Why does Lat. /ka'tena/ > N. It. /kad'æŋna/?

[Zju]

Look at Northern Italy - where did the velar nasal come from, given that there wasn't any velar element in the vicinity? There's other interesting stuff going on, too, but this caught my eye the most.

[Vijay]

Earlier nasalized vowel?

[Sumelic]

A number of Latin words show variation between sequence of long vowel + singleton consonant + vowel and short vowel + geminate consonant + vowel. A typical example is "littera~litera".

It seems possible to me that /kaˈdeŋna/ might be the reflex of a Vulgar Latin /kaˈdɛnna/. That said, there might actually be no connection, as one source I found connects the "littera" example to high vowels before voiceless consonants specifically (http://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/phonology/Ranjan-abstract.pdf)

Edit: the "littera~litera" alternation seems in fact to be unrelated

[alice]

It was a typo in the Basque dictionary, people!!!

[Zju]

Earlier nasalized vowel?

Could be, though are nasalised vowels known to have occured in Northern Italian at some point, and is V[+nasal] > V[-nasal]ŋ / _n attetsted? Vn / _n or just V / _n seems a much more natural outcome.

It was a typo in the Basque dictionary, people!!!

But typo in which word???

[Soap]

Vowel length was lost in all Romlangs, so this change would need to have occurred in many other words. Perhaps it is indeed a typo, in the map itself, and there is only /ŋ/, not /ŋn/.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Italic_languages says that /ŋ/ is a reflex of intervocalic /n/ and that it is lenition, not fortition.

(edited to touch up horrible mobile-phone typing)

[Sumelic]

Vowel lenthv was lost in all R langs, so this change would need to have occurred in many other words. Perhaps it is indeed a tgpo, in tbe map isstelf, and there is only /N/, not /Nn/.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Italic_languages says that eng is a reflex of intervocapic /n/ and that it is lenition,not fortition.

My understanding is that in some Romance languages, coda /n/ can also be velarized to /ŋ/ before a coronal consonant in the onset of the next syllable, resulting in clusters like /ŋt/ from historical /nt/. "Separating the Root Node: On Coda Velarization in Romance", by Barbara E. Bullock give the example "[sjeŋtə] 'listen' 3.sg." (p. 48).

Now that I looked through that again, I noticed it seems to mention a phenomenon that would explain /ŋn/ in the catena-word: Bullock says coda /ŋ/ can result from hardening of a glide, so something like /kaˈtena/ > /kaˈdejna/ > /kaˈdeŋna/.

[Soap]

Vowel lenthv was lost in all R langs, so this change would need to have occurred in many other words. Perhaps it is indeed a tgpo, in tbe map isstelf, and there is only /N/, not /Nn/.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Italic_languages says that eng is a reflex of intervocapic /n/ and that it is lenition,not fortition.

*blush*

My understanding is that in some Romance languages, coda /n/ can also be velarized to /ŋ/ before a coronal consonant in the onset of the next syllable, resulting in clusters like /ŋt/ from historical /nt/. "Separating the Root Node: On Coda Velarization in Romance", by Barbara E. Bullock give the example "[sjeŋtə] 'listen' 3.sg." (p. 48).

Now that I looked through that again, I noticed it seems to mention a phenomenon that would explain /ŋn/ in the catena-word: Bullock says coda /ŋ/ can result from hardening of a glide, so something like /kaˈtena/ > /kaˈdejna/ > /kaˈdeŋna/.

/uno/ > /vuk/?? Wow. That is really weird. I dont think I've ever seen a sound shift of /n/ > /ŋ/ > /k/, especially not in final position where nasals are usually favored.

But yeah, it looks like the map is correct, and in fact, if Im reading the paper right, they claim a regular shift of /n/ > /ŋn/ after all stressed vowels except /a/. Is that right? /n/ > /ŋn/ seems even more strange to me than /n/ > /k/.

[Porphyrogenitos]

/uno/ > /vuk/?? Wow. That is really weird. I dont think I've ever seen a sound shift of /n/ > /ŋ/ > /k/, especially not in final position where nasals are usually favored.

But yeah, it looks like the map is correct, and in fact, if Im reading the paper right, they claim a regular shift of /n/ > /ŋn/ after all stressed vowels except /a/. Is that right? /n/ > /ŋn/ seems even more strange to me than /n/ > /k/.

Yes, this all true. I have The Dialects of Italy by Martin Maiden and Mair Parry, which discusses this, and the following changes have all happened:

/n/ > /ŋ/ word-finally - this is common to many, many Romance varieties, including varieties of Spanish, Occitan, and numerous varieties in Italy

/n/ > /ŋ/ in all syllable codas/preconsonantally, resulting in forms like /ʒɛŋt/ < /ʒɛnt/ - in a number of varieties in Northern Italy

/n/ > /ŋ/ intervocalically via an intermediate stage of /ŋn/ - it only mentioned this as happening in Piedmontese, but it seems from this map it occurred elsewhere, too. Thus, the Piedmontese word for moon is /lyŋa/

People really do underestimate the diversity of Italian Romance, I think. The peninsula possesses a depth and variety of linguistic variation fitting for the urheimat of a major language family. Now, not that there aren't interesting features in other Romance languages, but in Italian Romance you really can find some astounding phonological and grammatical innovations. I started a thread about some of the interesting things I found in Maiden and Parry's book.

Some other things I recently found out from the Oxford Guide to Romance languages

- Some varieties of Italian Romance not only preserve a neuter (like Romanian), but some in fact have up to four grammatical genders
- Some varieties of Italian Romance have innovated gender marking on verbs, and some have even developed gender marking on prepositional phrases

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

/n/ > /ŋ/ intervocalically via an intermediate stage of /ŋn/ - it only mentioned this as happening in Piedmontese, but it seems from this map it occurred elsewhere, too. Thus, the Piedmontese word for moon is /lyŋa/.

This also happened in neighbouring Ligurian, if that information is necessary.

[Zju]

/n/ > /ŋ/ in all syllable codas/preconsonantally, resulting in forms like /ʒɛŋt/ < /ʒɛnt/ - in a number of varieties in Northern Italy

/n/ > /ŋ/ intervocalically via an intermediate stage of /ŋn/ - it only mentioned this as happening in Piedmontese, but it seems from this map it occurred elsewhere, too. Thus, the Piedmontese word for moon is /lyŋa/

What is the phonetical motivation for this, though? What exactly caused it?

- Some varieties of Italian Romance not only preserve a neuter (like Romanian), but some in fact have up to four grammatical genders
- Some varieties of Italian Romance have innovated gender marking on verbs, and some have even developed gender marking on prepositional phrases

How did these innovation happen? Interesting, I thought all contemporary Romance languages only ever have two genders.

[Dewrad]

/n/ > /ŋ/ in all syllable codas/preconsonantally, resulting in forms like /ʒɛŋt/ < /ʒɛnt/ - in a number of varieties in Northern Italy

/n/ > /ŋ/ intervocalically via an intermediate stage of /ŋn/ - it only mentioned this as happening in Piedmontese, but it seems from this map it occurred elsewhere, too. Thus, the Piedmontese word for moon is /lyŋa/

What is the phonetical motivation for this, though? What exactly caused it?

Nasalisation, basically. You start off with oral vowel + nasal, that becomes a nasal vowel and then breaks into oral vowel + (velar) nasal. So /ʒent/ > /ʒẽt/ > /ʒeŋt/. It's a soundchange I make use of in my own romlang Dravian.

- Some varieties of Italian Romance not only preserve a neuter (like Romanian), but some in fact have up to four grammatical genders
- Some varieties of Italian Romance have innovated gender marking on verbs, and some have even developed gender marking on prepositional phrases

How did these innovation happen? Interesting, I thought all contemporary Romance languages only ever have two genders.

I've had a look through Ledgeway and Maiden and I can't immediately find a reference to gender marking on verbs- could we get a page reference on that? Not disbelieving (the Romance family is unfairly scorned by conlangers: there's a hell of a lot of weird that happens), I just can't find the reference!

[Soap]

Romanian preserves neuters and so does Italian in a sense so I think that Proto Romance must have as well. So the differences that there are are a problem of weather it is reflected phonetically or grammatically.

For example there are nouns in Italian that are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This makes perfect sense when you look at the original Latin words that they had come from. so I think that only a few of these words survived into modern Italian and they are probably the most common words since they resisted the analogy.

[Porphyrogenitos]

- Some varieties of Italian Romance not only preserve a neuter (like Romanian), but some in fact have up to four grammatical genders
- Some varieties of Italian Romance have innovated gender marking on verbs, and some have even developed gender marking on prepositional phrases

How did these innovation happen? Interesting, I thought all contemporary Romance languages only ever have two genders.

Aside from masculine and feminine, there are some Romance languages with a neuter. Romance neuters are due to one of two things:

In Latin, as with many other IE languages, the neuter plural tended to resemble the feminine. When the Latin case system simplified, this mostly did away with the neuter, folding it into the masculine, but there remained a class of neuter nouns whose singular was identical to the masculine and whose plural was identical to the feminine. This class was done away with in the core Western Romance languages (which used -s to mark the plural), but in Italo-Western and Eastern Romance, which used vocalic plurals, this distinction was preserved. This is how we get the Romanian neuter (looks like masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural) and the class of "gender-changing plurals" in Italian, as well as other classes of neuter nouns with more or less identical behavior in some other Italian Romance varieties.

The other way is essentially an innovation. Firstly - the original masculine singular ending in Romance was actually /u/, not /o/. While short /u/ merged into /o/ in all other cases, the final /m/ of the masculine accusative singular prevented it from lowering. Only later on, in some languages, did the final masculine singular /u/ lower to /o/. Secondly - if you're familiar with the Spanish article lo, used to refer to categories and abstractions, as well as an impersonal pronoun, e.g. lo interesante "the interesting [thing about it]" or lo que es... "that which is..." - Imagine if that one word gave rise to a whole gender. That's what this other Romance neuter is. The article lo is descended from the Latin neuter demonstrative illud, whose final short /u/ did lower to /o/, as one would expect. So, the languages with this kind of neuter are Asturian and Neapolitan + some other Italian Romance varieties.

In Asturian, as far as I can tell, what must have happened is that words to which illud/lo was preposed took the ending -o out of analogy with it, as opposed to the regular masculine singular ending in Asturian, which is the unlowered /u/ discussed above. This allowed distinctions like el guapu "the handsome one"vs. lo guapo "the interesting thing [about it]" and el pelu "the [individual] hair" vs. lo pelo "the hair [as a material or substance]".

The illud neuter in Neapolitan and some other Italian Romance varieties carries essentially the same semantic distinction, but phonologically the distinction is maintained not through final vowels - final /u/ was lowered to /o/ in Neapolitan - but through consonant mutation (i.e. syntactic gemination, as found in Standard Italian and other Italian varieties). The final -d of illud triggered gemination of the succeeding consonant historically, resulting in distinctions like ’o pane "the [particular variety of] bread" vs. ’o ppane "the bread [as a substance or collective mass]" and ’o napulitano "the Neapolitan man" vs. ’o nnapulitano "the Neapolitan language".

Romance languages with four grammatical genders - of which there are a few scattered about the southern part of Italy, apparently - have both of these kinds of neuters.

Or, alternatively, they have the "gender-changing plural" neuter - but also innovated a second gender-changing neuter that looks like the feminine in the singular and the masculine in the plural.

I've had a look through Ledgeway and Maiden and I can't immediately find a reference to gender marking on verbs- could we get a page reference on that? Not disbelieving (the Romance family is unfairly scorned by conlangers: there's a hell of a lot of weird that happens), I just can't find the reference!

In Chapter 57: Gender, 934-935

Introducing gender agreement targets in §57.1, I specified that these do not usually include finite verb forms. In Mozarabic, though, loss of auxiliaries through replication of the Semitic model resulted in gender-agreeing past tense verb forms: e.g. MI-O sidÉLLO BEN-ID <mw sdylh bnyd> ‘my (p.935) Cidiello came.MSG’ (H 5, Corriente 1997:309-11). The same happens in acquisitional varieties of Italian before the auxiliaries emerge (Loporcaro 1998b:220-24).

Several Italo-Romance dialects have acquired gender marking on finite verbs, often limited to one paradigm cell of just one lexeme—‘have’ in some dialects on the Emilian Apennine, e.g. leː l ɛː vest/lo l a vest ‘she has.F/he has.M seen’ in Grizzanese (Loporcaro 1996), ‘be’ in several dialects of Trentino, e.g. l ɛi̯ bɛːla/l ɛ bɛːl ‘she is.F/he is.M beautiful’ (Loporcaro and Vigolo 2002-3), as well as in Friulian—or all verbs, as in Mesocco, Canton Grigioni, where all and only third person plural forms of all verbs agree in gender with their subject (Salvioni 1902:139): la dizen/i diz ‘they say.F/M’.

The most spectacular system in this respect is that of southern Marchigiano dialects spoken between the Tronto and Aso rivers. In Ripatransone (Parrino 1967; Harder 1988), finite verbs agree in gender with their subject: esse veðe ‘she sees.F’/issu veðu ‘he sees.M’/sə veðə kə ‘one sees.N that’. Also other constituents may agree in gender/number with the subject: ʧ ajju s‎ɔnna/-u‎ ‘I am sleepy.M’ vs ʧ ajje s‎ɔnne/**-u ‘I am sleepy.F’ (lit. ‘(I.M) have.M sleepiness.M’ vs ‘(I.F) have.F sleepiness.F’). This concerns even subcategorized prepositional phrases:

[Dewrad]

Cheers! Embarrassingly, I didn't think to consult that chapter:I was just scouring chapter 16...

(Not going to lie, it is the most satisfying £100 I have ever spent in my life.)