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/?

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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
>
>
I was wondering if the /h/ in the Romans' rendering of Germanic names
didn't serve a similar purpose to that of the French "/h/ aspiré". In
Latin poetry, the sequence '-V V-' is pronounced as -V- with one
short vowel. Germanic (and, I think, especially the dialects which
didn't go þ- -> ð-, f- -> v, s- -> z-) uses a "knacklaut", a sudden
onset of the vocal chords, before word-initial vowels (note also that
in Old Norse all words beginning vowels, no matter which, are
considered to alliterate; as if they began with same (laryngeal-like)
consonant.

I heard somewhere that the proper Classical pronunciation of

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

would be

Dúlcet decóru~st pro pátria móri

Cf also Italian:

La donna é mobile

One vowel too many; same solution.

So perhaps the Romans used the h- to show that following vowel was
not to be elided? Or perhaps even some of them heard that onset of
the vocal chords as a h-like consonant?

I would suspect the h-insecurity started in 1066, as anyone who ever
eard a Frenchman speaking Henglish will understand.

Torsten