Study of the rhotic consonants in Galician Portuguese Medieval cantigas

Abstract

The project aim to analyze Archaic Portuguese phonological phenomena, studying the rhotic consonants ( and ) in initial and syllable ending positions present in the Galician Portuguese medieval cantigas. Rhotic consonants were chosen as main subject because they constitute an interesting theme to compose a mosaic of the Archaic Portuguese Phonology, due to the fact that there are controversies about their phonological status at that time and today. We aim to check whether, in that historical period, there were two rhotic phonemes in opposition, or if in the phonological level could be considered a geminate variant of . Our results indicate the possibility of the existence of only one rhotic phoneme in Archaic Portuguese, which could have two variants, one simple and one geminate. By comparing the religious and secular Galician Portuguese medieval poems, we aim to check if our results for the religious cantigas, which point to the geminate character of intervocabular , also occur in relation to secular cantigas. (AU)