Compensatory lengthening by vowel and consonant loss in early Friulian

Abstract

The majority of Romanists have recognized that the Romance languages that have developed a length conirast in the vocalic system have done so through a process called open-syllable lengthening, that is, stressed vowels in open syllables automatically lengthened (Lausberg (1985). However, this is not the case in northern Italian dialects like Friulian or Milanese, where we observe contrasts like the following: FINITU > [finí:t] vs. FINITA > [finíde]. What has traditionally been interpreted in the Friulian case is that vowels lengthened before word-final voiced consonants. This article shows that the lengthening process attested in Early Friulian is better understood if we adopt a moraic conception of the syllable and syllabic weight. It is proposed that vowel lengthening is triggered by the loss of the final vowels: while FINITU deletes the last vowel and compensates the preceding vowel, FINITA does not drop the final vowel and, consequently, the vowel remains short.