Browsing by Author "Anderson, James M"

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    Ancient languages of Spain
    (University of Calgary, 1984-06) Anderson, James M
    As is well known, the Basque language of the northeast Hispanic Peninsula and the southwest corner of France has no substantiated antecedents. Similarly, ancient Iberian, a preRoman language of Mediterranean Spain and southern France, perceived only through inscriptional material still undeciphered and in some aspects problematical, also has no identifiable progenitors.
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    Doublets, cultismos, and their relation in Castilian Spanish
    (University of Calgary, 1983-06) Anderson, James M
    The traditional explanations for differences in the phonological shape of doublets and repeated by most texts on the history of the Spanish language, revolve around the notion that one of the pair evolved normally in the speech habits of the lower classes while the other in its pristine form can either be attributed to a direct borrowing from an older stage of the language, or was preserved among the conservative speech of the upper classes of society.
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    The Greek character of Ancient Iberian inscriptions*
    (University of Calgary, 1978-05) Anderson, James M
    Pre-Roman, non-Celtic Iberian inscriptions, dating from the fifth to the first centuries, B.C. and written in a semi-syllabic orthography of Eastern Mediterranean origins, remain generally undeciphered. That some of the Iberian funeral inscriptions would have been recorded in the Greek language, however, seems logical, certainly after the fact, as Greek trading settlements occupied areas of the Western Mediterranean coasts from the Rhone river to Gibraltar for nearly two centuries before the appearance of the first Iberian inscriptions.
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    Hispano-Celtic languages
    (University of Calgary, 1982-09) Anderson, James M
    Celtic documentation from Spain dates back to the second century B.C., predating the Ogham funerary inscriptions of Ireland by about four hundred years. They were inscribed sometimes in the Roman alphabet, sometimes in that curious semi-syllabic writing system employed by the ancient Iberians. Both Roman and Iberian cultures were in immediate contact with the Celtic tribes of the eastern portion of the Peninsula. The significance of these early inscriptions lies not only in their philological importance but also in their linguistic characteristics which are helpful in piecing together the even earlier common Celtic of Europe, and the relationship of Celtic to Italic languages and to Proto-Indo-European.
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    Loss and restoration of word final vowels in Spanish
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Anderson, James M
    The process of apocope in Medieval Spanish offers a glimpse into the interaction of structural and sociological constraints on linguistic behavior. Of the word final unstressed vowels /e/, /o/ and /a/, the twelfth and thirteenth century Spanish /e/, and less often /o/ were effaced exposing new consonants and consonant clusters. Written documentation of the period clearly indicates the loss of the vowel in environments where Modern Spanish has sustained the loss and in others where it has not, cf. Latin panem > Old Spanish pan, Modern Spanish pan. and Latin noctem > Old Spanish noch (in texts), Modern Spanish noche. By the fifteenth century, apocoped vowels were restored except after dental consonants, i.e., /l, r, s, n, ć (>θ), d/. The loss and subsequent restoration of these vowels appears to reflect syntagmatic, sociological and paradigmatic aspects of language function. To what extent can these factors be isolated, and their relative influence examined?
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    Resistance to the syntagmatic influence of the vowel /a/ in Spanish
    (University of Calgary, 1982-01) Anderson, James M
    The relative intractability of the vowel /a/ to syntagmatic influence in Popular Latin and early Hispano-Romance seems to support the contention that this sound is unmarked and the most natural of the vocalic phonemes, a consideration also supported by language acquisition studies where /a/ is found to be the earliest vowel in the linguistic formation of children and by typological studies of vowel systems which indicate that /a/ is present in most, if not all, languages. In both stressed and unstressed environments, phonological processes that affected other vowels in the early history of the Spanish language appear to have been constrained when /a/ was involved.