> 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!
Right right! Forgot!
>> ----- 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?
>>>
>>>
BPJ:
>>> Not very at all. As far as I remember OHG had [sk] and MHG had [sx]
>>> just as modern Dutch.
. . .
BPJ:
>> 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/.
[snip stuff about Hungarian]
Sally:
>> 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?
BPJ:
> 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.
I misspoke. I looked again, and Walshe says that |z| in some instances was
the voiceless "s," and pronounced somewhat lisped, so your laminal |s|,
then? He says nothing about the two pronunciations of |s|, though, assuming
that it was somewhere between that of NHG "s" and "sch." Yes, I've seen the
hooked "z."
>>> 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/.
Makes total sense.
>>> 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? ;)
Be my guest! I'll probably go searching through all my books.
>> 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!
Oy.
>> 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].
Scharf, I think, for the apical and dumpf for the laminal? Or scharf for
the unvoiced sound, and because it SOUNDS like "scharf," and dumpf for the
voiced? But then, I can never seem to remember what is "slender" and
"broad" in Irish consonants, so I don't trust my instincts, here.
Sally