L'HERITAGE DE LA LABIOVELAIRE DANS LES LANGUES ROMANES: LE CAS DU LAT. COQUERE ‘CUIRE’
THE HERITAGE OF THE LABIOVELAR IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES: THE CASE OF LAT. COQUERE ‘TO COOK’

Summary/Abstract: The Heritage of the Labiovelar in Romance Languages: The Case of Lat. coquere ‘to Cook’. Lat. COQUERE appears in REW3 (no 2212) with two variants: COQUERE and COCERE. According to REW3 and FEW (2, 1167a), Old French is the only idiom to have inherited both forms, with a semantic distinction: the (indirect) descendant of COQUERE, cuivre s.m./f., has a figurative meaning, namely ‘worry, torment’, while the descendant of COCERE, cuire, has retained the concrete meaning ‘to cook’. Our aim is to find out whether this semantic bipartition was coupled with phonetic differentiation in Protoromance, or whether it merely represents an idioromance development. We will apply the comparative grammar-reconstruction method, as it is used in the DÉRom project. This will enable us to establish, on the one hand, whether the */'kɔkw-e-/ prototype is found in an area wider than the Gallo-Romance domain, and, on the other, whether the semantic reconstruction also indicates two distinct prototypes. The Late Latin and Romance data we collected suggest that, by the 3rd century at the latest, the verb had already lost the labial appendice of the labiovelar, and the form in circulation had a simple velar: */'kɔk-e-/. Bringing into question the inheritance of the labiovelar consonant /kw/ in Romance languages, the study analyzes the possibility that a semantic differentiation may be accompanied by a phonetic bipartition. The conclusion is that, in this case, the reconstruction of two prototypes is not necessary, but that a single form, without the labiovelar, can explain the Romance descendants and their two main meanings.

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