Re: fasse, faccia, faça ... haGa?

"Marc Adler" <marc.adler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote...

John Atkinson wrote:

This analogical loss of the
glide evidently occured before the assimilatory changes which otherwise took
place when certain consonants were followed by [j] ..."

Interesting. Is this aversion to palatal glides something
characteristic of Old Spanish, and is there any indication that this
was caused by a substratum language? Or was there perhaps a phonetic
reason, like the way [k] was pronounced (strong aspiration, for
example) that made the palatal glide difficult?

I wouldn't call it an "aversion" to palatal glides -- AFAICS, glides were never, or hardly ever, lost in Spanish in circumstances other than in these verbal inflections. Like Penny says, it seems to be a matter of analogical levelling of the inflection system, rather than any sort of aversion. Note that the four Latin conjugations have merged into two in Spanish -- the Latin A:RE conjugation has one set of endings in in Spanish, while the E:RE, ERE, and I:RE conjugations have another (with minor differences in I:RE). In Romance languages outside Spain, the E:RE and ERE conjugations didn't merge early on, and the I:RE endings remain different in the main tenses. So, it seems, the glides in E:RE (and I:RE) verbs had less incentive to drop so as to agree with ERE.

John.

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