Since the issue has come up both in a private correspondence and on romconlang I looked up my old notes concerning that mysterious Romance root for ‘small, little’. The most likely story goes something like this:

In Latin there was a word pūtus, meaning ‘(small) boy’. In Vulgar Latin this word had a variant *pŭttus, since there was a general tendency for V:C and VC: (long vowel + single consonant and short vowel + long/double consonant) to alternate with each other, and then by analogy or dialect mixture a third variant *pūttus with both the stressed vowel and the following consonant long¹.

First of all the well-known Latin diminutive ending -ul- was added to *puttus, giving *puttulus, which soon was contracted to *puttlus, which Romanicists would conventionally write as *putt’lus. Now there was a very strong tendency in Vulgar Latin for an /l/ which formed a cluster with another consonant to become a palatal [ʎ] (like the older pronunciation of Spanish ll or Italian gli). As we see from the various reflexes of planta in the Romance languges — It. pianta, Sp. llanta, Fr. plante, Ptg. chanta — the consonant + [ʎ] could change in various ways: it could change into consonant + /j/ (Italian) which could in turn change into /tj/ and further into various reflexes of that combination, or indeed revert to or remain consonant + l (French).².

Next the palatal(ized) combination [cʎ] changed the preceding vowel /ʊ/ into /ɪ/. *pŭttulus had now become something which may be written *pĭtt^jl^jus. Now it is a well known fact that the combination *TL, or rather its palatalized outcome *t^jl^j [cʎ] was felt to be especially difficult to VL speakers: it usually changed to — or was indistinguishable from — cl > *k^jl^{j 3}, and Vulgar Latin speakers of central Italy, who tended to preserve or restore the -ulus ending, at some point retrofitted *pitt^jl^jus to *picculus, whence Italian piccolo.

Since the diminutive ending -ul- lost its meaning or vanished by sound change, and because people still felt the need to reinforce the sense of littleness, the thus obtained root variants *pitl/*pitt^j/*pikk^j/*pikkl and even the further back-formations *pitt and *pikk, all meaning ‘small’ or ‘small thing/being’ could be and usually were refurbished with further diminutive endings, giving the French variants and derivations petit, petiot, pichot, pichoun, and Sard pizeɖɖu < *pit^jellu, but above all *pitt^jīnus, and in Iberia *pikkinnus ⁴, although Rumanian also has the suffixless back-formation pitu.⁵

The different reflexes show a wide variation in the sounds corresponding to the final consonant of the root: Sard pizinnus [ts], Italian dialects pizzinnu [tts] and piccinnu [ttʃ], French petit [tt] ⁶, pichot [tʃ] > [ʃ], Sp. pequeño, Ptg. pequeno [kk], It. piccolo, no doubt because this sound could be palatalized or depalatalized, and then either to a dental/alveolar or a velar, and lastly it could even remain or be restored to a cluster. Last but not least these palatalizations and back- formations happened at different times and places, and therefore gave different results. The absence of [ʎ] reflexes no doubt is because the consonant was usually long or double. It has also been thought that the frequent use of diminutives in talk by and to babies has led to sometimes anomalous sound developments. For this word if anyone one is prepared to believe that!

Originally written Wed, 27 Aug 2008

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As I wrote in the post on Kijeb verb inflection:

there is an enclitic marker -ya which is attached to a non-animate agent NP of a higher- ranking patient (expressed or unexpressed) or to an animate patient NP of a a lower-ranking animate agent (which also may be unexpressed) — i.e. it is a kind of inversion marker attached to NPs. The distributional pattern arises because it is attached to the ‘most inverted participant’ and it can only be assigned once. In practice this means that since inanimates cannot be grammatical subjects but are inflected in the instrumental case -r there arises a virtual ‘ergative ending’ -rya used when the agent is inanimate and ranking lower than the patient, and a virtual ‘accusative ending’ -ya which is used on animate patients when the agent is also animate and ranking lower than the patient. Not surprisingly this is restructured into a split ergative case marking system in the later Sohlob languages, so that they have

• an unmarked absolutive-nominative used for all patients of inanimate agents, for inanimate patients of animate agents and for animate agents.

• an ergative marked by -Vl (where /l/ is the regular reflex of the [ʎ] /rʲ/ //rj// of the Kijeb -r-ya) used for inanimate agents.

• an accusative marked by -Vy used for animate patients of animate agents.

The external history of these endings is rather funny. The -l derives from the pleonastic ending -all of “all-språket”, the Swedish version of Pig Latin. In my first naming playlanglang which I created when I was eleven or twelve years old, and which derived a lot of words from Swedish, German and English words by way of all-språket -al became a ‘noun marker’. It was not long before I learnt of the English version, Pig Latin, from my grandmother and took up the ending -ei which became the ending for ‘things’ — because it ‘rimed’ with grej, Swedish for ‘thingie’ — while -al remained the ending for ‘people’. Thus I introduced an animacy distinction without really knowing what I was doing! When I had got a bit better understanding of Swedish grammatical terminology the ‘thing’ category got renamed neutrum and the ‘people’ category got renamed ‘utrum’. Next when I started to learn Latin -al became the masculine nominative ending while -ei became the ending for the accusative masculine and both cases in the neuter, much like -us and -um in the Latin second declension. By then there also had entered a genitive ending -ar (from Swedish har ‘has’!) and a distinct feminine with endings identical to the masculine, except that the vowel in each case was -i- (-il, -i, -ir — German sie and ihr had everything to do with it! :-) The plural BTW had the endings m. -an, -en, -ern, f. -in, -in, -irn while the neuter had no distinct plural like the majority of Swedish neuters. There were locatives, allatives and ablatives also, basically formed by adding -s to the nominative, accusative and genitive respectively, but subject to some Swedish-like sandhi which got expressed in the spelling:

The sh was because Swedish /rs/ is realized [ʂ] and ch was because in the Bohuslän dialect /ls/ could also be [ʂ] and I thought [lʂ] when I said it sounded like [ɕ] — I had unwittingly produced an [ɬ]!

To make a long story short I resurrected -al as an ergative ending when I started Sohlob some fifteen years later, and when I decided that Sohlob /l/ was from Kijeb /rj/ the instrumental -r sort of created itself. I was however long reluctant to resurrect -ei by using -ya as the accusative marker in Kijeb, until I found a plausible explanation for how the same element could create the accusative when added to the absolutive and the ergative when added to the instrumental. I think however that an involvement with inverse marking constitutes a plausible explanation.

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