> 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? As far as Romance is concerned, it's unlikely to be the result of Celtic influence. It seems to have developed in Vulgar Latin, probably starting with Greek loan-words beginning "sm-" (a sequence foreign to Latin), and then spreading to "sp-", "st-", "sc-" etc. So it's part of the common inheritance of all the Romance languages; all have it or have had it to some extent, but its fate varies from language to language. In Spanish and Portuguese it persists productively to this day; new loans beginning "s+consonant" will get the prothetic vowel: 'station' is "estacio^n", "estac,a~o". Old French had it, but then lost the "s", hence "e^cole", "e^cume" etc.; and in French it's ceased to be productive -- modern borrowings don't have it: "station", "statistique", etc. Early Italian had it, but then gave it up: "iscuola" > "scuola" etc., and "stazione" etc., not *"istazione". My guess is that Welsh gets it from Latin; i.e. that it first appears in Latin loans: "ystafell", "ysgol", etc., and then spreads to non- Latin words, before retreating (i.e. modern "stafell", etc.). But it could be an independent development in Welsh: it's a very natural thing for any language to do that on the whole doesn't favour clusters of consonants within the syllable: the point of putting the vowel in front of the "s" is to see to it that the "s" and the following consonant end up in different syllables. ************************ Nigel Love Linguistics Cape Town NLOVE@BEATTIE.UCT.AC.ZA ************************