Re: Y not? (was: Of Haa/hhet & other matters)

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 15:03:18 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
> >
> >> Of the many different uses of the letter |y|, I like best that Welsh use,
> >> since the other uses of |y| can be represented with other letters, but
> >> there's no other letter for that one.
> >
> >Needless to say, I, as a Swede, disagree; |y| is, as even the IPA accepts,
> >to be used for /y/! This moreover is the original use of the letter.
>
> I classical Greek, and in the educated Roman pronunciation by the time it
> was adapted. Most Roman alphabet orthographies, however, used it for /i/
> over many centuries, compare e.g. the French name /i grEk/. The German
> pronunciation of |y| as /y/ is a 19th century cultism that has caught on in
> the prescriptive standard language and hence in many regions, but not in
> all, compare e.g. the Swiss mountain "die Mythen" (plurale tantum), that is
> pronounced as /'mi:t@n/, and not because the dialects would have unrounded
> the front rounded vowels (as is common in many German dialects)!
I already knew all of that, actually. But I do not see how it affects my point,
such as it is.

(It may amuse you to know that my my teachers in German class in Sweden, who
supposedly taught the Dudenic standard pronunciation, were inconsistent in
rendering |y|, in learnt words such as _Mythus_, as /y/ or /i/, an
inconsistency I to some extent retain.)

> Do you know how the |y|-pronunciations developed in Scandinavia?
Yes, since reading BP's mail I do! :)

                                                     Andreas