Re: Eald Englisc to Niwum Englisce

At 9:09 am -0500 14/4/99, dunn patrick w wrote:
>All right, I suspect that's wrong; annoying language.
>
>Which is, of course, why I'm thinking of working on creating a new
>language based on Anglo-Saxon.
>
>Some questions:
>
>Why do we say /gIv/ instead of /yIv/?  It comes from giefan, which was
>pronounced like /yievan/.
Southern English was 'yive' etc (see Chaucer).  The modern 'give' is from
northern English who had adopted the Norse form - Vikings, Danes etc
settled quite a bit there and left their distinctive vocabulary, e.g.
'bairn' = 'child'.

'They', 'them' etc are also northern Engl. Norse borrowings which replace
the southern 'hie', 'hem' etc (although 'hem' in fact does survive and is
generally written "'em" and is now generally taken - wrongly - as a
'substandard' shortening of "them").


>Why did we choose to change cg -> dg, sc -> sh, thorn -> th, and ae -> a?
The Normans - they considered themselves more refined than Saxons and
imposed their spelling conventions on our language.  We've been stuck with
them ever since.

>What caused the vowel shift?
"substandard London pronunciation"  :)

Sounds are always shifting a bit.  Often these changes are regarded as
'substandard' and don't survive; some survive for a while as a fashionable
fad among those like to be 'with it' or display affected speech; some get
taken up by a 'prestige' group.  Capital cities often have underdue
influence (cf. the spread of the Parisian R in French, the modern use of
the Cockney glottal stop instead of medial or final [t] among the young
(and not so young) in the UK).

>To vowels tend, in most languages, to become more open, more closed,
>longer, shorter, midder, backer, forwarder?  :)
All :)

There seems to me a greater tendency for vowels to drift upward so that,
e.g. /a/ will drift towards /E/ or /e/.  In Greek from ancient to modern
times we've seen the complete shift of /a:/ to /i/  !

There's also a tendency to diphthongnize; thus the high vowels in English,
so to speak, made way for /e/ to rise to /i/ and /o/ to rise to /u/ by
themselves dipthongnising to /@i/ and /@u/ respectively.

In English dialects various forms of diphthongnization can be seen; in my
native Sussex the /o:/ and /e:/, which had become /ou/ & /ei/ in standard
English, became /u@/ and /i@/ (both falling diphthongs).  I believe
something similar has happened in Afrikaans.   The Australians, of course,
even go in triphthongs which I won't even attempt to imitate here.

But equally onr finds some languages move in the opposite direction and
diphthongs give way to monophthongs; so the Ancient Greek /ai/ and /oi/
have given way to simple /e/ and /i/.  The Latin /au/ generally gave way to
/o/ in most Romancelangs.

Old French produced a whole range of wonderful diphthongs and triphthongs
from the simple vowels of its Romance parent but has now move the other way
so that they've reverted to different simple vowels (e.g. /bEl/ --> /bj&w/
--> /bo/ - but the spelling 'beau' still gives way the older sound ;)

>How does this look for a typical noun format?
I leave that to the Old English experts :)

Ray.