Timeline for Where did French's silent ending consonants come from?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
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| Jan 8, 2022 at 18:08 | comment | added | Peter Shor | The masculine/feminine/liaison consonants nearly all fall into a small number of regular families. You just have to know which family each word belongs to. It's not that different than verb conjugations. And this is probably why there's no liaison after singular nouns ... it was too hard for illiterate people to remember the consonant you were supposed to add, so at some point people stopped doing it. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 6:48 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 12, 2018 at 17:07 | vote | accept | porque_no_les_deux | ||
| Jul 12, 2018 at 4:50 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak♦ | @CJDennis This came up in chat too, so to address it here: What I meant by that point was a question of functional vs. generative grammar and knowledge structure: not how do people learn, but how is the knowledge stored or how are the rules that generate it written (since the rules must not look anything like "flip the last written consonant from silent to pronounced" or "add an e"). | |
| Jul 12, 2018 at 4:47 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | I'm sure illiterate French are still very familiar with masculine and feminine versions of words. It's not like they've never heard "petite" before and have to guess the pronunciation solely from "petit". | |
| Jul 11, 2018 at 21:38 | comment | added | Eau qui dort | @Circeus The deaffrication of /ts/ is usually dated to the 13th century, but afaik the spelling z was immediately adapted to s to reflect the change in pronunciation. | |
| Jul 11, 2018 at 15:48 | comment | added | chepner |
I wouldn't think of the feminine as adding a consonant sound, rather it didn't lose one like the masculine did. petit and petite derive from Vulgar Latin *pittitus, which I presume had *pittita in the feminine. The process you want to explain is the loss of -tus on one hand and -a on the other.
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| Jul 10, 2018 at 21:45 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 10, 2018 at 14:43 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak♦ | @MathieuGuindon The spelling adds a vowel, but the actual pronunciation adds a consonant /t/. Because that question is about illiterate people, I'm concerned with pronunciation. :) | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 14:36 | comment | added | Mathieu Guindon | How do they know which consonant to add to petit to form the feminine - don't you mean vowel? | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 12:12 | comment | added | Robert Columbia | Continuing to include historical consonants that have become silent is very much a thing in English as well. One notable example is the "gh" in words such as "light" - it was originally the guttural sound spelled "ch" in German, which most dialects of English no longer have. | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 6:19 | comment | added | Circeus | @Eauquidort only in the initial stage. As I understand it (this part of french historical phonology I'm not very familiar with), the affricates weren't very stable historically and didn't stuck around very long before reducing. In fact if <z> does represent /ts/, it's the only place I'm aware of (bearing in mind the above caveat) at all that affrication, and not direct reduction to a fricative, was ever reflected in nondialectal spelling. | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 23:49 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 9, 2018 at 20:33 | comment | added | Eau qui dort | z=/ts/ though @Circeus. As for the answer, if you want to add similar final consonant loss in Latin or major Romance languages, there's the loss of final /d/ in Old Latin (dat sg aquād to classical aquā), the loss of final /m/ in Vulgar Latin (with an intermediate nasal vowel stage) and the loss of final /s/ in Andalucian Spanish, triggering vowel quality changes (the same thing happened in French with /as/ > /ɑ/ and with other vowels in Western Oïl varieties) | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 19:51 | comment | added | Circeus | I'd just throw in that -x has a more unusual backstory: it started as the abbreviation of -us, then people started putting the u's, but without restoring the original -s, and voila! irregular plurals! Other mute letters that were restored include the -t in -nts plural: the plural of, say, arrangement was in fact arrangemens for a while (well, I think it may have been arrangemenz, but let's not split hairs) because the -t wasn't pronounced in that form. | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 18:36 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 9, 2018 at 18:00 | history | answered | Luke Sawczak♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |