caminata

The vowel of the second syllable is etymologically , which in the evolution to Romance would be expected to 'weaken' in this environment, at least variably, yielding something like .

Any of the attestations with ⟨i⟩ could equally reflect or , since ⟨i⟩ stood for both vowels in Late Latin and early medieval spelling. (This orthographic phenomenon resulted from the merger of original Latin /ĭ/ and /ē/; it was absent from the few areas that lacked the merger, such as Sardinia and Roman Africa.)

Some corroboration of the /e/ variant unambiguously indicated by the spelling ⟨camenata⟩ is to be found among the Old French reflexes of camīnāta with ⟨e⟩ in the second syllable, such as chamenee, where the vowel in question probably stands for /ə/, reflecting an older /e/. Nevertheless, it is more common to encounter Old French forms with /i/ instead, such as cheminee.

As for the Italian cam(m)inata, its /i/ could derive from either an older /i/ or /e/, as the two vowels merged in Italian to /i/ in pretonic position.

Otherwise, all the Romance reflexes provided below unambiguously reflect an original /i/. The overall triumph of this vowel can be attributed to continued influence from the root word camīnus (“fireplace”), where the maintenance of /ˈi/ is regular. In French it may have additionally been reinforced by a folk-etymology that analyzed cheminee as chemin (“path, way”) + -ée, thus legitimizing it against un-analyzable forms like chamenee.