Re: English questions

When that happens to me, i get around it by replying at the top of the
message.  Like now :-) .


-Stephen (Steg)
 "dos iz nit der šteg!"


On Fri, 23 May 2003 12:56:11 -0400 Roger Mills <romilly@...> writes:
Thomas Leigh wrote:
Can anyone give me an approximate time frame for the following?

(a) when the Great Vowel Shift took place
(b) when the phoneme /x/ disappeared
(c) when /y/ unrounded (derounded? What's the term?) to /i/

RM This is not my field, but I'll jump in on a couple items...

(And while I'm at it, I know that the slashes / / are supposed to enclose
phonetic representation, not phonemic representation,

RM:  It's just the other way around. / / for phonemic, [ ] for phonetic
but I can't remember what you're supposed to put around the latter, so if
anyone could remind me I'd be grateful.)

Also, does anyone know why Modern English ended up with /x/>/f/ in a few
words (e.g. laugh, enough) rather than /x/ just dropping as it did in
most words?

RM:  Sporadic change happens, to the dismay of historical linguists.
There may be some slight conditioning-- *x > f after back (orig.
rounded?) vowels??? --
laugh, Germ. lachen; maybe through, Germ. durch?? -- (And in distinctive
feature analysis, based on acoustics, velars and labials as a class
differ only in one feature IIRC, but it's too technical too get into
here).  I think  it may be a "tendency" in Germanic languages-- note
Dutch lucht 'air', Germ. Luft; Du. stichting 'foundation, institute',
Germ, Stiftung.

I'd also be grateful for any recommendations for good sources of
information (books, websites, anything) on the historical development of
English. I've studied some Anglo-Saxon, and of course Modern English is
my native language, but I'm really quite clueless about all the inbetween
bits.

RM probably plenty of recent textbooks; a good older and highly readable
one is Otto Jespersen's Growth and Structure of the Engl. Language,
possibly still available in paperback.

How does one get rid of the line along the left margin that accompanies
some emails on my screen?