Abstract
It is admitted that the origin of the height of the radical vowel of Galician and Portuguese sigo~siga and cubro~cubra is problematic: the expected vowel in that context, through a regular phonological evolution, should be mid-high, not high. Given that Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish, share the unexpected height of the radical vowel, and that it seems the high vowel first appeared and was consolidated in the central dialects of the Peninsula, I will propose that forms like sigo and cubro were originated in those central dialects and were taken and spread into the occidental dialects by a language contact situation. As the contact was more prolonged and intense in Galicia than in Portugal, Galician promoted variants like pido~pides~pide~pida, shared with Spanish, diverging in this respect from Portuguese, which blocked their spreading.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
