# Mauretania through romance sound changes.



## killerbee256

Hello everyone, I've finally found time to return the project I posted about before. I need some help with processing _Mauretania_ through various western romance sound changes. Skimming all the references suggested to me before this is what I've got so far:
french = Morétagne
italian = Moretagna
occitan = Moretanha
castillan = Moretaña
catalan = Moretanya
portuguese = Moretanha
*visigothic = Moretanna
I'm unsure of how the "_et_" in the middle of the word should change.

*hypothetical Visigothic era common ancestor of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan


----------



## Gavril

At least one correction: in Castillian and Portuguese (and maybe some of the other languages), the _-t-_ should be voiced to _-d_-: thus _Moredaña_ / _Moredanha_.


----------



## bearded

killerbee256 said:


> italian = Moretagna


In Italian the country is called _Mauritania.  _In French _Mauritanie, _as far as I know.


----------



## jazyk

In Portuguese the country is called Mauritânia.


----------



## Nino83

I think killerbee is interested in knowing what the noun would look like if it weren't a cultism.
_Mauritania > Moretagna_ in Italian (like _campanea > campagna_ or _vinea > vigna_).
As Gavril said, north of the La Spezia-Rimini line the intervocalic _-t-_ becomes _-d-_ (this is true for French, Northern Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician).


----------



## bearded

Nino83 said:


> I think killerbee is interested in knowing what the noun would look like if it weren't a cultism.


Had he specified this, it would have been of help. And I cannot trace ''the project I posted about before'', that he mentions.


----------



## Nino83

Hi, bearded man. 
This is the thread: Evolution of Latin -ium ending in french


----------



## bearded

Thank you, Nino.


----------



## Nino83

You're welcome.
I'd say that in Italian it could be both _Mauritagna_ and _Moritagna_, because sometimes unstressed _-au-_ didn't become a monophthong (see _autunno_ vs. _automne_ [ɔtɔn(ə)], _otoño_, _outono_). 
otonno, otogno ...


----------



## jazyk

Then I think it would have been Mouretanha in Portuguese, as Latin au has become ou, as in Maurus - mouro, aurum - ouro, taurus - touro, etc., and I think only unstressed t's have become d's, which is not the case here.


----------



## killerbee256

bearded man said:


> Had he specified this, it would have been of help. And I cannot trace ''the project I posted about before'', that he mentions.


I'm sorry I should have been more clear before, I working on a "modification" for medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings 2. The developers included a feature which changes the name of game's "provinces," duchies, kingdoms and empires depending on who controls them, but they didn't make use of it much. I started by going through Wikipedia articles for alternate names that existed in the real world in places such as the border between Italy and German speaking countries or the alternate names for famous/important cities such as Florence. After I ran out of historical names I began to think about how France, Italy and Spain in the pasted changed Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese etc to conform with the dominate standard. So what if, as is possible in the game, Italians ruled over parts of France, or Asturias/Leon/Castile/Spain never lost control of Portugal, place names would be different. So I've been using the reference books that Nino83 and others recommended to me to transform place names between romance languages, Such as _Latium_ in the in the linked thread.


----------



## Cenzontle

How about the loss of an unstressed, word-internal vowel adjacent to the stressed syllable (syncope)?
I know it applies to Spanish and Portuguese, and probably to other Western Romance languages.
Sp. "Mordaña" (or "Mortaña" if the syncope happened prior to the voicing change).


----------



## Gavril

Cenzontle said:


> Sp. "Mordaña" (or "Mortaña" if the syncope happened prior to the voicing change).



The -_g_- in the suffix -_azgo_ (_hallazgo_, etc.), from Lat. -_āticum, _suggests that the -_t_- would already have become -_d- _by the time the vowel contracted.


----------



## Cenzontle

You are probably right, Gavril, about the relative chronology of the voicing and syncope changes.  I was thinking of Menéndez Pidal's statement (_Manual_, Sec. 24) "Ya en latín vulgar se perdía la protónica después de _r_", with the example of *_cerbellaria _(for _cerebellare_).

Penny (Sec. 2.4.3.3) says "In certain environments (contact with /r/ or /l/,...), intertonics were frequently lost in VL."

Lathrop (Sec. 9b) cites as (post-tonic) examples _ar(i)dus_, _sol(i)dus_, and _vir(i)dis_, already syncopated in Vulgar Latin.

But a recent dissertation (by Eric Adler Lief, 2006, starting on p. 177) claims that examples such as _anhelitāre_ > OSp. _alentar_, _sōlitāriu_ > _soltero_, and _offer(i)ta_ > _oferta _are due to analogy rather than sound change.  Lief concludes (p. 180) "the only clear cases of syncope predating voicing are ones with /sVt/ like _positu_."

So... "Mordaña".


----------



## killerbee256

Cenzontle said:


> You are probably right, Gavril, about the relative chronology of the voicing and syncope changes.  I was thinking of Menéndez Pidal's statement (_Manual_, Sec. 24) "Ya en latín vulgar se perdía la protónica después de _r_", with the example of *_cerbellaria _(for _cerebellare_).
> 
> Penny (Sec. 2.4.3.3) says "In certain environments (contact with /r/ or /l/,...), intertonics were frequently lost in VL."
> 
> Lathrop (Sec. 9b) cites as (post-tonic) examples _ar(i)dus_, _sol(i)dus_, and _vir(i)dis_, already syncopated in Vulgar Latin.
> 
> But a recent dissertation (by Eric Adler Lief, 2006, starting on p. 177) claims that examples such as _anhelitāre_ > OSp. _alentar_, _sōlitāriu_ > _soltero_, and _offer(i)ta_ > _oferta _are due to analogy rather than sound change.  Lief concludes (p. 180) "the only clear cases of syncope predating voicing are ones with /sVt/ like _positu_."
> 
> So... "Mordaña".


I've was just thinking this same thing, it seems like the vowel would have been lost quite early before the divergence into separate languages. Which leads me to these forms:
french = Mordagne
italian = Mortagna
occitan = Mordanha
castillan  Mordaña
catalan = Mordanya
portuguese = Mourdanha
visigothic = Mordanna


----------



## Cenzontle

I'm having misgivings about the term Visigothic.  Maybe a better term would be Proto-Ibero-Romance.
Isn't Visigothic the name of an actual Germanic language?


----------



## jazyk

portuguese = Mourdanha - I have never seen such a configuration in Portuguese words.


----------



## Nino83

Cenzontle said:


> I know it applies to Spanish and Portuguese, and probably to other Western Romance languages.


Youre right, Cenzontle. This happens in Italian too.


Gavril said:


> The -_g_- in the suffix -_azgo_ (_hallazgo_, etc.), from Lat. -_āticum, _suggests that the -_t_- would already have become -_d- _by the time the vowel contracted.


Right.
In Italian (where the sonorization of the intervocalic consonants didn't happen, south of Rome, and happened in half of the caes in the Tuscan variant) it seems, in some cases, it is due to the fact that the "r" sonorized the following consonant, like in _verecundia > vergogna_, so _Mordagna_ could be possible in Italian too.


----------



## killerbee256

Cenzontle said:


> I'm having misgivings about the term Visigothic.  Maybe a better term would be Proto-Ibero-Romance.
> Isn't Visigothic the name of an actual Germanic language?


The term is not mine rather it's the game's, which is used in it's code. It's been a annoyance the among the game's more linguistic orientated fans, so you aren't alone. The developer's logic is that the Visigoth kingdom only fell 49 years previous to the earliest start date. So Visigothic in this context is suppose to refer to the culture of Visigothic Spain not the Germanic Gothic subgroup. To give context I've attached pictures from the game.


jazyk said:


> portuguese = Mourdanha - I have never seen such a configuration in Portuguese words.


Is _Mordanha _better?


----------



## jazyk

Yes, Mordanha is much better　than Mourdanha. In a word like *Mourdanha, there would be a hiatus (mo-ur-da-nha), not a diphthong (mour-da-nha).


----------



## Sardokan1.0

I think in Italian would be Mauritania (like the actual nation of Mauritania)

In Sardinian I'm pretty sure it would be Maurredania, since in Sardinian language we still have a nickname we use for south-west Sardinians, we call them Maurreddinos, because in Vth century when Sardinia was conquered by Vandals, they brought to south-west Sardinia thousands of slaves from the former Roman province of Mauretania, whose inhabitants were called Mauri - Mauros (Moors), diminutive : Maurellinos -> in Sardinian : Maurreddinos


----------



## Cenzontle

I also wondered about the _ou_ diphthong in an unstressed syllable, but we do have _ousado_, _outono_, _outorgar_, _outubro_,_ ouvir_.
But in all these examples the diphthong is in an *open* syllable (followed by a single consonant, not a cluster like -_rd-_).
So... Does Portuguese allow the sequence -_ourd-_?
I searched for "*ourd*" in Prof. Davies's _Corpus do Português_ and found mostly derivatives of "Lourdes"; no clearly native words.
So maybe we do have to reduce the diphthong to -_o_-.


----------



## jazyk

Cenzontle said:


> Does Portuguese allow the sequence -_ourd-_?


I can't think of any such word. That's why I rejected it in post 17.



Cenzontle said:


> So maybe we do have to reduce the diphthong to -_o_-.


Right.


----------



## Cossue

As the hypothetical result of _Mauritania _I would expect in my own Galician either *Mordaña, or a more conservative *Mouredaña, but probably no *Mourdaña (the reduction -or- < -our- <  -aur- is usual just in the coda). Actually, there are several place names in Galicia which show both these posibilities:

*Morgade *< 943 AD _Mauregati  _< *villa *Maurigati 'villa of Maurigatus/Mauricatus'
*Vilamor *< 1165 _Villa Mour_ < 976 _Villa Mauri _'villa of Maurus'​
But

*Mourigade *< *villa *Mauricati
*Vilamoure *< 964 _villa Mauri_​
Also, for example:

*Parderrubias *< 957 Parietes Rubias​
So, first it happened the lenition of stops, them the vowel reduction. In any case, -au- was preserved in Western Iberia, then transformed in -ou-, then reduced to -o- in Castilian but (mostly) preserved in Galician and Portuguese.


----------

