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Rhotacism in the Old Italian Languages, and the Exceptions ...
Rhotacism in the Old Italian Languages and the Exceptions Author:Edward Lorraine Walter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Veturius Vetusius. Liv. III. 8. vires vis. visceris viscus. vomeris vomis. Verg. Georg. I. 162. vulneris vulnus. c. In the inflections of nouns. ... more » The ending of the genitive plural of a and o stems, rum, stands for original sam. Compare the genitive plural of the Sanskrit demonstrative pronoun tesham with Lat. is-torum Gothic thizo. So pennarum for pennasam, bonorum for bonosom etc. d In the inflections of voice. The formation of the passive is most simply explained by the addition of the reflexive pronoun se to the active. Rhota- cism took place at a very early period, after which the final e was dropped, and simple r remained in the popular consciousness as the passive sign. In spite of the hesitation occasioned by the presence of the same passive sign in Oscan and Keltic, where rhotacism has not as yet been proven in other cases, this theory deserves the preference before any other as yet brought forward, because of its simplicity and the completeness of the explanation which it furnishes. The z of the Oscan genitive ending shows that this dialect shares in the tendency to alter the sound of s between two vowels which was the chief cause of rhotacism in Latin, and the manifold changes of in Keltic under similar circumstances show the same thing. It is quite conceivable that a tendency which at a very early period affected several different languages alike, may have been developed differently in two of them, and in a third have been developed scarcely at all. In this way is the fact satisfactorily explained that the only trace of rhotacism in Keltic is the passive sign in question, and on the other hand that the disappearance ofs between two vowels, very frequent in Keltic, is also not without example in Latin. Vid. Corss. Beitr. p. 465. So amor for ...« less