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

ehlsmith <ehlsmith@...> wrote:

--- 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

-- Well, I have studied the history of the English language in university, along with Old English and Middle English.  "mood", "good", "hood", "flood", and "blood" come from Old English mo:d, go:d, ho:d, flo:d, and blo:d, but I made a small error with "food": it comes from Old English fo:da with an -a.  Recently I have realized that "mood" and "food" both begin with labials, while "good" and "hood" begin with gutturals, and "blood" and "flood" have /l/ preceding the vowel.  So perhaps it was a conditioned change.  But "weak" and "steak" originally rhymed (from Scandinavian *weik- and *steik-), "break" and "leak" originally rhymed (from Old English brecan and Scandinavian leka), "great" and "threat" originally rhymed (from Old English gre:at and thre:at, though "threat" may have been influenced by "threaten", Old English thre:atnian, where the -n- can have shortened the preceding vowel - but why doesn't "great" rhyme with "beat" (Old English be:atan)?).  I'm sure dialect mixture had something to do with it, but I have studied Middle English dialects and from what I have read, they do not account for the variations observed in Modern English.

Further examples: "hot", "goat", and "boat", from Old English ha:t, ga:t, ba:t -- why does "hot" have a different vowel?  And I'm quite sure that "hot" is the only word in which Old English a: becomes this vowel!  But look at "one" from Old English a:n vs. "alone" originally "all one", Old English eall a:n.  Why does "one" sound like "wun"?  It is not its initial position, since "oats" comes from Old English a:te and "oar" from Old English a:r.

To me, these are further examples of the strangeness of Modern English in relation to Old English, and in comparison with other Indo-European languages as they relate to the older versions of their languages. 

Andrew