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Re: English [dZ]

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Friday, December 9, 2005, 21:07
On 12/9/05, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> Mark J. Reed wrote: > > How did the letter |J| come to represent [dZ] in English, while > > continuing to represent [j] in the other Germanic languages? Was it > > because of French influence? > > Precisely - after 1066, Norman French spelling conventions replaced the > Old English ones.
Was it just a spelling convention change? I thought that words which previously had |j| began to be pronounced with |dZ|; they can't all be reanalyzed spelling-pronunciations, can they?
> No. In Old French |j| was pronounced /dZ/, and |ch| was pronounced /tS/. [...] In France the > earlier affricates were leveled to simple fricatives sometime in the middle of the13th > century.
Huh. Wouldn't have guessed that - I can see /j/ -> /Z/ -> /dZ/, but /j/ -> /dZ/ -> /Z/ is not exactly a monotonic-feeling sequence. As far as I can tell, 1066 is about 500 years before the consistent use of |I| and |J| to distinguish the vocalic and consonantal sounds, so I'm assuming there was a significant period when both French and English (to whatever extent it was written at all) had words spelled with an |I| that was pronounced [dZ]. True? -- Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
R A Brown <ray@...>