Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"

What numerous posts, Joe?  where?  I may have erased most of them.  I may
have been no-mail.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe" <joe@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2004 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"


> Sally Caves wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>
>>
>>
>> I wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> It's an old confusion.  In early ME, or in the transition from OE to
>>>> ME, I
>>>> believe, "lay" and "set" were established as transitive alternatives to
>>>> the
>>>> intransitives "lie" and "sit."
>>>
>>>
>>> No, these ablaut changes must be much older. They also occur in German:
>>> "liegen" (from older "ligen") vs. "legen" and "sitzen" vs. "setzen",
>>> also
>>> e.g. "trinken" 'drink' vs. "tränken" (older "trenken") 'make drink'
>>> (cognate
>>> to "drench"), "sinken" 'sink (intr.)' vs. "senken" 'sink (tr.)',
>>> "hängen"
>>> (older "hangen") 'hang (intr.)' vs. "henken" 'hang (tr.)'.
>>
>>
>> You're probably right; but when did these distinctions enter the German
>> language?  I'll trust your notion that they are entrenched in early Old
>> English rather than emerging in late Old English, especially since we
>> have
>> these cognates, but I want to make sure that the distinction wasn't
>> made in
>> say, the tenth-century somewhere on the continent  and then spread all
>> over.
>> But the umlauting speaks to a very early Germanic distinction, I'll
>> admit,
>> as does the cognate structure.  Will have to check the Old English
>> concordance and see if how early we find it in our extant literature.
>>
>
> See my numerous posts.  I researched it ;-)
>

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