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

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 42349
Date: 2005-11-30

At 3:15:11 PM on Tuesday, November 29, 2005, Rob wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
> wrote:

>> At 8:47:13 PM on Thursday, November 24, 2005, Rob wrote:

[...]

>>> 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.

> Sorry about that; of course I should have used brackets
> when talking about phonetics. I agree that [æ&] seems
> likelier than [æa]. However, why was <ea> used and not
> <æa> vel. sim.?

One reason, I suspect, was simply the observable
unwillingness to use trigraphs. Since <æ> is transparently
<a> + <e> and was often written <ae> early on, <æa> may have
been avoided for the same reason.

>>> 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.

> Something else I'm wondering is how a distinction between
> <ea> and <éa> (presumably the lengthened form of the
> former) could have been maintained (or was it?).

Actually, it seems to be better to think of the so-called
long OE diphthongs as bimoric, comparable to ordinary long
vowels, the short diphthongs then being composed of two half
morae occupying the length of a short vowel. At any rate,
OE short /æA/ (<ea>) merged with /æ/ as early ME /æ/, while
OE long /æA/ (<éa>) merged with /æ:/ as EME /æ:/. In short
order this /æ/ merged with /A/ in a vowel commonly spelled
<a>; it was perhaps [a] (and I suppose may in practice have
varied from [æ] to [A]). I'll write it /a/. Ignoring
conditional developments, this yields PDE /æ/ (e.g., <hæt>
'hat', <feax> 'head, head of hair, "fax"', <seax> 'knife,
"sax"'). A bit later /æ:/ was raised, and it's usual to
write ME /E:/. (The most obvious conditional change occurs
before /r/, as in <earm> 'arm' and <hearm> 'harm'.)

In general ME /e:/ and /E:/ have fallen together in PDE
(e.g., <meet> and <meat>), though not without some hiccups
in the 17th century. There's evidence that in the standard
language at that time ME /E:/ and /a:/ had fallen together
(as [e:]); had that state of affairs continued, it's <meat>
and <mate> that would now be homophones, not <meat> and
<meet>. Apparently there was another sociolect that
replaced the early 17th century standard in the 18th
century.

In general, then, the modern reflexes are /æ/ and /i:/.

Brian