Hello again,
> Ekwall, in his "History of Modern English Sounds and Morphology" (Oxford,
> 1975), p. 21, has an explanation starting from the late ME form Caumbrigge
> etc (1348- PNCambs), from earlier French-influenced Cauntebrigge etc.
> Although ME /au/ normally became the sound found in ModE "law" (I won't
> attempt the IPA symbol), Ekwall says that before labials and nasal groups it
> usually became some kind of a-vowel, but that before /mb/, /nd3/ it has
> become /ei/, with exceptions, which he discusses.
This is a perfectly fair point in itself, of course, but it needs to be
explained why French influence in this name was sufficient, in a period when
progressively less French was being spoken except the strange lect of the law
courts (and that surely with an English accent - I doubt whether many Anglos
were brushing up their Parisian on the spot during the 100 Years' War and I'm
unsure about the evidence for the survival of discrete Anglo-Norman
pronunciation), to tip it from being phonologically English to quasi-
French. I presume the _chamber_-words retained the vowel representing what
they had inherited from French when originally imported; why was _Cambridge_
pulled into this set? I can't think of any other English word or name that was
(bar the peculiar _ha'penny_, where [l] was probably decisive, as in _Ralph_,
_save_). Why didn't this happen in _Canterbury_ (of even higher administrative
status), _Grantchester_ (nearby)?
> According to Ekwall, the
> forerunner of [ei] in the name Cambridge is recorded by Gil in his Logonomia
> Anglica of 1621, though he doesn't actually quote what Gil says.
Gil says <K[a-diaeresis]mbri[yogh]> (p. 77): the same sound is notated in
_father_ (p. 80).
> A near-parallel to "Cambridge" is "chamber", but there are also
> counter-examples (amber etc), and the early modern development doesn't seem
> to be simple or consistent, even in the same words (e.g. in "cambric"?). The
> development to [ei] is more regularly found in words with /ein3/ such as
> "change", "danger", "angel"' etc.
>
Richard
--
Richard Coates
Dean, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Professor of Linguistics
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