Summary

Major dialect-dependent differences in articulatory fronting and strengthening for the front lingual affricate and fricative outcomes of Latin sequences composed of /t, d, k, g/ and a following front vocalic segment in the Romance languages may be accounted for assuming that those outcomes were issued from (alveolo)palatal or palatalized stop realizations exhibiting variable closure fronting degrees. The place and manner of articulation characteristics of the front lingual affricate and fricative outcomes in question depend on several aspects about the Latin stop sequences: stop closure location and voicing status, whether the vocalic segment was a vowel or a glide, and word position. While differences in fronting and strengthening associated with etymological stop voicing occur in both Eastern and Western Romance, those related to the other factors hold mostly in Western Romance and especially in Raetoromance. Several diachronic pathways are difficult to interpret; thus, in early times, [c] derived from Latin /ki,e/ and /kj/ may have been more anterior in Western Romance than in Eastern Romance, or else the initial outcome [tʃ] of the affrication process stayed palatoalveolar in the latter domain and fronted to [ts] in the former. Gestural blending accounts not only for the realizations [c, ɟ] of /t, d, k, g/ before a front vocalic segment but also for the alveolopalatal and palatoalveolar end products of the Latin sequences /kt/ ([c]), /nj/ ([ɲ]), /lj, kl/ ([ʎ]) and /sj, ks/ ([ʃ]).