Re: This week on Dancing with the Stars Re: The Business Memoir - the ``whom'' question

Historically, /a/ and /3/ are probably one phoneme, [a] being the
stressed realisation and [3] the unstressed one. But in modern
(European *) Portugese, they have become phonemic, due to /33/
becoming a single [a] (<à>) and /a/ occuring also in unstressed
position, like in padaria, Tavares, Camões and some other words, and
/3/ occuring also in stressed position, in <cantamos> and the like
(vs. <cantámos>).

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 23:02:37 +0100: António Marques <m.ap@xxxxxxx>: in
sci.lang:
Words like padaria are from paadaria with two distinct /a/ (usually
after a lost -l- or -n-;

Yes, that must explain it.

Could Tàvares and Càmões have similar earlier forms to explain the
presence of the open stressed vowel there?

For the present vs. imperfect I have no explanation, there's something
more here than just having taken advantage of a newly found phonetic
distinction - as I mentioned countless times by now, my father's village
has /E/ for the imperfect, [p@'sEmuS] 'we passed'.

(I'd probably have difficulty hearing the difference between (in my
transscription) [p3'sEmuS] and [p3's3muS], but that's just me.)

Right. So maybe there's an historic merger of dialects at play here,
around the time when in an emerging common standard language, stresses
/a/ before /m/ became [3] ?

In some other words, unstressed [a] may be meaningless (recent
development, analogy, etc).

Yes. But it's always there before m. Possibly parallel to the closing
of ó and é to ô and ê before m and n in Brazilian Portuguese. (pt-BR
Antônio vs. pt-PT António).
http://rudhar.com/foneport/en/noteport.htm#Note14

--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
.