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

I said I'd have questions for Germanicists, and here you are! :)

----- 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 | |.

> 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?

> 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!

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.  But
now I need pronunciation guides.

Sally

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