Re: YAEPT: uu/ii (< Quick Latin pronunciation question)

On 27/05/08 04:36:06, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...>
> wrote:
> > Does anyone know how <ae> came to be pronounced as [i(:)] anyway?
>
> Good ol' Great Vowel Shift.  By Late/Vulgar Latin, the diphthong <ae>
> was pronounced the same as long <e>, and long <e> in English becaome
> [i:] as part of the GVS.
Actually, Latin /ae/ merged with short /e/ as [E]; /oe/ merged with
long /e:/ and short /i/ as /e:/. So logically, /ae/ should've become
/e/ in English, and indeed it often has (e.g. "prelate" < praelat(us),
which unlike "economic" < oeconomic(us) can't be explained by tri-
syllable laxing).

Considering tho that English has borrowed most Latin words via French
and French-influenced Latin, which had no vowel length at all, the fact
that English behaved as if the source language did have length,
something must be up. (Some forms of Modern French have vowel length
from, I think it is, a missing "s" --- but when English was doing most
of its borrowing, the /s/ was still there.)

In the case of French borrowings, a lot of the distinction is open vs
closed syllables (I think at least) --- even if the borrowing occurred
after the sound change lengthening vowels in open syllables had
finished, languages grow accustomed to assuming foreign languages have
a particular pronunciation. And of course Old French still had
diphthongs.

In the case of the authentic Latin ae, it probably has to do with the
constructed Latin pronunciation Christians in Anglo-Saxon England had
used. On the continent at the time, pretty much if you used Latin in
your church services, you were speaking a Romance language, and you
just read Latin as if it was an insanely complex orthography. But that
couldn't work for English speakers, so they just pronounced it as it
was written. This habit was later exported back to the continent.
Obviously the modern English pronunciation of Latin words is not the
inheritance of Old English Christians, because they in all probability
would've pronounced ce, ci as /tʃe, tʃi/ etc. if they didn't pronounce
them as /ke, ki/.

So the modern pronunciation of Latin is an English adaption (that
clearly went through the Great Vowel Shift) of a French adaption (that
clearly was adjusted to French norms) of an Anglo-Saxon interpretation
of Classical Latin pronunciation. Somewhere, at some point, "ae" was
interpreted as different from its Vulgar Latin counterpart. I'm afraid
I can't say whether it was [E:] or [e:] in pre-GVS English reflecting
(respectively) its Vulgar Latin pronunciation + length or a complete
merger with "oe".

--
Tristan.