Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

On 1/24/07, Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> wrote:

> Old English had the semivowel 'y' (as 'ge') where German has 'g', so I think
> the /dZ/ phoneme actually came from Old French borrowings - Old
Some cases of English /dZ/ come from Old English /jj/ (probably
already pronounced [dZ]) and /nj/—tho obviously never at the start of
a word, where phonemes are most salient. These in turn come from /g/
and /gg/ in palatalised contexts. Hence 'bridge', 'singe'. I don't
think the French influence on English has ever caused the language to
gain a phoneme that wasn't already at least an allophone. (/Z/, of
course, also has a local origin in words like 'measure'.)

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