The Development of Latin Hiatus Groups in the Romance Languages

Abstract

During the past fifty or sixty years in the history of Romance linguistics, the erratic development of vowels in hiatus has constituted an ever recurring problem. Scholars have been little preotcupied with the subject except in so far as it touches the history of the number words (CL dŭo) and the possessive adjectives and pronouns (CL měus, tŭus, sŭus). A study of the latter led d'Ovidio to give the first account of any extent of the development of vowels in hiatus in a Romance tongue; he limited his study to Italian. At about the same time, Karl Brugmann was investigating the mode of development of vowels in hiatus in Latin and Greek. Although he was able to establish a fairly clear system of development for the forms in the ancient languages, further studies in Romance linguistics failed to clarify the issue for the modern languages. In 1893, Menger attempted to answer, at least tentatively, some of the outstanding questions incidental to the problem and cleared the atmosphere somewhat; his treatment was, however, primarily a development of the possessive pronoun and was limited to Italian. The work of scholars such as Meyer-Lubke led to mere tabulation of forms; other treatments have considered at most a set group of words, like the possessive pronouns, in the various languages or have dealt only with the multitude of dialectal forms in an area geographically restricted. In short, the development of vowels in hiatus in the whole of the Romance territory has never been the object of a comprehensive study.