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

Good stuff, Brian. And the political side may show in the way Sweet
(iirc) treats the dialects. Even though there seems to be a very
large overlap between SW and SW Midland (and less with NW Midland,
and less again with E Midland), they are treated as different. But
in the EDD, for which of course the boundaries of the AS heptarchy
had no special significance, the SW Midlands are part in Wright's
south-western English area, with the rest in their own 'Western
English' zone. I do not recall why the distinction was made: the
amateur reports (in booklets I've only ever seen in the Worcester
reference library or on its lending shelves) suggest that the speech
of the Avon Valley (SW) and Teme Valley (Western) were very close in
the second half of the 19th century.

I shall have to dig Jackson out of the pile of books and papers it is
supporting to read the argument for the 5th century intervocal
lenition. Of course, it also occurs initially in sequences where the
stop is intervocal [eg *sinda + ]

Best wishes,


Gordon Selway
<gordonselway@...>

At 12:02 pm -0400 06/09/2003, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>At 5:10:45 PM on Friday, September 5, 2003, Gordon Selway wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>On the other hand, Middle English voicing of /f-/ is found not only
>in the Southwest and southwest Midlands but also, and I believe more
>strongly, in Kentish, which in Bedan
>tradition would derive ultimately from Jutish dialects. But (1)
>Orrin Robinson, at least, takes the view that most OE dialect
>differentiation was political in origin and occurred in England, and
>(2) I have no idea how far back the voicing can be traced.
>
>> 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'!
>
>Jackson (LHEB) dates British lenition to the later 5th century. It
>would also have affected the British pronunciation of Latin, so that
>Latin <medicus> would already have been /meðigus/. But this was
>voicing of medial and final stops, not of initial fricatives.
>
>Brian