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Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 10, 2002, 5:35
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. 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. 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. Edh, I believe, did die out in the Normanized middle English spelling, but thorn held on in competition with {th} till the time of printing when the lack of suitable fonts ensured the victory of {th}. Ray.

Replies

Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>