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

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 22:51:15 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>
>
>> 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.
I've taken a look into the web and now I guess I was wrong. But I found a
nice link page to OHG texts:
http://www.litlinks.it/a/althochdeutsch.htm

It links e.g. to a comparison of Lord's Prayers:
http://www.linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/~strunk/Deutsch/vergleic.htm

>And when it
>comes to MHG, couldn't there be regional differences?  Which MHG are we
>talking about?
Most MHG resources talk about the overregionally used language, which was a
kind of poetry standard in that time. If I remember correctly, it's mainly
Alemmanic-Swabian (that's also the reason why it's more similar to current
Alemannic than to modern standard German, which has developed from other
dialects). The spoken language, of course, differed a lot from region to region.

>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?
I've always thought of this sound as an original allophone of /s/. In
southern German, BTW, there's no [z] at all, but only voiceless [s] (though
often transcribed as [z_0]). The two s-sounds are distinguished by length
(or by articulary "force"??). So I'm inclined to believe that [z] is a
northern German/Saxon sound, therefore also found in English.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust