Spanish as well as Portuguese and French have developed the word-inicial cluster sC-, from the formative period of vulgar Latin, and formed the prothetic vowel e-, while the other middle eastern brother languages, Italian and Rumanian, have almost mai...
Spanish as well as Portuguese and French have developed the word-inicial cluster sC-, from the formative period of vulgar Latin, and formed the prothetic vowel e-, while the other middle eastern brother languages, Italian and Rumanian, have almost maintained their primitive Latin form sC-. About this phenomenon some scholars have supposed some structural linguistic factors, assuming that the phonetic feature of the Spanish consonant 's' caused the formation of a preceding vowel to reduce and to accommodate its overloaded tension. But we remain still curious about why the other languages get unchanged their almost same feature and context. We hereby turn our concern into the outer factor, that is, the substratum-related influence. So it is assumed that Spanish, together with her neighbor languages, Portuguese and French, has inherited the usual habit of prothesis from Basque, which is also accustomed to the prothesis e-.