Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 16:36, Ray Brown wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 12:47 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> > En réponse à Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:
> >
> >>
> >> We thought you were going to provide words for us to borrow to
> >> strengthen the phonemicity of them? We were trying to be advanced and
> >> ahead of our times so that we wouldn't have any trouble learning
> >> French
> >> when they invaded us and brought their bizarre phonemes along. Pity we
> >> came prepared with /T/ but not with even an allophonic [Z], isn't it?
> >>
> >
> > Yep, not very clairvoyant those English ;)))) .
>
> Oh dear - this is getting worse and worse - error compounding error.
I guess this is what you get for not knowing much/anything about Old
French. Thanks for all the corrections/alertings.

> The Old French were *not* the same as the modern French.  _They_ did
> not have /Z/ - they still pronounced words like 'damage', 'gentle' etc with
> /dZ/ which was similar enough to the Old English sound written {cg} to
> keep my ancestors happy.
True enough, I guess. I was thinking of 'beige' and 'regime'. Which are
modern French borrowings. But that doesn't stop people from pronouncing
them with /dZ/s.

> And Old French _did_ have the sounds [D] and [T].   The English 'faith', e.
> g.,
> is derived from Old French 'feit' [fEiT] - they were positional variants
> of /d/
> and /t/ and eventually died out.
Really? Interesting.


Tristan