Having woken late, I'm still trying to digest the wealth of responses to my
original query/puzzlement/bafflement.
> This is my fault for setting Robin off on this track in a phone
> conversation the other day.
Yeah. (Alas.)
> The truth is we don't know, whatever
> Beowulf is it survives as a literary text, it's not an oral poem
> because we've never heard how it sounded, only reconstructions.
But. But, but, but ...
Within the parameters of the text as we have it, there's a consistency. And
to me (still) something problematic about the alliteration on the yogh/g
scribal character.
(Appendix C of Klaeber apparently discusses the issue of the dotted and
non-dotted g's in his edition, but unfortunately this doesn't seem to be
part of his text available on-line.)
But to go back to line 13:
geong in geardum thone God sende
"geong" goes to Modern English "young", "geardum" to "years", and God stays
as God.
OK, I admit that a simple answer would be that this represents a later split
in the pronunciation of the first consonant of these words, but I don't find
this (as of now) a satisfactory explanation.
> Somebody mentioned how pronunciation could vary wildly within a few
> miles, let alone centuries.
It was Sally, and while (as you point out below) her point is valid, again
it doesn't scratch the itch I have. For one thing, dialectical
pronunciation variants increase over time -- there would be fewer in 800
than in, say, 1375. And we're talking specifically about literary West
Saxon.
It would be a poor (in financial terms) scop who could only be understood in
an area of ten miles around where he was brought up.
>This is spot on. Even now: this afternoon
> I was listening to a very very echt Leicester guy talking and he said
> the same sentence both 'home' (said as written) and ''ume' (same word
> word)
As I say, I'm not arguing with this, either your or Sally's observation.
What I'm saying is it doesn't seem to me to entirely answer the problem that
started me off, that in the Beowulf MS, yogh/g seems to represent two
different sounds (clearly distinct in Modern English and already distinct at
least as early as GGK which *doesn't allow alliteration on these sounds).
And OK, we have the added problem there that in the GGK manuscript, the yogh
character represents the [x] {as in loch} sound, not the earlier y/g
variant).
My brains are broken ...
R.
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