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Joodles thanks I bow to your superior Yogh Cheers Patrick it is freezing here and VB has just bitten(or was it a deep scratch?) he is such a yoghy animal Janet again! -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Judy Prince Sent: 01 December 2008 20:58 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Beowulf's Yogh Hey, I knew that! Just would've explained a little differently, like this: Yogh- yogh- yogh Yogh- yogh- yogh Yogh- yogh- yogh - yogh- yogh Yogh- yogh- yogh - yogh- yogh- yogh- yogh - Yogh- yogh- yogh - yogh- yogh- yogh- yogh - 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: > > Hw�t 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 �lfric'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 > No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com Version: 8.0.173 / Virus Database: 270.9.12/1822 - Release Date: 01/12/2008 08:23