Re: Phonetic scripts and diphthongs ...
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, July 18, 2004, 19:38 |
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Tried to send this yesterday - but overstepped my limit. Let's hope it
gets through today.....
On Saturday, July 17, 2004, at 04:14 , Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>>
>>
>>>> This is only
>>>> because historically, they were single sounds. English /dZ/ was once
>>>> [j].
>>>
>>> Not in English it wasn't. The sound came into English from Norman French
>>> as [dZ] (in modern French, the old French [dZ] has become simply [Z]).
>>> The
>>> Old French affricate [ts] simply became [s] in English borrowings, as
>>> neither Old English nor Middle English (nor modern English) has the
>>> affricate [ts].
>>
>>
>> I thought OE had /dZ/? Spelt as 'cg', in at least some circumstances?
>
> Yeah, but Old English /dZ/ was never /j/. It came from /gg/ (geminate
> g).
I'd forgotten about OE 'cg', I must confess. But it's survival in modern
English is always spelled 'dge', cg. brycg --> bridge, hrycg --> ridge.
Also, one must remember, that the pronunciation of OE 'cg' as /dZ/ is
convention.
As I understand it, the OE spelling was representing geminate 'soft g' (i.
e. /j/); I guess there'd be dialect variation between [jj] ~ [dj] ~ [dj\]
and possibly even [dZ]. A similar thing happened to Classical Latin /jj/
in Vulgar Latin, cf. maiore(m) /majjore/ --> It. maggiore /madZdZore/
After the Norman invasion, it's true the OE 'cg' and the Norman /dZ/ fell
together.
Similarly, I suspect the OE 'soft c', which we conventionally, pronounce
as /tS/, was in fact pronounced in the various ways that |k| before front
vowels is pronounce in the Scandinavian langs which, I believe, varies
between [C], [tC] and similar sounds. It would've been the adoption of
Norman French words with /tS/ that helped fix the pronunciation (with the
respelling |ch| instead of just plain |c|).
> I suspect Ray was just limiting himself to /dZ/ that can trace their
> ancestory to /j/.
Indeed, I was responding to j_mach_wurst who I understood to be saying
that the English use of J = /dZ/ was a historical accident. I was limiting
myself the /dZ/ --> Old French /dZ/ <-- Latin /j/.
Ray
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