Re: Digest 2 Apr

Bjorn Kristenson wrote:
> > Muke Tever sikayal:
> >
> > > > I like phonology, but I don't know enough about historical phonology
>to
> > > > be entirely comfortable with the sound-changes I devise.
> > >
> > > Hehe.  My langs tend to have regular but likely-implausible sound
>changes.
> >
> > I don't know.  There's some pretty weird stuff out there, like s > r,
> > which is attested multiple times, but which I can't justify in my own
> > mind.
> >
>I seem to recall one of my phonetics teachers (I'm studying English in the
>University of Iceland, so the emphasis was on the differences between the
>pronounciation of these two languages) saying that in some words, English
>speakers might perceive 'r' as 's' in English when spoken with a strong
>Icelanic accent... The Icelandic 'r' is a trill or a tap, and can be both
>voiced and unvoiced. I presume it's the unvoiced 'r' that causes this
>confusion. Maybe that's similar to how 's' gradually changed to 'r'?
>
>Just remembered as I was writing this, in old Icelandic texts, the verb
>'is'
>was 'es', but today it's 'er'. The same development has occured in the
>Scandinavian languages... Odd, I'd never spotted that before.
Ever noticed all those "r"s at the end of Icelandic nominatives? They're
from earlier "s" pretty much all of them ... ;-)

The actual develoment, in this case and many others, is s>z>r.

                                                 Andreas
PS "Guest" is _gestur_ i in Icelandic IRRC? In Gothic they had _gasts_, note
the final _-s_ that's preserved in Gothic.
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