# The stress-conditioned split of ŪNU, ŪNA as seen from the Croissant

Fabian Zuk

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Fabian Zuk. The stress-conditioned split of ŪNU, ŪNA as seen from the Croissant. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2025, 11 (3), pp.1-22. 10.5565/rev/isogloss.438. hal-05003936

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<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# The stress-conditioned split of ŪNU, ŪNA as seen from the Croissant

Fabian Zuk

CNRS (LLACAN UMR 8135)

fabian.d.zuk@gmail.com

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

**How to cite:** Zuk, Fabian. 2025. The stress-conditioned split of ūnu, ūna as seen from the Croissant. In *Romance minority languages: A challenge for linguistic theory*, eds. Michela Russo & Shanti Ulfsbjorninn. Special issue of *Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics* 11(3)/6, 1–22.

**DOI:** https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.438

## Abstract

Minority speech varieties often retain insightful archaisms and innovations which are absent from the diachronic descriptive grammars of major national languages. One such innovation is the splitting of the Proto-Romance numeral adjectives ŪNU ‘one.MASC’ and ŪNA ‘one.FEM’ into phonologically distinct tonic numerals on the one hand and cliticised indefinite articles on the other. Employing recent dialectal data collected at Saint-Pierre-le-Bost (Dubac & Quint 2021) in France’s Creuse department, we employ autosegmental strict CV representations (Scheer 2004) to account for the numeral’s development from Latin into the phonologically differentiated numerals and articles of the Gallo-Romance Croissant. Under stress, the inherent palatal quality of the initial vowel spread into the empty leftward C position; the numerals thereby underwent yod insertion in onset. When cliticised the same numerals resulted in reduced forms suggesting that the lexical split between tonic numerals and cliticised articles began as a stress-dependent phenomenon. This evolution was hitherto left unexplained in descriptions of Croissant varieties. Moreover, the formal analysis of this phenomenon contributes to our understanding of grammaticalisation and dialect formation through parameter setting more broadly in Romance.

**Keywords:** Gallo-Romance, diachrony, vowel fortition, indefinite articles, autosegmental phonology.
# 1. Introduction

Saint-Pierre-le-Bost, a hamlet of some 120 inhabitants in France's Creuse department lies at the northern limit of the eastern half of a Gallo-Romance transition zone known since Ronjat's (1913) thesis as the “Croissant”. This linguistic area is of particular interest to linguists since its traditional speech varieties retain evidence of a Gallo-Romance linguistic continuum stretching from the English Channel to the Mediterranean and from the Alps to the Atlantic. Nestled between Oïl varieties in the North, Occitan in the South and Franco-Provençal to the East, Croissant varieties act as diachronic comparanda for their linguistic neighbours (see Escher et al. 2021).

While Romance historical phonology can rely on a venerable tradition of philological research and the description of logically ordered and hierarchised sound-change rules (see for example Richter 1934; Straka 1956; Zink 1986, etc. for French; most recently Marr & Mortensen 2023 for a computational approach), mainstream understanding of linguistic evolution pertains primarily to the major national languages of a country which are frequently formed through the convergence of supra-regional features, koineisation and standardisation (Lodge 1993, 2008).

From a methodological perspective, minority varieties offer a unique opportunity to understand the broader evolution of a language family through time. By observing innovations and archaisms which are absent from the national standard language, minority varieties allow the historical linguist a glimpse into the evolution of the family as a whole and the emergence of said standard, which, in the case of French emerged around Paris.<fnref n="1" /> Even in well studied varieties such as Standard French, there is still no consensus for many of the fine-grained details of the language's evolution (cf. Morin 2003). Minority varieties therefore provide evidence to contrast, contradict or support diachronic analyses of a language family.

In the 21st century, the remaining speakers of Romance minority languages in France (Occitan, Catalan or Franco-Provençal and Oïl varieties traditionally dubbed *patois*) are also speakers of Hexagonal French, either the national standard or a regional variety thereof, and are subjected to its influence.<fnref n="2" /> Furthermore, these regional varieties are rarely transmitted between generations, hence the urgency of describing remaining patois varieties.

Thanks in large part to work undertaken as part of the ANR17-CE27-0001 project *Le Croissant linguistique*, the dialectal diversity of this transition area has been partially preserved by the translation into the local patois of a well-known French classic, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's *Le Petit Prince*. The preparation of local graphophonological systems has allowed the series editor to capture twenty-six varieties from the Croissant in addition to two non-Croissant Occitan varieties. Data for the present article are drawn from Dubac & Quint (2021) and supported by original audio recordings by Faust & Dubac (*in prep*) which have allowed us to resolve remaining doubts in the transcription.

Saint-Pierre-le-Bost patois (abbreviated SPLB or SPLB patois) has also been the subject of recent work by Faust (2023; Faust to appear, this volume) as have

<footnote n="1">¹ See Lodge (1993, 2002) for a history of this linguistic area and the emergence of a French standard.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² We intentionally employ the term *patois*, often employed by speakers, in a neutral sense to refer to regional, generally rural, varieties of non-standard Gallo-Romance.</footnote>
neighbouring Croissant varieties, such as that of Crozant (Deparis 2024) located some 60 km West, near France's Indre department. This article therefore contributes to a larger understanding of Croissant varieties by concentrating on a specific issue of Gallo-Romance morpho-phonology: the evolution of the Latin cardinal numerals signifying 'one' and their grammaticalisation into indefinite articles. We propose that the particular evolution of these adjectives in Saint-Pierre-le-Bost not only helps to understand the grammaticalisation of numerals into determiners, but more generally exposes the role of word-stress in diachrony within the Gallo-Romance family.

## 2. The Evolution of ŪNU and ŪNA from Latin to Romance

With minor variations in the specific evolutions of the Latin vowel system across the daughter languages, the words meaning ‘one’ (Latin ŪNU, ŪNA) have remained remarkably stable:

1. Ū, the long high back “velar” vowel gave Proto-Romance /u/. Within most of Gallo-Romance, Rhaeto-Romance and some Gallo-Italic varieties, Proto-Romance */u/ was fronted to palatal /y/, a rounded high front vowel (cf. § 4.1).

2. N, the dental nasal stop remained /n/.

3. Ŭ, the unstressed high back round vowel, generally merged with Ō the other characteristically ‘masculine-marking’ vowels, giving /o/ in unstressed syllables, which underwent further vowel reduction variously across the daughter languages.

4. Ă, the open back vowel, and characteristic mark of feminine gender gave Proto-Romance /a/, and underwent additional reduction across many of the daughter languages.

As can be seen in **Table 1**, the similarity between the numerals of many Romance languages allows us to trace them back to Proto-Romance forms *únu and *úna which are the direct descendants of the Latin numeral ‘1’, masculine ŪNU and feminine ŪNA. The numerals and indefinite articles of many Romance languages share a single phonological form, especially in the feminine. In the masculine, the article, with the exception of Sardinian (see below) is systematically characterised by the loss of the final vowel. In any case, whether the reflexes of ŪNU and ŪNA act as cardinal numbers, nouns, or as grammaticalised indefinite articles, the article is either identical to the numeral, or can be derived through apocope.

<table><caption>**Table 1.** Numerals and Articles in Romance</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Numerals</th><th colspan="2">Indefinite Articles</th></tr><tr><th>ŪNU</th><th>ŪNA</th><th>ŪNU</th><th>ŪNA</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Asturian</td><td>unu</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>una</td></tr><tr><td>Castilian</td><td>uno</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>una</td></tr><tr><td>Catalan</td><td>un</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>una</td></tr><tr><td>Occitan</td><td>un</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>una</td></tr><tr><td>Italian</td><td>uno</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>una</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td>Sardinian</td><td>unu</td><td>una</td><td>unu</td><td>una</td></tr><tr><td>Galician</td><td>un</td><td>unha</td><td>un</td><td>unha</td></tr><tr><td>Portuguese</td><td>um</td><td>uma</td><td>um</td><td>uma</td></tr><tr><td>French</td><td>un</td><td>une</td><td>un</td><td>une</td></tr><tr><td>Romansch (Surmiran)</td><td>en</td><td>ena</td><td>en</td><td>ena</td></tr><tr><td>Romanian</td><td>unu</td><td>una</td><td>un</td><td>o</td></tr></table>

**Source:** Loyo (2022)

However, in the Croissant variety of Saint-Pierre-Le-Bost there is a lexical distinction between the numeral (acting as a cardinal number, adjectivally or as a substantive) and the indefinite article. As a numeral, ŪNU surfaces as *yin* [jě] and ŪNA as *yune* [jyn]. As articles the same etyma give *un* [ō(n)] and *inne* [ēn] respectively (see **Table 2**). Spellings from SPLB were construed by the native consultant (Dubac & Quint 2021), the geminate <nn> in the spelling indicates that final /n/ is always pronounced. The final <e> signals the diasystemic connection with French <une>.<fnref n="3" />

<table><caption>**Table 2.** The evolution of ŪNU, ŪNA in Gallo-Romance</caption><thead><tr><th>etymon</th><th>numeral</th><th colspan="2">quantifier/article</th></tr><tr><th></th><th></th><th>/__C</th><th>/__V</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="4">ŪNU</td><td>Occ. (languedocian)</td><td>un [ŷn]</td><td>un [ŷn]</td><td>un [ŷn]</td></tr><tr><td>Fr.</td><td>un [ō]</td><td>un [ō]</td><td>un [ōn]</td></tr><tr><td>Croissant (SPLB)</td><td>yin [jě]</td><td>on [ɔ̃]</td><td>unn' [ōn]</td></tr><tr><td>Frpr. (Savoie)</td><td>- [jō]</td><td>on [ɔ̃]</td><td>on [ɔ̃]</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">ŪNA</td><td>Occ. (languedocian)</td><td>una [yno]</td><td>una ['yno]</td><td>una [yn]</td></tr><tr><td>Fr.</td><td>une [yn]</td><td>une [yn]</td><td>une [yn]</td></tr><tr><td>Croissant (SPLB)</td><td>yune [jyn]</td><td>inne [ēn]</td><td>inne [ēn]</td></tr><tr><td>Frpr. (Savoie, pnt. 956)</td><td>- ['je:ne]</td><td>on [ne]</td><td>on [ɔ̃ne]</td></tr></tbody></table>

**Source:** The cardinal number 1, ALF n. 1347 ‘un, une’

Some of the earliest mentions of distinct numerals and indefinite articles are found in the dialectal descriptions of: Auvergne (Ambert) by Michalias (1907), the Creuse (Chavanat) by Queyrat (1927), and Gartemps by Quint (1996). More recently Monnet-Quelet (2017) has pointed out the presence of *yod* in the numeral, not only in the Croissant, but also in Western Oïl varieties such as Guernsey Norman (de Garis 1982) and in Franco-Provençal as far east as the Aosta Valley (Stich 1998: 86–88).

In fact, a look at the *Atlas Linguistique de la France* (ALF, map n. 1347 *un – une*) shows the existence of *yod* initial forms in a nearly unbroken band, running from Savoie in the East to Vendée in the West, demonstrating that initial vowel fortition touches Gallo-Romance more broadly, despite being absent from Standard French. As shown in **table 2**, SPLB patterns with Franco-Provençal in regards to the dual

<footnote n="3">³ Despite the presence of a final vowel in the graphic form, etymologically reminiscent of its origin in ŪNA, *inne* is realized in the data as monosyllabic [ě]: <jusqu’au moument d’inne [dě] pane dé l’désert> ‘until a breakdown in the desert’ (Dubac & Quint 2020: 11); <inne [ēn] réparacion complicade> ‘a complicated repair’ (Dubac & Quint 2020: 11), etc.</footnote>
treatment of Latin ŪNU and ŪNA, most significantly with the presence of an excrescent [j] in non-cliticised reflexes. Note that a portion of the Puy-de-Dôme department shows excrescent [v] or [vw] which, though related, will not be treated here.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Fortition of initial *y* (based on the cardinal numbers, ALF n° 1347 ‘un, une’)</figcaption></figure>

Having established this difference in function and form between the tonic numeral and the article, and having signalled that this division is not only a property of SPLB patois, but exists more broadly in a number of understudied minority Gallo-Romance languages, we now turn to the relevant data from Saint-Pierre-le-Bost.

### 3.1. ŪNU and ŪNA in SPLB patois

Beginning with the article, like in Standard French, there is phono-syntactic variation of the article depending on whether the article is followed by a consonant or by a vowel within the Noun Phrase. In standard French ‘a man’ *un homme* [œnɔm] is realised with a linking /n/ because *homme* /ɔm/ begins with a vowel, while ‘a snake’ *un serpent* is realised [œ sɛkpã] without the linking nasal since *serpent* begins with a consonant.
Going back to at least Encrevé (1988), these final consonants have been described as “floating”, being realised when the appropriate phonological conditions are met. In Standard French, the feminine article is always realised /yn/, with the final nasal consonant, regardless of the shape of the following word, thus pre-vocalic *une amie* [yn ami] and pre-consonantal *une sorcière* [yn sɔ̃ksjɛ̃k].

In SPLB patois, as in Standard French, the article has retained an underlying nasal which is stable in the feminine and floating in the masculine. Thus, one finds the Latin Noun Phrase ŪNUM HOMINEM ‘one man’ (i.e. ‘an individual man’) result in SPLB patois *un oume* [ç̃en um] ‘a man’, with the linking /n/, while in pre-consonantal position no linking /n/ is found, e.g. Latin ŪNUM SERPENTEM ‘one snake’ giving SPLB patois *un sèrpent* [ɔ̃sɛ̃rpã] ‘a snake’. Like in Standard French and Occitan, the nasal of the feminine <inne> is stable, for example, the Latin noun phrase ŪNA BESTIA ‘one beast’ gives SPLB patois *inne bète* [ɛ̃n bɛ́t] ‘a beast’ and *UNA ARMĀTŪRA results in *inne armure* [ɛ̃n aukmyr] ‘an armour’. It is important to highlight that while the masculine article has preserved a front round vowel /œ/, the feminine article of SPLB patois now contains the front vowel /ɛ̃/.

As mentioned in section 2, SPLB patois is characterised by a distinct evolution of the numerals ŪNU and ŪNA, which when stressed (i.e., not cliticised) have developed an initial /j/ as seen below in (1).

(1) SPLB patois -Croissant (Dubac & Quint 2021)

### UNA

a. *Tape* tâs *mins yune* su l'aute (p. 43)
   [tap ta mɛ̃ jyn sy l-ot]
   clap-IMP your hands one on the other
   'clap your hands together'

b. ô *découvri yune* de yuzautes (p. 18)
   [o decuvri jyn də jyzot]
   he discovers one of them
   'he discovers one of them'

### ŪNU

c. *qu'y' enn' a yin* (p. 66)
   [k j =ãn a jɛ̃]
   that. to.it there has one
   'that there is one'

d. *Y' enn' a qu' yin* (p. 41)
   [j =ãn a k jɛ̃]
   to.it there has but one
   'there is but one'

e. *n' aurans* b'zoin *yin* d'l'aute (p. 68)
   [n orã bzwɛ̃ jɛ̃ d l ot]
   we have.3.PL.COND need one of the other
   'we would need one another'

Though SPLB patois, like modern French, shows frequent word-boundary external sandhi effects (*liaison*), there is no obvious morpho-syntactic origin for initial /j/. Example (1d) [kjɛ̃] demonstrates that the [j] of *yin* [jɛ̃] also appears after a consonant
in onset, so hiatus resolution cannot easily be employed to explain the presence of [j]. What unites the examples in (1) is the ability of these words to carry a lexical accent, i.e., they bear word stress.<fnref n="4" />

Thus, to recapitulate, the MASC.SG. article ŪNU → *un* alternates between [œn] before a vowel and [œ] before a consonant, while the FEM.SG article ŪNA is always realised *inne* [ñen]. On the other hand, the cardinal numbers ŪNU and ŪNA when used as nouns result in *yin* [jê] and *yune* [jyn] respectively (with some phonetic variants). These conditions are summarised for the masculine in (2) below.

(2) Distribution of masculine numeral and masculine indefinite articles in SPLB patois, as attested in Dubac & Quint (2021)

a. indefinite article + V: [œn εlɛfã] ‘an elephant’

b. indefinite article + C: [œ sɛvpa] ‘a snake’

c. numeral: [jɛ a jɛ] ‘one by one’

### 3. Formal Analysis

In this paper we employ autosegmental representations (Goldsmith 1979; Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud 1990, etc.) to formalize the reconfiguration of pre-existing elements, called auto-segments, along different tiers of organisation. The particular model adopted here is that of Strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996; Scheer 2004; Scheer & Ségéral 2008) in which a structural timing tier of alternating C(onsonants) and V(owels) is juxtaposed to a Melodic Tier, composed of elements, the subsegmental building blocks of phonological representation.

Element Theory proposes that linguistic melody is composed of acoustic primitives called elements which may exist in isolation, such that the |I| element present in coronal and palatal consonants can be pronounced [ɪ] when associated to a V position, |U| associated with labials and labiovelars can be pronounced [ʊ] when associated to a V position, while |A| present in laryngeals can be pronounced [e] when associated to a V position (Backley 2011). Elements can be combined: |I+A| to represent /ɛ/, /ɪ+A/ to represent /ɔ/ and can be doubled (or underlined) to indicate “headedness” or a greater contribution of that element to the representation: for example, headed |I| and |U| to represent the [+ATR] vowels /e/ and /o/ respectively. Here, following Backley & Nasukawa (2009), we employ non-headed |N| to indicate nasality.

Because our analysis demonstrates transitions between stages of representation, each lexical stage of an etymon’s evolution shows three kinds of association between melody and structure. Stable relations are indicated by a solid line, productive variability may be indicated by a dotted line while active phonological

<footnote n="4">⁴ Knowing that [k] is the relative pronoun meaning ‘which’ in (1d) and goes back to QUAM or QUEM (this neutralisation is claimed to have occurred in Vulgar Latin before the 4th century, cf. FEW 2:1465a), <qu’> in these examples is the equivalent of French comparative *que* /kɔ/. One could argue that there is an underlying vowel to condition the epenthesis of a linking /j/ but other examples such as *ale ajustève yin à yin* (Dubac & Quint 2021, p. 31) [al aʒystɛv jɛ a jɛ] ‘she adjusted them one by one’ also confirm that synchronically the tonic /jɛ/ form can appear after a consonant.</footnote>
phenomena are signalled by an arrow. When melody is given a structural position by association, it is realised, whereas an associated melody is left unrealised. Greyed-out melody or structure indicates its elimination from the synchronic representation. There are likewise two types of lateral relations which a filled Vowel position may impose upon another Vowel position immediately to its left: government which allows a filled Vowel to suppress the realisation of that which it governs, and licensing which enables the fuller expression of a licensed position. Each stage of the diachronic evolution can be conceived as the lexical representation of a given generation and the association between melody and structure may therefore evolve between generations.

### 3.1. The evolution of stressed ŪNU ~ ŪNA

As demonstrated in section 2, the source of Gallo-Romance, /y/ is the Latin stressed vowel Ū. This vowel, though long through inheritance, became phonologically short in Romance, except under stress. As Ségéral and Scheer (2015) have argued the Romance word accent became one of length under stress, hence the attribution of two V-slots to all stressed vowels.

The high front rounded vowel /y/ can be characterised by the element |I| by which it is headed and by dependent |U|. In examples 3a-b and 4a-b we can see that the initial Ū vowel of ŪNU and ŪNA began its life in Gallo-Romance as a stressed (read long) high front rounded vowel, /y/, composed of |IU| (3a-①, 3b-①).

In the evolution of feminine ŪNA under lexical stress, the first stage is characterised by the stability of all Melody-to-Structure associations (3a-①). In stage two (②), there is fortition of the initial vowel segment as headed |I| of V₁ branches into the empty C-position to its left, causing the production of yod in the onset.

In classical autosegmental terms, the spread of |I| into the leftward C can be understood as an extension of V₁'s ability to licence C₁ (Scheer 2004). In stage two there is the partial dissociation of the final unstressed vowel under V₃ which may or may not associate to a structural position in use (see later discussion in section 4.3). This detail is peripheral to the current analysis and by stage three (③) the final weak vowel under V₃ is nothing more than an alternating empty nucleus.<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="5">⁵ Here the neutral vowel |@| may stand in for a root-note unspecified for |I|, |U| or |A|.</footnote>
(3) a. Evolution of numeral ŪNA

①

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

[y: n]

②

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

[jõ: n(ev)]

③

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

[jy:n]

b. Evolution of numeral ŪNU

①

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

[y:n(o)]

②

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

[jõ:]

③

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

[jɛ̃:]

The evolution of masculine ŪNU (3b) is likewise characterised by relative stability in stage one ①. However, whereas the final “feminine” signalling /a/ vowel of ŪNA remained stable in the Gallo-Romance and Old French periods, the same cannot be said of the masculine marking final unstressed back-vowel /o/, which long before stage two ② was reached, had disappeared from the phonological representation.<fnref n="6" /> As can be seen in 3b-②, the loss of the final vowel entailed the loss of the CV position to which it had been attached. The nasal /n/, |NI| still present in the feminine, lost its anchoring position in the masculine and survived as a floating nasal |N|, being realised solely as nasalisation on the preceding vowel (V₁–V₂).

Pierret (1994: 205) writes that “once a vowel is nasalised, it tends to open” and this has been expressed by the introduction of excrescent [A] into the melody of the pre-nasal vowel in 3a-② and 3b②. At this point the opening of the vowel is a subphonemic effect carried into the surface output by the association of the nasal |N| with that vowel. Note that the same fortition of the initial CV sequence /ɣ/ → /jγ/ can be seen here in the masculine (3b-②) as was observed in the feminine (3a-②). The final step in the evolution of stressed ŪNU is the phonologisation of a new nasal vowel /ɛ/. This is achieved in stage three ③, on the one hand by the stable anchoring of the previously floating nasal element |N| along with the accompanying [A], both phonologised under V₁–V₂.

The introduction of the |A| element into the phonological representation may better be accounted for by the addition of extra phonological structure into which |N|

<footnote n="6">⁶ Here we have spared the reader some details on vowel reduction in the final unstressed syllable, but see Zuk (2022b) for a comprehensive treatment.</footnote>
could settle. In a model like GP 2.0 (Pöchtrager 2006, 2021) the |A| element is replaced by cumulative layers of vertical space, wherein each layer beyond the first (signalled by <'>) allows for the existence of additional head/dependent combinations. This is represented in Figure 2 below where the three front vowels /i/, /e/ and /o/ are characterised by the palatal element |I|, but vary in the number of empty terminals which equate with vowel aperture.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: A representation of vowel aperture and complexity in GP 2.0.</figcaption></figure>

It appears that the integration of nasality into the phonological representation, had as a consequence the addition of vertical “phonological space” and therefore the opening of the nasalised vowel. In other words, what began as passive phonetic nasalisation caused the opening of the target vowel in order for |N| to integrate the phonological representation.

What is clear from the data is that by the time stage three ♂ was attained, |I| under V₁ had lost its headedness (preserved only in the *yod* under the leftward C₁-position. Furthermore, |U| was lost from the phonemic representation in the tonic form of the masculine. At a glance, it appears that the language’s phonotactics could not allow for a single vowel containing headed |I| in addition to unheaded |U|, |A| and |N|. This may be explained as a cross linguistic pressure against combining headed |I| or |U| with |N|; these vowels are, after all, the most resilient to nasalisation (Pierret 1994: 224). We can therefore assume that well formedness was achieved through the loss of |U| and the un-heading of |I| resulting in /jɛ̃/ ‘one’.

## 3.2. The evolution of unstressed ŪNU and ŪNA

In section 4, we will discuss the grammaticalisation of ŪNU and ŪNA, but it suffices to say that these indefinite articles began their lives in Late Latin formally identical to the numeral, and this has remained the case in numerous Romance languages (Loyo 2022). Thus, is stage one (4a-① and 4b-①), which we may call Proto-Gallo-Romance, the articles-to-be are formally identical to the numerals presented in 3a-① and 3b-①. The changes witnessed in stage two and three however are slightly more complicated. In section 3.1 we argued that the fortition of the initial vowel, /V̄/ → /jV̄/ was in fact the spontaneous spreading of headed |I| out of V₁ position when bearing word stress. Therefore, to maintain this scenario is to argue that, for the evolution of the articles, stage two (4a-② and 4b-②), in fact represents the grammaticalisation
and procliticisation of ŪNU and ŪNA to a following NP, thereby causing loss of lexical stress.

The loss of lexical stress has been indicated both in the feminine under 4a-(2) and the masculine under 4b-(2) by the deletion of -C₂V₂- which had thus far provided length through lexical stress. As in the tonic form, the final /o/ vowel of the masculine, had been deleted early in the language's history. In the feminine, in contrast (4a-(2)), final /a/ was beginning to alternate with Ø (see section 4.3). In this stage, passive nasalisation is likewise introduced by the nasal |N| under C₃, causing the opening of the vowel just as in the stressed numeral. Phonemic nasality is achieved in 4a-(3) and 4b-(3), accompanied by the simplification of the remaining floating unstressed vowel |A| → |@| in the feminine. The change from a low back vowel to a neutral schwa vowel through despecification is typical of vowel reduction (Harris 2005; Zuk 2022b). Here there is a major difference with the non-clitic ŪNA, notably that while the final vowel of stressed ŪNA could foreseeably survive as schwa for some time, the prosodic context of proclitic ŪNA resulted in the early erasure of the final vowel under the control of V₁ of the following word, depending on whether said word was consonant or vowel initial.<fnref n="7" />

(4) a. Evolution of cliticised ŪNA

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

b. Evolution of cliticised ŪNU

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="7">⁷ So far as SBLB patois shares a similar evolution with other Croissant varieties, the exact condition regulating the dissociation of final |A| in stage two must have varied between speech varieties. For example, in Cressat, 37 km South-West of SPLB, ŪNA has evolved into /na/ with apheresis of /y/ as in ŪNA VICE → [na 'vɛ:] (Gilliéron & Edmont 1902, ALF n. 590, pnt 602). However, at Lavaufranche, a mere 11 km or less than a 3 hour walk from SPLB we find [ɛ̃n fwɛ] (ALF n. 590, pnt. 601) with the same article as in SPLB, demonstrating local coherence.</footnote>
Thus, in the proclitic form of ŪNA, the nasal |N| and its accompanying [A] entered the
melody of V₁. Most significantly the eventual loss of the final vowel in recent times
did not entail the loss of the final CV unit. However, as in the tonic masculine form
ŪNU → /jɛ̈/, here in the cliticised feminine, the over-complexification of V₁ through
the integration of |N| and |A| caused the expulsion of inherited |U| from the
representation and the ceasing of |I|'s headedness, resulting in the feminine indefinite
article /ɛ̈n/ ‘one’.

In the masculine, the loss of the final vowel in phase ② and the ensuing
destruction of the final CV position caused the |N| to float. This is the status it has
carried into Modern French and visibly into the Saint-Pierre-le Bost patois. Though
the nasal and the accompanying [A] have made their way into the phonological
representation in ③ and |I| has ceased to be headed, significantly the labial element
|U| has not been expunged from the melody of V₁. Therefore, because |U| has been lost
from the stressed vowel of the numeral, ŪNU → yin [jɛ̈], the survival of the round vowel
[œ̈] in its cliticised form requires explanation.

Significantly, when ‘one’ is pronounced in isolation, it is tonic, pronounced
[jɛ̈] and represents its own phonological domain. However, when used as a genuine
proclitic, the article is always followed by a noun or adjective as part of a Noun Phrase
as demonstrated in the examples in (5a–b).

(5) Examples of the indefinite article in SPLB patois (Dubac & Quint 2021)

a. ô l'arpreséntève pâ **un** chapàu (p. 10)
   [o laɛprəzãtɛv pa ɔ̈e ſapɔ]
   it represent.IPFV.3S NEG a hat
   'it did not represent a hat'

b. chouèsir **unn」** aute métié (p. 10)
   [ʃwɛziɛk ɔ̈en ot metje]
   choose.INF. an other profession
   'to choose another profession'

c. coume **inne chôse** bin sérieuse (p.12)
   [kum ɛ̈n ſoz bɛ̈ serjøz]
   like.ADV a thing well serious
   ‘like something very serious’

Formally, the masculine article, realised [œ̈] before a consonant as in (6a) *un chapàu*
'a hat' or [œ̈n] before a vowel as in (6b) *unn'aute* 'another' is in a licensee relationship
with the first vowel of the following word. In 6a and 6b, the etymological -CV-
structure where masculine /o/ was once anchored has long since disappeared from the
representation and has been greyed-out for representational purposes. It is our proposal
that licensing by V₁ of the controlling stem allows the underlying |U| of /œ̈/ to be
reinforced and realised. On the other hand, licensing is impossible in the feminine *inne
chose* (6c) because in the feminine ŪNA an additional inherited -CV- structure
continues to interpose itself in the representation, due to the fact that /n/ has remained
anchored to its original C-position. Because licensing cannot bridge over the empty V-
slot, the vowel of the feminine article is not reinforced by the licensing which would
allow the expression of inherited |U|.

(6)

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>un chapeau</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>unn'aute</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>inne chose</figcaption></figure>

3.2.1 *A note on variation*

In listening to the live recordings of SPLB (Faust & Dubac *in prep*), there seemed to
be some variation in the exact pronunciation of the sixty-some year-old informant's
/ɔ̃/ vowel, which to our ears sometimes trended in the direction of [ɛ̃]. Because the
Middle French phonemes /ɔ̃/ of *brun* 'brown' and /ɛ̃/ of *brin* 'a strand' are generally
merged in the speech of many Hexagonal French speakers, this partial neutralisation
may be French influence at play.<fnref n="8" /> On the other hand, we have seen that the preservation
of [ɔ̃] ~ [ɔ̄] is overall rare in SPLB patois and even where it was present in the tonic
feminine numeral, e.g. 3b-②, it has since been unrounded resulting in /ɛ̃/. It is thus
likely that SPLB patois shows a transitionary system between the preservation of
inherited vowel contrasts and a strong pressure to simplify these highly complex
vocalic melodies, notably by unrounding as has happened among many speakers of

<footnote n="8">⁸ Fónagy (1989) is among the early authors to recognize these changes in the system of phonemic nasals, though continued research has suggested that the change is not yet complete, even within the French of Parisian speakers (cf. Berit Hansen 2002).</footnote>
Hexagonal French. Unfortunately, further sociolinguistic research on the community is lacking and the speech variety is highly endangered.

## 4. Diachrony

Until a more thorough study of the linguistic history of the Croissant has been attempted, we will abstain from suggesting absolute dates within the Croissant for the phases and phonological processes presented in this paper. The analysis presented here is dependent however, on the interaction of three phonological processes which are found more broadly in the Gallo-Romance family: the fronting of the high back vowel Ŭ → /y/, the assimilation of vowels to a following nasal, and finally apocope. It is to these processes which we now turn.

### 4.1. Fronting of the velar Ŭ

While the fronting of Latin Ŭ → [y:] is hard to date, because the inherited Latin velar Ŭ and the later Gallo-Romance palatal [y] were both written with <u>, the change was already accomplished by the time of Old French. Therefore, the fronting of velar Ŭ is dated to the earlier Gallo-Romance period. De la Chaussée (1982: 196–197) places the emergence of /y/ at the end of the 7th or early 8th century while Fouché (1958: 207) provides a slightly later date: the later 8th or even 9th century. Bec (1986) on the other hand, though recognising the presence of /y/ over the whole of the Gallo-Romance space today, has argued that the fronting of Ŭ → /y/ may occurred later in Occitan, especially in Aquitania when compared to the North. One argument in favour of this position is the preservation of /u/ ← Ŭ in the closely related Catalan language.

### 4.2. Nasalisation of /y/

Ségéral & Scheer (2020, §17.8), following a long tradition of historical phonology place the nasalisation of /y/ → [ỹ] in the 13th century and the lowering of [ỹ] → [ɔ̃] a century later. The phonetic, allophonic or phonological status of this nasalisation is rarely made explicit, but the later French forms wherein phonological nasalisation has only occurred when the nasal source |N| was word final suggest that the passive nasalisation of the 13th and 14th century became phonological when the final /n/ in such words as *un* ‘one’, *brun* ‘brown’ and *commun* ‘common’ became floating (3b-② and 4b-②).

Here, the loss of coda /n/ has been analysed as the loss of its C-slot, and the development of a floating |N| in the masculine singular from the 9th century onward, especially in the North of Gaul. The timeline for other regions is still up for debate, and is dependent on the date of vowel apocope in those regions (cf. Zuk 2022b). In feminine forms such as *une*, *brune* and *commune*, the stable association between the nasal |N| and consonant position meant that any passive nasalisation was correctly mapped as spreading from the phonological /n/ in C position.

One consequence of passive nasalisation was the lowering of high nasalised vowels (see *supra*); thus, the lowering of the vowel could be perceived as a concomitant allophonic effect of nasalisation. However once nasalisation became phonologised through the loss of the conditioning coda nasal, the surface openness of
nasalised vowels was reanalysed as inherent openness of the vowel (Pierret 1994: 205). Thereby, in Standard French as in SPLB patois, nasalised /ỹ/ lowered to [ɔ̃] and was phonologised as /ɔ̃/ in masculine forms containing a floating final |N|l. In Standard French however, the associated /n/ of /ynə/ allowed passive nasalisation and accompanying vowel opening to be identified as just that: passive phonetic assimilation. The underlying form remained phonological /y/, i.e., |I|U|l until passive nasalisation had ceased, resulting in the Standard French form *une /yn/ both as a numeral and in the article.

In SPLB patois there occurred a critical bifurcation between the numeral *yune /jyn/ where /y/ was maintained, and the article *inne /ɛ̃n/ where nasality entered the phonological representation and rounding |U|l was lost. Though this passive nasalisation had originally also affected the open syllable of *[ɔ̃:na] ← ŪNA (3a-② and 4a-②), this passive nasalisation had ceased by the 16th century.

### 4.3. Apocope and Rule interaction

According to Ségéral & Scheer (2020), and following Rickard (1989: 63) the weakening of final schwa from Latin /a/, was a gradual process, first in hiatus contexts and attaining post-consonantal contexts by the end of the 16th century “when it had become so weak as to lose its syllabic value”, disappearing entirely by the 17th century. Thus, one explanation for the phonologisation of nasalisation in the feminine indefinite article *inne /ɛ̃n/ vs the lack of nasalisation in the feminine numeral *yune /jyn/ would be the early loss of the final vowel, [e] or [ə] in the article.

What we find is the seeming interaction of two rules. In (7), Rule 1 is contingent on the presence of a post-nasal vowel, while Rule 2, if it were to apply first, would bleed Rule 1 of its operating environment. Pierret (1994: 224) places both the denasalisation of vowels followed by a NV sequence (Rule 1), and the beginning of the loss of final /ə/ (Rule 2) in the 16th century.

(7) Two sound rules of later Middle French

$$ \text{Rule 1. } [\tilde{V}NV] \rightarrow [VNV] $$

$$ \text{Rule 2. } \ə\# \rightarrow \emptyset $$

It thus seems, that the results which we have accounted for in SPLB patois are the result of a delicate interplay between two competing phenomena, which as Croissant and other Gallo-Romance varieties demonstrate, has given varying results in the local minority varieties.

Morin (2003) and others have shown that sound-change cannot be treated adequately without a notion of internal variation and equipped with Labovian-type notions of change-in-progress, Scheer (2021) argues that “rule crossing is absolutely massive in French diachrony”. This appears even more to be the case when minority varieties are taken into account. In our best attempt to provide a straightforward account of the numerals and indefinite articles, the data suggest the following order of developments in SPLB:
$$ (8) \quad \begin{array}{rcl} \bar{U} & \rightarrow & [jy:no] \rightarrow [jÿ:n] \rightarrow [jœn] \rightarrow [jɛ̃n] \rightarrow /jɛ̃/ \\ & & \rightarrow [y:no] \rightarrow [ÿ:n] \rightarrow [œ:n] \rightarrow /œ/ \\ & & \rightarrow [y:no] \rightarrow [ÿ:n] \rightarrow [œ:n] \rightarrow /œn/ \end{array} \quad \begin{array}{c} / \text{tonic} \\ \text{C} \\ \text{V} \end{array} $$

From the intermediate stage of [jœn] in (8) above, the loss of |I| in V₁ led to the attested Franco-Provençal (Table 2, Savoie) form [jɔ̃], while the loss of |U| led instead to the attested SPLB form [jɛ̃].

$$ (9) \quad \begin{array}{rcl} \bar{U} & \rightarrow & [y:na] \rightarrow [y:nɛ] \rightarrow [jynɛ] \rightarrow [jyn] \rightarrow / \text{tonic} \\ & & \rightarrow [y:na] \rightarrow [ÿ:na] \rightarrow [œnɛ] \rightarrow [ɛ̃nɛ] \rightarrow [ɛ̃n] \end{array} $$

In the feminine, the final vowel was very resilient, inhibiting the phonologisation of a
nasalised vowel; this can be seen in the SPLB numeral [jyn] or the Franco-Provençal
(Table 2, Savoie) [je:nɛ]. The presence of the post-tonic nasal has inhibited
phonological nasalisation of the stressed vowel (see Rule 1). However, in the article
the seemingly more advanced dissociation of the final vowel, has allowed passive
nasalisation to integrate V₁. The inability of licensing to affect V₁ in the cliticised
feminine, has resulted in simplification to a nasalised front vowel [ɛ̃] in SPLB patois
[ɛ̃n] ‘an’ and in a round back vowel [ɔ̃] in Franco-Provençal (Savoie) [ɔ̃nɛ] ‘an’.

4.4. Grammaticalisation

An issue which we have fully yet to address is the grammaticalisation of the numeral
adjectives ŪNU and ŪNA into the well-known Romance indefinite articles. While the
definite articles, Fr. *le* (ofr. *li*), *la*, *les* were already well established in Old French,
already present in the Eulalia Sequence of the 9th century, and began their
grammaticalisation in Late Latin, the occurrence of the indefinite article is seldom in
Old French, suggesting it was still in an early stage of grammaticalisation.<fnref n="9" /> Though
the widespread grammaticalisation of ŪNU and ŪNA into articles as seen in **Table 1,**
would suggest a common development in Late Latin and Proto-Romance, actual
observation of their use suggests a much later date, long after the separation of the
Romance languages. Rather it is the shared inheritance of ŪNU and ŪNA and of Proto-
Romance syntactic structures that allowed the numerals to be grammaticalised as
articles, separately within each language family.<fnref n="10" /> Because the numerals ŪNU and ŪNA

<footnote n="9">⁹ Carlier et al. (2020, §39.1.1.3) in the GGHF provide a description of the introduction of ŪNU and ŪNA along a scale of individuation, first appearing to signal unique individuals, then developing pragmatic and discursive functions typical of an article. They claim that, in Old French of the 13th century, *un* and *une* were still felt as numerals and are regularly translated as ‘*only, unique, single*’, etc. The semantic bleaching of numeral ‘one’ can be detected by author’s contextualisation of the numeral, for example in <ung seul anemy> (Bersuire 1486) ‘one single enemy’, beginning in Middle French and complete by the 16th century which is when stage ③ of our derivations has been achieved.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Zink (1989: 70) argues that tools for the eventual article formation of *le* ← *ILLE* and *un* ← *ŪNUM* can be traced back to Terence (2nd c. BC), with an early indefinite use in a vulgate passage from Matthew (26.69) *Accessit ad eum una ancilla* ‘a servant girl approached him’.</footnote>
have so widely developed into indefinite articles across the Romance languages, it is
likely that NUMERAL + NOUN constructions reach far back and were in use before their
semantic bleaching and reuse as indefinite articles.

This late dating of the grammaticalisation of ŪNU and ŪNA is in fact supported
by the phonology, since as demonstrated in section 4.3. slight modification to the
application of regular sound-change processes led to different results across Romance
and more specifically Gallo-Romance varieties. In any case, the change from
autonomous numerals to specifiers of nouns, undergoing cliticisation and phonological
reduction is well supported by the variation which we have exposed here.

5. Conclusions

In the introduction to this paper, we signalled the unique role which minority
languages play in understanding the evolution of languages. If one were to only look
at the major national Romance languages, an entire set of fortition and lenition
phenomena would be left out of the diachronic record.

We have made the case that the evolution of the common Gallo-Romance
numerals */'yno/ and */'yna/ from their Latin ancestors ŪNU and ŪNA to their forms in
SPLB patois were the result of fortition under stress and that this fortition process was
only possible by the presence of palatal /y/ in the stressed syllable. By extension, other
Gallo-Romance varieties which demonstrate this fortition, e.g., Franco-Provençal yon
'one' likely possessed the palatal /y/ phoneme and underwent a similar evolution when
subjected to stress conditions.

We have also argued that it is the syntactic and phonological procliticisation of
these numerals which provided the phonological context for the further reduction of
inherited forms to the masculine indefinite singular article *un /ðe(n)/ and the feminine
indefinite singular article *inne /ɛn/ in the SPLB patois. We do not have evidence that
the cliticised articles show or ever showed *yod* fortition, a consideration which has
contributed to a relatively late dating of the fortition process.

Finally, through the case study of the dual evolution of Latin ŪNU and ŪNA into
the patois of SPLB, we have demonstrated that autosegmental models such as CV
phonology are able to capture language change as a series of synchronic snapshots. At
each subsequent stage, the richness of lexical representation allows for the mapping of
phonological phenomena, while parameterised implementation at the level of the
individual grammar allows us to grasp phonological change between generations. This
endeavour will, we believe, lead to a more thorough understanding of dialectalisation
and changes in lexical representation across generations.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go out to Noam Faust for first introducing me to the patois of SPLB. I
would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers of this article and especially this
volume's editors whose remarks and considerations allowed me to significantly
improve upon the original structure and relevance of this article. Finally, a thank you
to my colleague Clayton Marr for looking the manuscript over. All remaining errors
are my own.
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