempus fertBut in other, by no means uncommon examples these apparent rules of distributionare contravened: QuTntus pater , dabis supplicium

w ~ " w w ~ (in these-s does not make position); salQtis meae (here it does). Thus even inearly poetry -s could be reintroduced if needed by a poet to suit his meter.

One of the shortcomings of Latin as a vehicle for Greek meters was itsfrequent plethora of short syllables in sequence. For example, mulieribus in

Plautus' plays can scan as four light syllables in a row; such a word cannot befitted into the hexameters of epic. Therefore the heavy scansions of r?buspar?tTs, etc.. and salfJtis meae look like solutions to what Lausberg might havebeen tempted to call d?tresse po?tique; and he himself concedes that the situationof -s in the oldest hexameters reveals the breakdown of a previousmorphophonemic norm. Itmust once have been more natural always to elide -sbefore a consonant, whatever the voicing of that consonant. When d?tressepo?tique militated for reintroduction, voiceless consonants would offer the leastresistance, for the resulting clusters would indeed be word-medially familiar.Hence doubtless there was a higher frequency of sp, etc., with position made;but this would be a tendency, not an absolute. Thus, removing poetic artificialityfrom the picture, we may conclude that Wartburg's simpler formulation of -svarying with zero before any consonant, providing the previous vowel is short,describes this environment better than Lausberg's more complex statementstipulating the factor of voicelessness In the following initial consonant. In anycase, as we have seen, Lausberg preferred not to start Romance -s from thevariation he defends for Latin metrics.

The Latin entry in this correspondence is zero.

Medieval Gallo-Romance is traditionally stated to be most conservative of-s, and its mase. sing, subject suffix -s, as in li bons chevals est chers < *illTbonus caballus est carus, is cited in evidence. Considerable effort has beendevoted to explaining in purely morphological terms why no cognate formssurvived in Spanish or Rumanian. We can now see in the light of Cicero'sexamples that the final -s of bonus > bons, above, has to have been a latehypercorrection, starting no doubt in the acrolectal Latin of Rome and spreadingto the basolectal Romance that was being inculcated in new populations at thetime. Transalpine Gaul was in fact conquered and Latinized during and after

Cicero's lifetime, and hence can have had imposed on it the secondarilyreestablished preconsonantal -s after short vowel, whereas Spain and the Balkans

were Latinized startinga

good centuryand a half earlier. Thus in a

Proto-Romance reconstruction of the sample sentence we should reject the -sof OFr. bons: */li-b?no-kav?llos-cs-k?ros/.6

Hence the Romance entry in this correspondence is also zero.


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813. Between long vowel and consonant. Obviously, this is the environment

for the operation of Lausberg's mechanism -s > -z > [N. As a preliminary it isnecessary to distinguish -s suffixed to a posttonic vowel from that following anaccented one. The vocalically altered suffixes of Eastern Romance reflect theformer situation (cas?s > casai > case); monosyllabic lexemes, the latter (eras> crai). The second group has, in Eastern Romance, generally retained a glide.

The IE suffixes of the nom. plural In declensions l-lll were, respectively, -?s,-?s, -Sa The corresponding ace. plurals, -ans. -ons, -ns (consonant stems) ~-ins (i-stems), through the regular loss of n before s and compensatorylengthening, emerged in Proto-Latin (which we are reconstructing) identical inform with the nominatives. The case distinction had thereby completely collapsedIn the plural, and In the singular was ipso facto gravely threatened. Both pluralcases developed the same allomorphs, since the forms were the same, andthereafter the same allomorphs served both syntactic functions. The Old and

Classical Latin specialization of the originally preconsonantal allomorphs (-ae,-T, but -?s) for the nominative, and of the originally prevocalic and absolutelyfinal allomorph in -s for the accusative reveals in this branch a reassertion ofthe endangered case distinction, but the overthrow of the original allomorphic

distribution (analogical morphologization). The East-West s-crux reveals casesyncretism in the plural as in Proto-Latin and a longer retention of the originalallomorphic rules in the Romance branch.

The correspondence thus gradually clarifies: Latin has reemployed theallomorphs; Western Romance has analogically reestablished -a The evidenceof the Western nominative and of Eastern Romance is all that we can admit forthis context. Allowing for the later operation of the simplification of diphthongs,we shall not be wrong to enter, both on the Latin and the Proto-Romance side

of the ledger, U ].In Old French and Proven?al, reflexes of the 1st declension have no

subject-object case distinction in either plural or singular; and those of the 3rd,primarily only when imparisyllabic in the singular: here the shorter form was

marked as subject. The mase. 2nd decl. singular, with its reasserted -s. alsopreserved the concept of the nominative, and here an analogical extension inpre-Gailo-Romance saw the originally common nom.-acc. plurals stripped of -sin the nominative function as a formal reversal of the oblique distribution of thesibilant. That the subject plurals of Old Gallo-Romance cannot directly reflectCLat. nom. plurals In -T is revealed by their lack of stressed-vowel umlaut andof stem-consonant palatalization, both bound to be caused by -T.7

In the 2nd pers. sing, verb forms IE had -a and the Latin endings of the fourdeclensions, -?s, -?s, -is, and -Ts respectively, thus appear to be very old. Allbut the first, by the allomorphics suggested here, would, in this correspondence,however, develop the by-forms -ei and -T,8 both bound to emerge as -T. Variantsof this shape may be taken as the etyma of ERom. (Ital.) devi < d?b?s, vend? r. Yet the putative mid-point in rhotacism. [zl, is also that otLausberg's mechanism for the rise of ML Simplicity would require someconnection; but, even if some version of rhotacism did once occur between words,itwould have been too early to matter here: restoration of -s was fait accompliin the Proto-Latin envisioned.

6. Ct., with other article shapes, Span, el buen caballo es caro, Ital. il buoncavallo ? cara though here the possibility of other underlying case forms cannotbe lightly rejected. Whatever we decide for the mase. nom. sing, -us must alsohold for verbal -mus and -tis. The Ital. -mo, -te must reflect the earlygeneralization of the preconsonantal, s-less variant, since we see no alterationof the suffix vowel O.e., -o, -e have not become -i). Span, -mos, -is, on the otherhand, if we allow reintroduction of -s before consonants only in French onchronological grounds, must reflect the generalization of the prevocalic andabsolutely final allomorphs.7. Itmust be acknowledged, nevertheless, that the oldest Romansh (1 7thcentury) does have mase. nom. plurals showing umlaut and/or palatalization ofthe stem consonant: plur. predicative adjective sauni fs?y?] < sanT beside plur.


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84attributive adjective with noun head sauns [s?yrjs] < san?s. These are said toreflect the two Latin case forms; but, from the Romance viewpoint, it cannot beetymological. We must instead acknowledge the early borrowing of ahypercorrect case distinction on the model of Classical Latin and not let sucha Latinate distinction unduly influence our reconstruction of Proto-Gallo-Romance.

8. In -Ts the -s would drop automatically after short vowel, and that in turnwould be replaced by -? because -T was not phonotactically permitted. Present

indicative and imperative would thus merge; and this anomaly must then havebeen repaired in pre-Romance by the analogical acquisition of Ml by theindicative. Again, e + j[would emerge as -T.

9. Unequivocally, French, Spanish, and Portuguese do. but what of SouthernRomance? We note the paragogic (echo) vowel in Sard ?m?ndasal, S.Luc,?m?nnesel


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85REFERENCES

Beiardi. Walter. 1965. Di una notizia di Cicerone (Orator 161 ) su -s finale latino.Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 7. 1 14-42.Buck, Carl D. 1933. Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.Hall, Robert A., Jr. 1950. The Reconstruction of Proto-Romance. Language 26.6-27.

-. 1974. External History of the Romance Languages. New York: Elsevier.Hubbell, Harry M., tr. 1939. Cicero's (Brutus and) Orator. The Loeb ClassicalLibrary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, and London: Heinemann.Lausberg. Heinrich. 1939. Die Mundarten S?dlukaniens. Beiheft 90. Zeitschriftf?r romanische Philologie.-. 1956(-62). Romanische Sprachwissenschaft. 4 vols. (Sammlung G?schen.128/1 28a, 250, 1199. 1 200/1 200a. 2nd ed.. 196 7-.) Berlin: de Gruyter.

Leonard. Clifford S.. Jr. 1978. Umlaut in Romance. Giessener Beitr?ge zurSprachwissenschaft. 12. Grossen-Linden: Hoffmann.Penny. Ralph J. 1980. Do Romance Nouns Descend from the Latin Accusative?Preliminaries to a Reassessment of the Noun-Morphology of Romance. RomancePhilology 33, 501-9.Pulgram, Ernst. 1958. The Tongues of Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.-. 1975. Latin-Romance Phonology: Prosodies and Metrics. M?nchen: Fink.Wartburg, Walther von. 1950. Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachr?ume.Bern: Francke.

Weinrich, Harald. 1958. Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte.M?nster: Aschendorff.

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The Incidence of -S in Proto-Romance and Latin