Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 12/9/05, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
[snip]
>>
>>Precisely - after 1066, Norman French spelling conventions replaced the
>>Old English ones.
>
>
> Was it just a spelling convention change?
Yes.
> I thought that words which
> previously had |j| began to be pronounced with |dZ|; they can't all be
> reanalyzed spelling-pronunciations, can they?
Not as far as native words are concerned. the Old English [j] was
spelled |g| and occurred before front vowels. In the post-Norman
spelling it was denoted either with |y| or with the Old English version
of |g| which we call yogh. The English initial [j] never became [dZ]
The Vulgar Latin [j] however had become [dj] or [dz] in the
proto-Romance period. When French words came to us spelled |j| or 'soft
g' the sound was already [dZ]. English has not changed it.
>
>>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.
Mis-spelling in the late Roman period make it quite clear that the Latin
/j/ (which was always geminate between vowels) had become an affricate
in Vulgar Latin.
>
> 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?
Absolutely.
I think Tristan has covered other points I might have made.
--
Ray
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