Re: USAGE: YAEPT: Re: Diversity and uniformity AND No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong) -- responses to Andreas and Ray.

On 03/06/06, daniel prohaska <danielprohaska@...> wrote:
> On 03/06/06, daniel prohaska <danielprohaska@...> wrote:
> ...
> > [&] > [&:] => ME staff [st&f] > [st&:f] (further development in the 18th
> > century > [sta:f]), similarly: glass, ask, path, laugh;
> >
> > [A] > [A:] => ME soft [sAft] > [sA:ft] (further development in the 18th
> > century > [sO:ft]), likewise: off, cross, frost, cough, wrath,
>
> --------------------------------------
>
> From: Tristan Alexander McLeay
> "[A]? Not [Q] (or even [O] in the first place)?"
>
>
> Yes, [A] and not [Q] or [O].
> [A] is the reflex of ME /O/ which became unrounded (lowered?) as part of
the
> second wave of vowel shifts in the late 16th century. So, in effect ME [O]
> shifted > [A] (late 16th) and then back > [Q] (late 18th) in England Other
> examples: lot, long, gosling, odd, lodge.
"How do we know this?
Tristan."

I got this from various historical grammars of English the writers/compilers
of which looked at the usual tell-tale tokens in historical spellings,
misspellings, loan-words in other languages. German for example has <Frack>
"tuxedo", which is an 18th century loan word from English <frock>, as well
as from the same period the verb <baxen> "to box", which was re-borrowed in
the 19th century as <boxen>.
Dan