Re: English questions

Roger Mills wrote:

> > 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.

While to the conlanger such whim tweakage provides great
pleasure and solves many an aesthetic dilemma! :)

> 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.

That's really interesting! Cool. :)


 > > 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.

Great, thanks for the reference! I'll have to look for that. I'm
a huge fan of Otto Jespersen. He's my idol. :)

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

The one which appears next to the quoted text instead of ">"
even when you tell it to prefix the quoted text with ">"? And
which won't disappear when you type no matter what you do so
that your remarks are indistinguishable from the quoted text you
are replying to? If you find out how to get rid of that damn
thing, let me know! I hate it, but nothing I try makes it go
away. F***ing Microsoft. I also noticed that if I don't switch
the format to Plain Text when sending each message, my emails to
the list show up on the Brown Listerv archive site (where I read
the messages) as one huge line you have to right-scroll to read.
Why the ?*&! won't it just wrap like any other normal text on a
normal webpage? And nobody else's messages seem to do that. I
wonder how my messages come out to those who read them in email
rather than on the website, do they still come out like that?
And is there something I can set so that they transmit normally
and wrap normally when displayed on the screen? F****ing
Microsoft!

BTW Roger, since I've got you, an Indonesian question. To my
surprise, since I don't find most Asian languages particularly
nice to listen to, I've discovered that I actually quite like
the sound of Indonesian (I listen to the news on the web) and
this is leading me to want to learn more about the language. Any
textbooks, grammar reference books, etc. you would recommend?

Best regards,

Thomas