During my commute to work this morning, I remembered the classic case of assimilation in Romance: Engish
pilgrim from Old French
peligrin from Late Latin
pelegrinus from Latin
peregrinus 'foreigner' (cf Italian
pelegrino). Here the two
rs are in different syllables. Another example of anticipatory assimilation is umlaut in Germanic languages (e.g.,
man ~
men,
foot ~
feet :- the umlaut is because the low or mid vowel is assimilating to the high front vowel which then disappeared in the final syllable (i.e., the plural ending). Umlaut also appears in other languages, e.g., Ligurian Italian dialects,
man ~
moen 'hand(s)',
can ~
chen 'dog(s).
[Added following text.]
I found a nice
lecture on language change at the UPenn linguistics website. Mark Liberman of Language Log is teaching the class.
