Re: English & Old French (was: How you pronunce foreign place names)

On Thursday 25 January 2007 06:19, R A Brown wrote:
> Wesley Parish wrote:
> > On Wednesday 24 January 2007 04:49, li_sasxsek@nutter.net wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > Old English had the semivowel 'y' (as 'ge') where German has 'g', so I
> > think the /dZ/ phoneme actually came from Old French borrowings
>
> Yes - but the Saxon 'cg' was apparently similar and certainly, e.g.
> bridge <-- Old English _bricg_.
True; I just didn't think it worth mentioning that.
>
> - Old English, if
> > left to go its own way with a minimal of Romance borrowings and no
> > Norman/Acquitainian court influences, would have ended up a lot more like
> > Frisian and Low Saxon/Niedersassisch/Plattdeutsch.
>
> Possibly if the Danes & Vikings had left us alone as well    :)
Probably! ;)  But Frisian's got the sort of morphology I would expect a modern
minimally-Romance-influenced English would have had; Frisian did after all
come in for a whole lot of influence from Norse/Danish in its more northern
regions, and from Franconian/Dutch in its southernmost regions, and Saxon in
its more eastern regions.

The later Wessex literary dialect probably had more Old Norse in it than is
shown in what remains of Old English literature - certainly I expect the
northern Essex dialect would have been heavily influenced by Old Norse, since
it was in the southern borders of the Danelagh.  But it wasn't a literary
language to the best of my knowledge. ;)

Wesley Parish

--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
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Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
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