Mark E. Shoulson writes >I always thought that at least for Spanish it was due to influence from >Arabic, which does much the same thing to avoid initial consonant clusters. >That wouldn't explain French, though, which has no reason to be exposed to >Arabic. And it's just a guess anyway. In reply to my > (2) Do you linguists out there know whether the tendency of Spanish, >Portuguese and French to add an initial e- (escuela, escola, e'cole) to Latin >words beginning in sc- is an inheritance from the Celtic languages >pre-existing in thos areas? Are there writings on this and other >inheritances from Celtic? Mark: if I had thought about it at all I had assumed the same. What made me ask the question was that Welsh does the same thing: scola=ysgol=escuela, scala=ysgol=e'chelle; scribere=ysgrifen=escribir; in fact much more so than Spanish or French - in my Welsh dictionary there are 4 pages of similar words, some derived from English rather than Latin (ysgum=scum, ysto^l=stool). However, Italian and Romanian have few to no such words. This is such an obvious phenomenon that the nineteenth century linguists must have noticed it and written about it. But it also made me wonder whether there are many more such influences or survivals. I wonder if the Goidelic languages also add this initial vowel? And which group were the Celtic languages of Spain in, anyway? Diolch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | John L. Berry Pecten International Co. "R.S. R us" | | Phone: 713-544-4293 200 N. Dairy Ashford RD ||| _ ||| | | Phacs: 713-544-4873 HOUSTON, TX 77079, USA |||-| |-||| | | ej10jlbs@shell.com USPS: P.O. Box 205 |_| | | |_| | | (Schedule "A") HOUSTON, TX 77001-0205 `+' | ------------------------------------------------------------------------