248 The Loom of Language medial consonant has disappeaied lege-LOi (law), fide-poi (faith), videt-voix (sees}> credit CROIT (believes)* or patre-PERE (father), matre- MERE (mother), fratre-FRERE (brother), sorore-soEUR (sister) In other French words, as in the last four, an unaccented final E exists only on paper The last remark would be equally true about the majority of final consonants, e g, the silent T in voit or croit One result of this is a great gap (see p. 35) between the flexional system of the written and of the spoken language No other Romance language furnishes comparable examples of drastic shortening, e g EAU (pronounced o) from aqua (water), HAUT (pronounced 0) from alto (high), MI from media (half), (pronounced a-oc or oo) from augusto (August), ROND (pronounced LATIN ITALIAN SPANISH PORTUGUEbL FRENCH ENGLISH (a) cantare cantare cantar CHANTER sing claro chiaro claro CLAIR clear ala ala AILE wing (aisle) prato prato prado PR£ meadow sale sale sal SEL salt patre padre 1 pa* PERE father (£) seta seta seda SOIE silk me me MOI me velo velo veu VOILE veil tela tela TOILE cloth r$) from rotunda (round); S£R (pronounced syr) from securo (safe), H6TE (pronounced oat) from hospite (host) Thus the Latin ancestry of most French words, other than those which have been introduced by scholars in comparatively recent times, is far less apparent than that of their Italian or Spanish equivalents As a spoken language Spanish has moved furthei away from Latin than Italian has., but not so far as French Partly for this reason, but also because the spelling of Spanish words is highly regular, there is less to say about the sound-changes in relation to the appearance of the printed word For recognizing the similarity of English words of Latin origin to their Spanish equivalents, the important ones are few. Some have turned up in the preceding paragraphs The most mislead- ing one is still to come This is the disappearance of the initial /, re- placed in script by what is now silent H, cf hacienda, which comes from the Latin word facienda Some linguists attribute this to the influence of the Moorish occupation, and others to that of the pre-Aryan popula- tion now represented by the Basques, who have no/ sound The first of these suggestions is unlikely, because H at the beginning of a word crops up at a comparatively late stage in old documents The Spanish Jews who emigrated to Salonika about AD 1500 sail preserve the