Re: /S/ in old and middle High German; was: Vikings

----- Original Message -----
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>


> On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 21:52:10 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
> wrote:
>
>>Sally Caves wrote:
>>> I'm interested in the |sc| and |sch| spellings in Old and Middle High
>>> German.  How confident are we that in the twelfth century |sch| was the
>>> /S/ sound, and in what regions?
Benct:
>>Not very at all.  As far as I remember OHG had [sk] and MHG had [sx]
>>just as modern Dutch.
Mach:
> I remember differently: |sch| was already used in OHG, and im MHG it was
> pronounced [S]...
In what OHG texts?  I'm perusing these and see only "sc"s.  And when it
comes to MHG, couldn't there be regional differences?  Which MHG are we
talking about?  I'm interested in the middle Rhineland area, or middle
Franconian. Was this |sch| pronounced /S/ in twelfth-century Germany
*universally*?  I guess I need to look at Rudolf Keller's _The German
Language_, barred to me this weekend because of the holidays. :)  Thanks for
the reference, BPJ!

A new question: could the monks from this region, used to reading Latin, or
even a little Greek, have ever associated the letter "z" with the sound /z/,
instead of with /s/ or /ts/?  After all, there was Zephyrus, Zodiak, and a
handful of other words in Latin borrowed from Greek words with initial zeta
(which I think may have also been pronounced /dz/ but under what
circumstances I'm unsure).  I'm perfectly willing to accept what I've read
and been told, that /z/ was not a sound in general then, but could there
have been exceptions?  I'm thinking, of course, of the southern Middle
English dialect, whose /z/-ish "s"s.  Could that sound have come from the
continent along with the Anglo-Saxon invaders?  Where does this sound come
from in modern English, German, and French, and how far back does it go?

Sally