At 8:47:13 PM on Thursday, November 24, 2005, Rob wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
> wrote:
>> At 4:49:12 PM on Thursday, November 24, 2005, Rob wrote:
[...]
>>> What do you mean by "breaking"?
>> Here it's the diphthongization of earlier /æ/ to /æa/.
> I see. If /æa/ was indeed the phonetic value of <ea>,
It obviously isn't being offered as such: those are slants,
not square brackets. Phonetically [æa] is a possibility,
I suppose, but [æ&] seems likelier.
> that is. I think it may rather have been /E/.
I presume that you mean [E]. This slot is already occupied
by /e/, and the two follow different trajectories in ME and
PDE.
In any case, there's no real doubt that the OE diphthongs
were just that. Come to think of it, part of the evidence
is breaking itself: it's most easily explained as the
introduction of an epenthetic vowel between a front vowel
and a velar or velarized consonant (/lC/, /rC/, or /x/),
much as [mIlk] becomes [mIok] when the /l/ is sufficiently
velarized.
Brian