Re: English: Thou

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Robert Hailman wrote:
> > That's what I thought originally, but then wouldn't "you" become /jau/
> > at the same time? Unless originally it was pronounced /jo/
>
> It was /jo:/, I think.  Originally, English tended to avoid written
> vowels (except e) at the end of words, so a lot of final -o's were
> re-written as -ow (like "know").
In a lot of words, that's because morphophonemic variants required
the extra consonant.   If you add the infinitive ending -en, still present
in MidE, you have to add the glide /w/ to get <knowen>.    Only in
later periods, when most of the morphology had been sloughed off,
did the method you describe become used generally.

> Also, "you" is derived from OE "eow",
> so it would make sense to suppose a /jo/ or /jo:/ pronunciation from
> that.  "Thou" is derived from "Thû"
I'm not expert on Old and Middle English dialects, but I'd think that
would be a problem for supposing MidE [DU] rather than [Du:].

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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