Changes in the vowel system and spatial representations from Latin to Romance languages: hypothesis of a spatial referent buccal space

Abstract

I comment on the disappearance of the Latin vowel quantity which is accompanied by arecapture of the length for the prosody in the Romance languages, and in Italian, for thediphthongs, geminates and affricates management. I establish a parallel between, on one hand,spatial distribution and aperture distribution of vowels, on the other hand, conceptions of theperson and its space. I present an hypothesis about the role of language in establishing spatialreferentials, in which spatial geometry of the oral cavity serves as the fundamental referential forkinesthetic memory, and the phonological system of the mother language is a model of theoperating of body’s set of internal models and physical laws.

Keywords

• vowels
• space conception
• Latin
• Italian
• French.