[tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:

>
> Well, you certainly seem to have taken exception to my comments

about English! Below are some replies to your comments:

>
> david_russell_watson <liberty@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > May I make mention of English "mood" "food", "hood", "good",
> > "blood", "flood", with three different vowels, all from
> > words which originally rhymed. What reason is there for that,
>
> For specific answers to each of these, you would have to
> ask an English expert - I'm not particularly interested in
> English myself - but I don't think that such a situation
> is really all that unusual.
> Why don't you think such a situation is unusual? Can you come up

with any truly similar examples from any other language in the world?

>
>
> > and what other language has undergone a similar threefold
> > change? Or "weak" and "steak" with originally rhyming vowels,
> > or "break" and "leak" with originally rhyming vowels, or
> > "great" and "threat" with originally rhyming vowels - and the
> > list goes on. What other language has similar phenomena?
>
> Without knowing all of the sound changes in the history of
> English, I have no way of knowing whether some or all of
> your examples have phonetic or analogical explanations or
> not. Although even those that don't may well be explained
> by dialect mixture or incomplete sound changes?
>
>
>
> My point here was not primarily that these examples are

inexplicable (though they may well be), it is that they serve as
examples of how English is atypical of Indo-European languages. Only
English among Indo-European languages has examples like these - where
originally rhyming words have diverged, with no apparent reason. And
yes, you could say that all that says is that English is different in
the same way that the word "German" is different from the
word "English". But these examples say something else - they say
that the word "English" sometimes sounds like "Inglish", sometimes
like "Anglish", or sometimes like "Onglish", even though there was
only one original form "Englisc" in the parent language,
whereas "German" always sounds like "Jurman". Do you understand what
I am saying here?

Hi Andrew,

I am no expert either, but I have to ask how certain is it that those
words actually rhymed once? You would certainly have reason to
believe so if the spelling conventions of English all crystalized in
one dialect area at one time. But is my understanding (possibly
wrong) that that was not the case.

Regards,
Ned Smith