> For a start the Anglo-Saxon poets wrote in what was outdated language at
> the
> time, not too surprising, conservatism in literary dialects isn't unusual,
> however this encompassed the Great g-change, even worse than the Vowel
> Shift, when 'g' as in Ge-this Ge-that started to soften into 'j' (as in
> German pronounced jerman) and then, even worse, into 'y' (second cousin of
> yogh) as 'y-fallen' etc.
I hadn't thought of (known) that, dave -- the sequence would then be the
3e-past tense Old English indicator shifts from a 'g' to a 'j'
pronunciation, and by the time of Spenser we get a totally erroneous
y-fallen [e.g.] (pronounced eye-fallen) based on a confusion of the soft
yogh with y-pronounced-eye rather than yogh-pronounced-yi.
Have I got this right? My head is spinning.
:-(
> Hence did Great Chaos flap its wings.
To right, and not in the luminous void in vain either.
Robin
> The end result was English, the authentic global mess. Babel, have we got
> news for you.
>
> Best
>
> Dave
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 9:42 AM
> Subject: Re: IE radicals (response to Robin)
>
>
>> dave:
>>
>> > Seriously, if just a relatively recent, in historical terms, matter, as
>> > how
>> > Scots orthography was meant to be pronounced, let alone your
> Bewilderments
>> > on Beowulf, how on middleearth can anyone make confident pronouncements
> on
>> > Indo-European?
>>
>> Weeeell .... There are two different issues here. I think I was simply
>> confused over the spear-Danes. There isn't a real problem (leaving aside
>> Twizzlechisled) over how the yogh-transcribed-as-z was pronounced -- 'tis
> an
>> orthographic rather than a pronunciatory conundrum.
>>
>> But it's late at night (early in the morning) and I've still to get my
> head
>> round the article from the American Heritage Dictionary that Jon
> referenced
>> (and scratch an itch that turns on an A3 sheet of paper where I did a
>> ray-diagram of about 24 words, apparently unconnected, all stemming from
> the
>> same Indo-European root, but curse me if I know where it is).
>>
>> AND I've just had a transatlantic phonecall asking me to chase a
>> reference
>> in an MS in the Bodleian and I don't even bloody HAVE a reader's ticket
>> to
>> there. (Anyone on the list have one, or know anyone who has? Help!)
> Then
>> there's the current Jimmy Crichton poem. And photographs to print out.
> And
>> ongoing computer problems ...
>>
>> HOWL!!!!
>>
>> I can write no more, my brains are broken.
>>
>> R. feeling mischievously machiavellian
>
