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

Sally Caves wrote:

> I said I'd have questions for Germanicists, and here you are! :)
Scandinavicist, actually, but I do my occasional dabbling
further afield!

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Benct Philip Jonsson" <bpj@...>
>
>> 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?
>>
>>
>> Not very at all.  As far as I remember OHG had [sk] and MHG had [sx]
>> just as modern Dutch.
>
>
> Good to know.  My problem is that I have been using a Middle High German
> Reader, by M. O'C. Walshe, Oxford: Clarendon: 1974.  His texts are
> mostly of
> the "courtly" material: Parzival, Iwein, Tristan, etc. but he says
> absolutely nothing about |sch| in his phonology, although his Reader is
> sprinkled with words like schemelich, scherpfen, schaden, and so forth.  If
> we're to read any of this aloud, then it would behove him to tell us how to
> pronounce the consonant clusters. I guess it boils down to this lack of
> confidence you speak of.
>
>> MHG had two /s/ sounds, one laminal /s_m/
>> corresponding in most cases to modern _ß/ss_ and one apical /s_a/
>> corresponding mostly to modern _s_ /z/.
>
>
> I'm still unsure what _m  or _a refers to in CXS.  Or any underscore.
> Although I gather that underscores around a letter represent the letter as
> letter.  Like | |.
John already described this spot on, so I won't enlarge on it,
except to say that [s_a] sounds [S]-ish to those used to [s_m].

>
>> The apical phoneme had an
>> [S]-like sound -- hence the Hungarian values of _s_ and _sz_!
>
>
> I'm not familiar with the Hungarian values.  I take it that German |z|
> acquired its /ts/ sound fairly early.  Walshe says that |z| represented two
> phonemes in MHG: /ts/, initially and after consonants: zit/herze/; and /z/
> after vowels: vuoz/groz, where it became German SS, Fuss, gross.  A
> laminal/apical distinction here, too?
Alas the MHG "/z/" is not [z] but [s_m].  The proper Germanicist
transliteration is a |z| with a small hook below.  The hook is
a modern invention -- there was a hook on |z| in some Medieval
hands, but it made no graphemic distinction.  It is U+0224 (capital)
and U+0225 (lowercase) in Unicode.  The only font I know of which
includes it is Gentium.

>
>> Now the apical vs. laminal distinction was lost or replaced by a
>> voiced/voiceless distinction in most positions, but next to
>> consonants the old apical /s_a/ got reinterpreted as /S/ once
>> the old /s_ax/ had merged into /S/, which was fairly late.
>> Hence spellings like _Schmerz_ and _Hirsch_ for MHG _smerz_
>> /s-amerts)/ and _hirs_ /hirs_a/.
>>
>> This is what I remember off the top of my head.  To be sure
>> you should check a historical grammar of High German.  If
>> you can't find one mail me offlist and I'll try to find one.
>> After all Sweden used to be quite under the spell of Germany,
>> so the material is easy to find here.
>
>
> Gee thanks, Benct!
You're welcome!  It took some severe jogging of my memory though! :)
Mind if I pester you some time about Old English? ;)

>
> I see that our library does have some of the German ones you suggested
> off-line (instead of going to the computer as you did, I sat in the aisle
> and pulled books down on my head this fall).  One of the best dictionaries
> I've found for MHG is Matthias Lexer's Mittelhochdeutsches
> Taschenwo"rterbuch because it gives different dialectical spellings.
That's always useful.  I wish there was an electronic dictionary of
Old English where one could search for specifically Mercian forms!

> But
> now I need pronunciation guides.
I hope you can work it out.  IIRC the Germans refer to
the two MHG /s/ phonemes as "scharf" and "dumpf" respectively,
though I don't remember which is which.  Anyway the one
written |z| is closer to [s] and the one written |s| is
closer to [S].

>
> Sally
>
>

--

/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)

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