The thing is that it's hard to piece apart what's native and what's inherited. So far as I know, most Latin /kk/ was formed from the prefix ac- followed by a word stem beginning with c, and it was very rare within morphemes. Im sure there are some, but I couldnt find a single example offhand of a monomorphemic Latin word containing internal cc followed by a front vowel.Salmoneus wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 02:17Why would you 'expect' that?
Give examples of cases where Latin /kk/ becomes /s/. If the /ks/ examples are only reborrowings, it should be easy to find a horde of 'real' reflexes with /s/, or even doublets!
And in any case, as I say, Italian doesn't degeminate, it just assimilates: /kk/ > /ktS/ > /ttS/.
Spanish has words beginning with ac- and words beginning with acc- . I suspect the ones with acc- are reborrowings from Latin because the stems of those words are all what I'd expect from a reborrowing, but Spanish is fairly conservative and it could also be that none of those words would have changed in either case. The sample size for ac- followed by a front vowel is even smaller. So in essence, the sample size is too small in general for me to be sure either way, but that the singleton form ac- even exists leads me to believe that the reflex of /kk/ followed by a front vowel is simply /s/ and never /ks/.
[edit: searching on oc- vs occ- leads to the same situation .... no way to tell which, if any, of the words are loaned and which are inherited.]
Still, I phrased my post as a question because IM not sure. There might be words with /kke/ and /kki/ in Latin after all, and if at least some of those words have been inherited into Spanish and have evidence one way or the other of being native or reborrowed, that would help clear it up. Or maybe other languages can help. At least with French it's a lot clearer when a word is reborrowed because it stands out more from the rest.