Re: RV: Old English

----- Original Message -----
From: "BP Jonsson" <bpj@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 7:17 AM
Subject: 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!
Well, I'll try: the most common:
sj (standard orthography: /S/ =: <sj>)
sk (before front vowels)
skj
stj

The less common:
ch (French borrowings): champinjon, chaufför
j, g (French borrowings): gestikulera, journalist
sh (English borrowings): show, shopp
sch (German borrowings): schack, schampo
si,ti (in -sion, -tion borrowings): pensionär
xh (only one word: xhosa)

Interesting how some of those words change part of the orthografy for more
Swedish models but the /S/ part is left unchanged: _chaufeur_ -> _chaufför_
(instead of more "Swedish": sjåfför).

I guess all other 6 spellings are borrowings that hasn't been asimilated
completely into Swedish, where original languages had /S/ or /Z/.

> /BP
>
> "Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe
-- Carlos Th