Revisiting the history of Tuscan consonants: the type stùpito ‘stupid’ (< stupĭdu(m))

This article fills a gap in the existing descriptions of Italo-Romance diachronic phonology. It does so by offering a geographical and historical account of the emergence of voiceless stops replacing etymological voiced stops in the final syllable of proparoxytones, as in the widespread Tuscan variant stupito ‘stupid’. Within a broadly-defined Labovian framework, this development is discussed according to two main options: as due to finely-conditioned articulatory processes, typical of the initial stages of regular sound change, or as a case of lexically sporadic, substitutive change. The second option is tentatively favoured, also on the basis of the possible links to another change – the much debated, irregular voicing of intervocalic /p/, /t/ and /k/.