Re: THEORY: derivation question
From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
Date: | Monday, March 29, 1999, 1:08 |
FFlores wrote:
> What happened with "gh" in English? It's always puzzled me
> to have a digraph that is silent sometimes and a fricative
> some other times. After such patterns as seek > sought,
> think > tought, I'd say that (besides Ablaut) a final /kt/
> became /xt/ (<ght>) and then /x/ lengthened the previous
> vowel and disappeared, maybe becoming /h/ at some point.
> This could explain the long vowel in light, might, etc.
> But where does the /f/ come from? Is it that final /xt/
> becomes /:t/, but /x.t/ (in different syllables as in laughter)
> becomes /f.t/, with /x/ shifting from velar to labiodental?
Well, the <gh> came from the Normans. In Old English it was written
<h>, e.g., <riht>. This indicated /x/, thus /riht/, or something like
that. The Normans wrote it as <gh>.
I don't know about the /f/ and /h/. I don't know about words like
"laugh", if it had been interdental, /lOxa/, or whatever the vowels
were, surely there would've been voicing. But perhaps it was dialectal
variations?
--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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