Re: English [dZ]
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, December 9, 2005, 21:07 |
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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@...>
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