Re: English questions

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?