From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 38925
Date: 2005-06-25
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:In the western area there is also a zone with
>
>> There's a famous article the name and authos of which I forgot
>which
>> investigates the distribution of 'huis'/'muis' "house"/"mouse" in
>> Dutch; the vowel developped this way: *u: > *ü: > *ui > *äÜ (vel
>> sim.!).
>>
>> The interesting part was that in some places it
>was 'huis' "house",
>> but 'mu:s' "mouse". In other words, since the "mouse" word belonged
>to
>> a 'loer' sphere, it stayed behind in the prestige-driven
>development
>> of the vowel.
>
>
>It's famous because Leonard Bloomfield discussed it in _Language_ in
>the chapter on "Dialect Geography". (In my edition the map is on p.
>328), on the basis of work bij G. Kloeke. As Torsten relates, it is
>about two innovations: an automatic fronting of long *u: to ü: and a
>subsequent diphthongization of ü: to [öü] or [äü] or something along
>those lines paralleled by a diphthongization of *i: to [ei] and
>comparable with similar diphthongizations found in English and
>German.
>
>The eastern periphery retains the original *u:, all the rest has
>fronting. Most of the fronting area has undergone diphthongization
>too, but there are large peripheral areas on both the east and the
>west that still have monophthongs. Between the eastern monophthongal
>area and the archaic area with retention of *u: there is a large area
>with inconsistent reflexes showing innovating items with fronting
>(hü:s) on an archaic non-fronting background (mu:s).