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Re: RV: Old English

From:BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2000, 12:17
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