This book presents for the first time an in-depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non-etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French esperer (to hope). Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide-ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and explores in detail their historical trajectory and the relationship between them. The presentation draws freely throughout on the rich philological materials available from Romance and brings to light various unexpected changes in the productive use of prosthesis through time. For example in French and Italian (which is Tuscan-based), one category of prosthesis became well established in the early Middle Ages only to lose productivity and subsequently become moribund. With its extensive use of empirical data and findings from theoretical linguistics, the book offers a thorough and revealing account of a fascinating chapter in the phonological history of Romance."

This book provides a complete, comparative, nongallocentric account of nasality in all the Romance languages. It demonstrates the central role of nasality in the history of sound changes in the languages of southern Europe. In doing so, it assembles a large amount of important philological and linguistic data previously dispersed and difficult to access, and organizes it in a way that allows the author (and will allow the reader) to analyse it systematically. Two introductory chapters discuss general principles of nasality and Romance nasalization. Subsequent chapters are then devoted to each language. The author considers all the standard varieties and a substantial range of non-standard varieties, and identifies broad characteristics of vowel nasalization in Romance. In the the final chapter he makes a clear bridge between the data-rich discussion of individual languages and the isolation of language universals. This is will be the standard work in its field for many years. It will be of central interest to linguists and philologists of Romance, as well as to those concerned more generally to understand the causes, patterns, and processes of sound change.