I wouldn't be surprised. Some linguists
attribute the origin of English /h/-dropping to the French-English
contact situation back in Middle English times (Jim Milroy, 1983, "On the
sociolinguistic history of /h/-dropping in English"; Milroy finds abundant
evidence of /h/ becoming unstable in English as early as AD
1200). About the sixteenth century (h) began to function as a
prominent sociolinguistic variable, which led to its diffusion back into those
"cultivated" accents that had lost it (and its hypercorrect introduction in
words of French origin), but /h/-dropping was not strongly stigmatised until the
18th century.
Note that despite having absorbed a
Frankish component French eventually dropped not only the volatile "<h>
muet" of Latin origin (lost already in Proto-Romance) but also the secondarily
acquired Germanic "<h> aspiré".
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 1:17 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: "Irmin" and Hermes
I vaguely recall having seen in an exposition of Dutch
dialects that some very southern (ie. in France) moribund dialects of Flemish
also dropped /h/?