Re: Danish dispalatalisation

But the fact that the French-derived <sky>, with its unetymological spelling, was affected suggests that the spelling did play a role. It often does in cross-dialectal borrowings if the borrowers are literate. They may not know the exact distribution of the loan-pronunciation in the donor dialect (which is not their own), so they will use any clues available to them, also the spelling, to figure it out. Children trying to switch from a non-rhotic to a rhotic accent of US English will probably be more likely than adults to rely on roughly reconstructed sound correspondences, and to use hypercorrect forms like "guard" for "god" (applying the rule of thumb "non-rhotic /a(:)/ -> rhotic /ar/") -- the sort of thing that accounts for your <skersánt> example. Fully literate adults may be more spelling-conscious and more likely to be guided by generalisations like "orthographic <r> -> /r/".

Anyway, thanks for putting me so fully in the picture.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 1:26 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Daci

[Torsten, 2:] ... The reason we don't find any <skokolaD&> is that the general uncertainty was between the <sj-> of the dialect that palatalized and the <sk-> of those that didn't. And no dialect produced *<sko-> from <sjo-> (On the other hand, Adam Oehlenschlæger (note the name! Our national composers before Nielsen had names like Weyse, Heise, Kunzen and Kuhlau), our local Mickiewicz, notes in his memoirs that some old people in his childhood pronounced <sjorte> and <sjold> for present <skjorte> "shirt" and <skjold> "shield", which would tend to corroborate your claim). However, in 19th century low Copenhagen for <sersjánt> you find <skersánt> "sergeant" (<sersjánt> -> <sjersjánt> -> <sjersánt> with sj- alternating with sk-.