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

Sally Caves wrote:
>> Sally Caves wrote:
>
> 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.
Slender or narrow = palatalised, broad = unpalatalised/labialised.

Funny, it seems like a very natural metaphor for me; I'm not sure why.

In school (as I mentioned in a recent post) we were taught it was the
_vowels_ (the vowel letters!) that were leathan/broad or caol/narrow.
A, o and u were leathan, i & e were caol. So maybe the naturalness
of the nomenclature to me is based on the letter "i" being quite narrow,
visually, and the letters "a", "o" and "u" being quite wide. Lower case
"e" might be seen as narrow, but in any case all they you had to remember
was that it was associated with "i" - a connection easily made my comparison
with English spelling ("c" mean "s" before "i" & "e" etc.).

All this was quite sophisticated reasoning in those days, when our level
of linguisitc understanding was on the level of such mind boggling
paradoxes as "You can't have a word without a vowel!" but "the word
'my' has no vowel!"

s.
--
To be sure, to be sure