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Vowel Length in the Romance Languages

Loporcaro, Michele (2024). Vowel Length in the Romance Languages. oxfordre.com: Oxford University Press.

Abstract

This article classifies all the Romance languages and dialects with regard to the phonological property of vowel length, phonemic and allophonic, considering its relationship to its correlate in phonetic substance, namely vocoid duration. It examines the rise and fall of vowel length in Romance, starting with a reference to Latin, where vowel length was contrastive as was consonant length, while in the Latin-Romance transition the former became dependent on the latter, as a part of a syllable structure conditioning. Consequently, Proto-Romance can be reconstructed as featuring an allophonic rule that lengthens stressed vowels in non-final open syllables (short, OSL) identical to that operating today in standard Italian, all Italo-Romance dialects south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and Sardinian, which I will label type A languages. Due to a series of later changes, the remaining Romance languages and dialects lost this allophonic rule, which gave rise to either of the two further types: on the one hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination and contrastive vowel length (type B, including Daco- and Ibero-Romance all along their documented history, as well as, today, most of Gallo-Romance); and, on the other hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination but displaying contrastively long versus short vowels (type C, including most of northern Italo-Romance as well as part of Raeto- and Gallo-Romance, but which arguably stretched from the Apennines to the North Sea in the Middle Ages).

This article examines all relevant sources of evidence, from Latin epigraphic inscriptions to experimental phonetic measurements, showing that they all chime perfectly with the picture just outlined. Needless to say, while the data from modern languages and dialects are observational, and those from older stages delivered by the written record need interpretation, reconstruction is, by definition, constructional: It can be supported by several sources of evidence but is in itself always provisional. Therefore, the story to be told here must be considered the best approximation to the historical truth that the present author deems reconstructible based on the available evidence.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Scientific Publication in Electronic Form
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Romance Studies
06 Faculty of Arts > Zurich Center for Linguistics
08 Research Priority Programs > Language and Space
Dewey Decimal Classification:470 Latin & Italic languages
460 Spanish & Portuguese languages
800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism
450 Italian, Romanian & related languages
410 Linguistics
440 French & related languages
Uncontrolled Keywords:phonology, phonetics syllable structurestres, sconsonant gemination, dialect variation
Language:English
Date:2024
Deposited On:28 Jan 2025 12:59
Last Modified:28 Jan 2025 14:42
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Series Name:Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Linguistics
OA Status:Closed
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.715
Official URL:https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-715

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