Re: RV: Old English

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 16:48:15 +0100, yl-ruil <yl-ruil@...> wrote:

>Basileus wrote:
>> >> with a palatalizing effect of _sc_
>>
>> I meant the diphthong -ea-. PGerm /a/ ( + dental + back vowel) should
>> yield WS /a/, shouldn't it? As in _talu_ ( > tale; sorry for possible
>> misspelling, no references handy).
>>
>> The further change /a/ > <ea> may point to palatal quality of what was
>> spelled <sc>, for it resembles /u/ > <eo> after /j/ in _geong_, etc.
>
>The fracture diphthong /æa/ "ea" normally derives from PGmc /au/, contrast
>German auch and OE eac.
_scadu_ had a short vowel, as evidenced by ModE _shade_.

>In this case it is from u-mutation of the
>following -w. This doesn't happen for talu because it derives from OS
tala,
>in turn from PGmc *talô.
It seems to me that /a/ > /a/ (rather than /æ/) before any back vowel,
and therefore was not subject to fracturing by 'back umlaut' (which
happened later, didn't it?).

>
>AFAIK (see! I used the acronym!) eo derives from high vowel + w as in
*iwwis
>> eow and *juwungaz > geong. Often the e of geong is not found, generally
in
>Mercian and other Anglian dialects, deriving from the contracted form of
>*juwungaz, *jungaz.
The PGerm form for 'young' is more commonly presented as *jungaz (or at
least I cannot think of any evidence in favor of *juwungaz within Germanic
langs).

There are other examples of vowel fracturing after /j/, e. g. _geoc_
'yoke' ( = Joch, jugum, zygon, etc.).

>
>Dan
Basilius