Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, July 10, 2002, 5:35 |
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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.
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