On the Role of Palatalization

Ústav klasických studií a brněnská pobočka JKF srdečně zvou všechny členy i veřejnost na přednášku

On the Role of Palatalization in the Vulgar Latin Sound Change /w/ > /β/

kterou přednese Dr. habil. Béla Adamik, Ph.D. (University ELTE Budapest, Hungary).

Přednáška se uskuteční v úterý 25. října 2016, v 16.00 hod. v posluchárně A 21 na Ústavu klasických studií (FF MU, budova A, I. patro).

Anotace přednášky: Our paper focuses on two convergent Vulgar Latin sound changes, i.e. the intervocalic fricativization of both the bilabial voiced stop phoneme /b/ and the labial velar semivowel phoneme /w/ to bilabial voiced fricative [β]. Regarding the latter, i.e. /w/ > [β], Stephens (1988) proposes that palatalization of /w/ promoted the fricative pronunciation [β] and tries to demonstrate, on the basis of spelling variation in Vulgar Latin inscriptions, that in word-internal position the fricative pronunciation was significantly more frequent in palatalizing (i.e. before front vowels) than in non-palatalizing environments (i.e. before back vowels). A revision of this palatalization hypothesis is, however, reasonable on more than one score. Accordingly, in our paper we intend to test the palatalization hypothesis of Stephens by a distributional analysis of all types of B/V confusions with regard to the quality of the following vowel, on data sets recorded from Sardinia and other Roman provinces.