Re[2]: [tied] Re: English Young (was: Indo-Iranian Vowel Collapse)

At 3:40:02 AM on Friday, November 25, 2005, Piotr
Gasiorowski wrote:

> Rob wrote:

>>>>> b) Breaking after 'c' is West Saxon, and breaking
>>>>> before 'l' is non-Anglian.

>>>> 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>,
>> that is. I think it may rather have been /E/.

> Actually, post-palatal breaking (as suggested by Richard)
> doesn't apply here.

Ah, thanks: I was wondering about that, but hadn't got round
to sorting it out. (<sigh> There's too much of this that I
don't have on tap; at least on a good day I usually know
what to look for.)

> It affected originally _back_ vowels preceded by /j/
> (spelt <g>) or /s^/ (<sc>), e.g.

> *skurta- > *skort > sceort 'short'
> *juka- > *jok > geoc 'yoke'

> There's some controversy about the value of the <eo>
> spelling, which may be either phonetic (representing a
> genuine diphthong) or diacritic (indicating the palatal
> pronunciation of <sc> or <g>).

Since Rob seems to have doubts about the diphthongs, perhaps
it would be as well to clarify: the question as to whether
<eo> represents a genuine diphthong applies very
specifically to this context (<geo>, <sceo>).

I have to agree with Lass that the diacritic interpretation
is elegant, but I admit that I've not read a serious
counter-argument.

[...]

Brian