Re: USAGE: OE pt was Re: USAGE:Yet another few questions about Welsh.

Ray Brown wrote:

> On Sunday, July 11, 2004, at 08:42 , David Barrow wrote:
>
>> Ray Brown wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> It was, and the voicing would be regular for the reasons I've given.
>>>
>>> Ray
>>
>>
>> Would the voicing have happened automatically ie as soon as they coined
>> a new compound or would it have evolved over time?
>
>
> Automatically as soon as the compound was made, I guess. I don't imagine
> that most OE speakers were any more aware that /f/ had two allophones [f]
> and [v] (or that /T/ had allophones [T] and [D], and /s/ had
> allophones [s]
>  and [z]) any more than most English speakers are aware that /l/ in
> English has two environmentally conditioned allophones, e.g. leaf /lif/
> [li:f] ~ field /fild/ [fi:Ld].
>
Why did OE have both þ and ð, anyway?  It could have done perfectly well
with just one.  Maybe they were originally coined to represent [T] and
[D], but then someone got confused.

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