re Voiced affricatives in English dialects [was: re [tied] Animate

On the "Saxon -v- Anglian" dichotomy, it's worth recalling that (a)
the areas are close to Wales and Cornwall (if Devon is thrown in),
the eponym of the royal house of Wessex had a Welsh name, the DNA
research carried out for the BBC in connection with their "Blood of
the Vikings" series last year showed a higher level of similarities
in the DNA tested in the south-west of England to that tested in
Wales than elsewhere in England, there was a chiropodist who asserted
that there are similarities in bone form between her local (ie from
families with long roots in the area) patients in Herefordshire and
Worcestershire and those in Wales, but not between those patients
from outside the counties and people in Wales.

Not sure what to make of this. I''m not sure how far the voicing of
stops which is one of the features of the change form Brittonic to
Welsh (eg Lat. 'medicus' (?or Br 'medicos') -> W 'meddyg') was areal.
And I'm certainly not suggesting that 'language is in the genes'!

Best wishes,


Gordon
<gordonselway@...>

At 12:07 UT this afternoon tgpedersen wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, [I] wrote:
>> A discursive contribution, only to point out that the voiced
>> affricatives [z for standard s, v for f, the 'th' in eg 'thumb' as in
>> 'the', not as std. 'throat'] which it is suggested occur in Somerset
>> (and I suppose they may still do so in out-of-the-way parts of the
>> county) were once very much more widespread in south-western/western
>> English, but have been receding at perhaps five km a decade for the
>> past couple of centuries.
>
>> I do not recall it occurring in the speech of my father, or of my
>> uncles fifty years ago, though some
>> archaic features were present. Text books suggest iirc that it
>> stopped being the usual pronunciation in the Forest of Dean and south
>> Herefordshire about 150 years ago, and in Worcestershire a century
>> earlier, though as I have none to hand I cannot verify my references.
>
>> The phenomenon may occur with the initial consonant of a component of
>> a word: 'Zummerzet'.
>
>> With kind regards,
>
>
>> Gordon Selway
>> <gordonselway@...>
>
>Thanks for the information! Was it once widespread enough that one
>might hypothetically characterise it as a distinguishing feature
>between Saxon and "Anglian", given the historic settlements of those
>groups?
>
>Torsten
>
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