Re: Scots.

On 19.07.2008 01:58:21, Lars Finsen wrote:
> A word sounding like /s3:r/ or similar is common in Scottish songs,
> and seems to be an emphasising adjective. I wonder if any of our
> knowledgeable listmembers could identify it for me?
>
> It's such a struggle to identify a vowel from those IPA or Sampa
> lists. I guess you need years of training to do it passably.
>
> BTW, Scots seems to have escaped the diphthongisation that tore
> gashes and slashes through the English vowels some time during the
> last centuries. I do hear diphthongs, but it seems to be largely the
> traditional Indoeuropean ones.
I'm not sure what you mean by traditional Indo-European diphthongs. If
you're saying that Scots diphthongs mostly decend from the common ones,
then that's not true at all. PIE has the diphthongs *ai, *au, *ei, *eu,
*oi and *ou. As with the simple short vowels, o > a in diphthongs and
*ei had, I believe, merged with *i: already by Common Germanic (or if
not then, then definitely before English was English), so Proto-
Germanic has *ai, *au, *eu.

Now, by Old English, *ai -> a: which in English rounded but in Scots
--- the separate language, not Scottish English --- remained unrounded.

*au had become a diphthong spelt "ea" and pronounced something like
[&A] or [&@] --- no doubt very similar, in fact, to the Australian
diphthong /&O/ corresponding to RP /aU/. In Middle English, this vowel
(still spelt "ea") had merged with *æ: as the monophthong /E:/. In
Modern English of course it's mostly become /i:/ thanks to the Great
Vowel Shift but I think in Scots a greater proportion remain at the
more expected /e:/.

And as for *eu, it had become "eo" which in turn merged with /e:/
(spelt "ee") in Middle English and has almost entirely become Modern
English/Scots /i:/.

So as you can see no Indo-European diphthongs remain in English or
Scots, the last having been lost around a millenium ago.

If you mean that Scots/Scottish diphthongs are merely more like what
you see in other Indo-European languages than the English ones are,
then well maybe I'm just thinking too hard, but I don't know any
diphthongs are particularly I.-E., and even the diphthongs RP or
American English has that Scots/Scottish lacks, like /eI/ have
certainly existed in in the last thousand years in French, Spanish and
German. I guess the RP /@U/ diphthong's a little odd. (Of course, if
you're using Australian English as your baseline, then well yeah its
diphthongs are a little funny, with about a million going towards some
nature of high front vowel contrasted with a single one going from a
low front vowel to a low back vowel. But I'm probably the only person
on this list who'd even think of doing that.)

On 19.07.2008 03:54:32 Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Paul Bennett
> <paul.w.bennett@...> wrote:
> > Is it the mostly-archaic English word 'sore', meaning 'very' (cogn.
> > Ger. 'sehr', i.a.)?
>
> I wouldn't say it's mostly archaic.  The word is of course common in
> the sense of "painful", but even the "very" meaning is alive and well
> in many rural areas in the US.  ("I'm sore tempted to hit you upside
> your head right now")
I for my part have never once heard it meaning "very", and if I'd heard
it I would've assumed it was just a nonce or highly regional and slangy
use of an emotional term as an emphatic.

--
Tristan.

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