Re: English questions

John Cowan wrote:

> > I assume (b) must have happened before (a), since e.g. /nixt/ had to
> > have become /ni:t/ (loss of /x/ + compensatory lengthening) before the
> > GVS in order for Modern English to have ended up with /najt/.
> Quite right.  Of course in Scots the vowel is still short.
Yup; they say /nixt/, er, [nIxt]. For that matter, they still have /la:x/ and
/@njux/ (laugh and enough)!

> No, slashes do indeed enclose phonemic representation; 
> square brackets enclose phonetic representation.
Oh good, then I'm all right! :) I was afraid of getting jumped on for writing
/nixt/ instead of /nIçt/ or something like that. I obviously had the symbols
backwards in my head. I was concerned with the phonemics, e.g. short versus
long /i/, rather than the actual realization of e.g. short /i/ as [I], or of
/x/ as /ç/ (or whatever the X-SAMPA is) next to front vowels. But I see I had
nothing to worry about, I did it right all along. :)

> > Also, does anyone know why Modern English ended up with /x/>/f/
> It's idiosyncratic as far as anyone knows.  Another example, no longer
> reflected in the spelling, is "dwarf".  
Oh neat, I didn't know about that one!

> http://alpha.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/ is a wonderful site on the 
> Great Vowel Shift, including voices reading a text in various stages of it.
Great site! Thanks for the link.

Thomas

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