The Apocope of /s/ in Greco-Corsican

The Greek spoken in Corsica from 1676 to 1976 is characterized by a deletion of final /s/, which is reminiscent of the behavior of Greek in Southern Italy and recapitulates the development within Italian from Latin. Some observers have assumed that the Corsican phenomenon is the result of Romance influence on Greek, but several Greek dialects also feature apocope of /s/ without any influence from Romance. In this paper, Nicholas summarizes the existing accounts of /s/-apocope, and he investigates the coditioning of /s/-apocope in Maniot and Corsican in order to determine whether there are any differences between the two that may point to Romance influence. To do this, he compares their apocope to that of Italior, where he argues Romance influence should be assumed. Adapted from the source document