On 2007-05-14 10:43, tgpedersen wrote:
> But the fact that this is just one development of Middle English x
> points to the change being of dia- or sociolect origin, or it would have
> been a general rule.
Even if dialectal (cf. traditional West Country "boft, broft, thoft" for
<bought, brought, thought>), it took place in the 15th century and so
proves my point. It is still reflected in many standard pronunciations
-- note, in particular, that some words now spelt with <f>, such as
<dwarf> and <draft> used to have /x/, and we have the pronunciation /f/
for <gh> not only in <cough, trough, enough, rough, tough, chough,
slough, clough, laugh, laughter, draught>, but also in many placenemes
and several surnames (<Brough, Hough, Loughborough, Hougham>, etc.)
> Cf preservation of /u/ (Midlands?) in the
> non-Germanic p-words put, push, pull.
In the accents of northern England and most of the Midlands there's no
butter/butcher split. In the south, the words that preserve /U/ have
something in common phonologically (in most cases /p, b, f, w/ before
the vowel, /l/ or a palatoalveolar [sometimes an alveolar] after it),
but the /U/preserving lexical class contains Germanic words as well, cf.
<wolf, wood, full, bull, wool>.
Piotr