Re: RV: Old English

At 19:15 27.3.2000 -0800, Sally Caves wrote:
>The "til" suggests
>Scandinavian influence, and I suspect further influence may
>have yielded an /sk/ pronunciation instead of an /S/.  But
>that is pure conjecture, and I may be mistaken.
No way to tell, since /sk/ before palatal vowels or /j/ eventually became
/S/ -- and even [x] in most Swedish! -- in Scandinavian too.  Influences
may or may not have gone both ways there.  The only thing that would be
tell-tale IMVHO would be a loan word into Scandinavian showing /sj/ or /s/
for Old English _sc_!

Linguistic trivia: /S/ can be spelled in 18 different ways in Swedish,
though far from all are equally common!


/BP

"Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe