Re: English [dZ]

On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 16:07 -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> 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?
There's a couple of issues here...

In the history of French there was a sound change which turned [j] into
[dZ]. Many words were borrowed into English while the French value was
[dZ]. This change also affected the French and English (and no doubt
others) pronunciation of Latin, so that Latin words with orthographic
<j> were pronounced with /dZ/. In most other Germanic languages, <j> was
used with the classical Latin value of /j/, so Latin words with
orthographic <j> were pronounced with /j/. So the English word
"jurisdiction" has a /dZ/, but the German equivalent (if there is one)
would have /j/. One could say these are "reanalyzed
spelling-pronunciations", if you wanted ... but the change didn't happen
in English, but in a non-native Latin. The only time you really have
spelling-pronunciations in English, I'd think, is when you have modern,
un-re-spelt borrowings from langs like German or Dutch, as in "ouija
board".

English inherited many /j/ from Germanic and Indo-European. These are
typically spelt <y> in English and have cognates in other Germanic langs
with <j>. Hence, En. <year> /jI@/, De. <Jahr> /ja:r/; En. <yea> /j&i/,
De. <ja> /ja:/, En. <young> /jaN/, De. <Jung> /jUN/. (During Old
English, these sounds were spelt with "g" and a following front vowel
thus OE <geong> /juN/, by analogy with the below.) I think most of most
other Germanic langs' /j/ come from this source, though I'd expect
Frisian to have some palatalisation too, breaking I think might've
caused some in the North Germanic langs etc. etc...

In the history of English, during a pre-English stage, the phoneme in
Old English called /g/ most often had the realisation [G]. (As I
understand it, during OE /g/ was only [G] around liquids.) Around front
vowels, it was palatalised in Old English; this sound eventually merged
with inherited /j/. I can't think of an cognates OTTOMH here.

In the pre-Old English stage when /g/ most often had the realisation
[G], the geminate /gg/ was pronounced [gg]. This also had a palatal
form, [ddZ]. In Old English, [gg] and [ddZ] were spelt <cg>. You can see
this in words like "ridge" or "bridge", which in OE were _hrycg_ and
_brycg_. I don't know what the German forms (or any other Germanic lang)
would be, but they'd probably have a /g/. In MnE, because these are all
word/syllable final (no geminates word initial in pre-Old English),
these are generally spelt with <dge> or the like, not <j>.

I think that's basically complete as a summary of the origin of
English /j/ and /dZ/.

> > 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.
I presume there was a palatal stop in between, and probably also a
palatal fricative... Changes don't happen in just one direction.
Languages don't change, people change languages, and people are only
really likely to have knowledge of the difference between their speech
and their parents, and perhaps grandparents i.e. no more than two
generations. Until some time in the twentieth century, speakers of
Australian English tended to use progressively closer realisations of
[&]. Since the 1960s, and especially during the 1990s and 2000s, the
direction of change has reversed...

> 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?
Yes. OTOH, /j/ was spelt in Middle English variously with <y>, yogh, and
I think <i>, yogh being a descendant of the OE scribe's way of drawing a
g.


--
Tristan

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