Abstract
Cornell University 1. Since Meyer-Liibke,1 it has been a commonplace of Romance phonology that Proto-Romance voiceless stop consonants have, by and large, been preserved intact in word-initial position throughout the Romance territory, whereas intervocalically they have undergone lenition, becoming voiced (and in some regions also fricative and eventually dropping). The spirants /f/ and /s/ (for which there were no voiced counterparts in Proto-Romance) have likewise become voiced intervocalically. Similarly, voiced stops are normally preserved initially, but have remained intervocalically as plosives (with the exception of /-b-/> /-v-/) only in East Romance, and have become fricatives or have dropped in the West. It is convenient to refer to these West Romance developments by the general term 'the West Romance sound-shift',2 as exemplified in Table 1 (with ERomance examples from Italian and WRomance from Provengal). Explanations of the retention of word-initial consonants in an unshifted state in West Romance have been of three main types: (a) Some observers have considered that word-initial position is in itself somehow enough to preserve a consonant from change.3 This theory has been rejected by those who do not accept 'mystical' explanations of language development.4
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