>You can then go on (that is, One can; I certainly can't) to assert some sort
of dating of the Original Oral Text, based upon this principle.<
Oh my dear Christopher, you lovely guy, how can one have an Original ORAL TEXT?.
anti-matter meets matter, conceptually!
Bless you!!!
2008/12/1 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
> Caveat for Candice: my OE goes back to 1970, plus a few years thereafter. So
> I am no more up to date. And my knowledge, which time has long since eroded,
> was never all that vast.
>
> Caveat for everyone else: I was a poor student of phonology (OE and OHG),
> finding it somewhat Grimm: more snafu than gyfu in my case.
>
> Anyway here goes.
>
> First orthography: the insular (or Irish Latin, < Old Irish) symbol at issue
> is written 'G' when capitalised and like a 'g' but with the two loops open
> (ie a tailed 'z') when in lower case. It covers various phonemes. The two
> that are relevant here are nowadays contrasted in the Mod E minimal pair
> velar 'gear' and palatal 'year'. The phoneme /h/ (from W Germanic /?/) can
> be represented by either 'h' or 'g'; hence Mod E suffix '-gh'. Another
> phoneme becomes the stop in the '-ng' of English gerunds and is graphed in
> ME and in Middle Scots with a slightly different tailed 'z', which survives
> in the Mod E orthography and pronunciation of, say, 'Menzies Campbell'. And
> so on...
>
> And so on, in fact, to sound. As implied above, the issue isn't voiced
> versus unvoiced: /g/ and /k/ are voiced and unvoiced velar plosives in
> Modern English, and as such they are quite distinct both from /dg/ and /ch/
> and from /y/. It's position in the mouth.
>
> So, with all that in mind, here is the first line of Beowulf:
>
> Hwæt we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
>
> The 'g' of 'Gar-Dena' (everything up to -na is capitalised in the MS) is
> written as capital G, whereas the 'g' of 'gear-dagum' is in lower case, as
> are all the 'g's of line 13, including that of 'God', irrespective of
> phoneme.
>
> So why alliterate them? Well the visual link is irrelevant. (Campbell notes
> that the runes gyfu and cen, though more systematically used for back and
> front respectively, are also swapped about.) The modern argument is, I
> think, that it's similar sounding allophones of these two quite different
> phonemes that actually make it possible: even though one was back positioned
> and velar and the other front positioned and palatal, both were spirant or
> fricative in terms of how they sounded. Consider, by analogy, the three
> 'c' sounds of 'keep', 'cool' and 'calm' which move from the front of the
> mouth to the back. We normally ignore this distinction but it's there.) Wren
> in 1958 (my Klaeber has gone missing for the moment) makes the same point
> more or less:
>
> 'The alliterating g of [line 1] shows that at any early date the front
> ['year'] and the back ['gear'] positions of g still retained their original
> fricative or spirant quality; for it is this spirantal quality which makes
> the alliteration. Pronounced in the later classical Anglo-Saxon of Ælfric's
> time, when the MS was copied, there would be no true alliteration.'
>
> You can then go on (that is, One can; I certainly can't) to assert some sort
> of dating of the Original Oral Text, based upon this principle.
>
> Grimm's Law, Verner's Law... and now Walker's Law: Just this one post and
> then stop.
>
> CW
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Dozens have gone missing, the decision taken is Elsewhere.
> but yes, yes we remain as poetry, pure immateriality.
> in the name of the 'current state of things' they murmur to us:
> "we went for a stroll, now it's a question of marching!" But this
> stroll of ours has brought us a long way off, and now
> the horizon is behind us.
>
> (from *Materiali*, Indiani Metropolitani 1977
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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