Lynne Mielke
HISP 607
February 2, 2012
Muhammad, Charlemagne, and Apocope or the Cultural Relevance of Romance Historical Linguistics
Employment prospects for Romance historical linguists are in jeopardy. There is a cultural role crisis at public universities and limited resources contribute to this state of affairs. However, the historical perspective of the Romance domain displays richness in documentation hardly found elsewhere in the humanities.
Consider the feature of raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), the gemination of wordinitial consonants when preceded within the speech chain by a word ending in a stressed vowel (e.g., cantò [m:]ale ‘s/he sang badly’; regular RF) or by a lexically restricted set of unstressed monosyllables (e.g., a [t:]e ‘to you’; irregular RF). It has been argued that stressconditioned RF must have arisen as a result of the collapse of Latin distinctive vowel quantity: the second mora of final long vowels was reassociated to the following initial consonant, bringing about lengthening (e.g., [tu: vide:s] > [tu v:e:di], ‘you see’).
Comparative evidence shows that stress-conditioned RF is restricted to Italian
(Tuscan) and to the earliest documents of Gallo-Romance. Irregular RF occurs in only southern Italian dialects and Sardinian, directly traceable to sandhi assimilation of Latin final consonants. Latin grammarians report on sandhi assimilation whereas stress-conditioned RF does not appear. The point is Romance historical linguistics requires command of diverse sources of evidence.
However in this era of limited resources, should universities allow personnel to acquire the skills that would result in an essay such as raddoppiamento fonosintattico? The wealth of a society correlates with the amount of ‘useless’ research it can afford. Others note that historical linguistics has made such valuable contributions in past research that it is now time to look at new priorities.
A broader, cross-disciplinary approach may be the key to the survival of the discipline in that linguistics could be meshed with phonology, geography and cultural studies. As such, there is a currently a lively, cross-disciplinary debate on the linguistic revolution that transformed the Latin-speaking into the Romance-speaking world.
The issue of the “end of Latin” as a language spoken and understood can be determined by checking mutual intelligibility between priests performing Mass in Latin and their uncultivated audiences. Banniard finds evidence up to the early decades of the seventh century while Herman notes the breakdown of intelligibility as having occurred in
Northern Gaul in the eighth century. In 789 Charlemagne pointed out that even priests had trouble understanding the text of Mass.
Herman notes that this time period coincides with work in phonology of Old French for the loss of final vowels (except a): muru(m) > mur. He crosses the areas of history, phonology, culture and philology and proposes a linguistic explanation. In that light, we must show the importance of Romance historical linguistics in language research and support new generations of scholars.