On 2007-05-14 15:34, tgpedersen wrote:
> Evidence? Hopefully not e silentio? Remember Kuhn's point that with
> time literacy spreads downwards in society resulting in material
> appearing in the records from low sociolects in which it might have
> existed indeterminably long before.
But this is what happened in ME times after the suppression of the
Anglo-Saxon "intelligentsia" by the Normans and the collapse of the Old
English literary traditions. Middle English had no standard and no fixed
ortography, the scribes often wrote "by the ear", and all the regional
dialects are represented in the corpus, including styles and registers
far too "low" to have occurred in OE texts. If the /f/-pronunciations
had existed then, that would have been the best time for their first
appearance in English spelling. But as far as I know, the earliest
examples of <f> for <gh> come from the 15th c., the time of transition
between ME and ModE, when /x/ was being eliminated from the phonological
inventory of most dialects by being either vocalised or replaced by /f/.
It seems that the development was Vx > Vwx (the diphthongisation is well
visible in the ME spellings retained in ModE) > Vw (x-loss) or VwH > Vf
(wH = voiceless w).
> Forgive me for thinking it proves my point instead. Any particular
> geographical distribution of x -> f ?
It occurs throughout England. Words like <drought> often have /f/ in
traditional dialects. Dialectal words like <broft> are (or at least used
to be) particularly common in the conservative dialects of the West
Country (esp. Devonshire, Cornwall).
>> In the accents of northern England and most of the Midlands there's
>> no butter/butcher split. In the south, the words that preserve /U/
>> have something in common phonologically (in most cases /p, b, f, w/
>> before the vowel, /l/ or a palatoalveolar [sometimes an alveolar]
>> after it), but the /U/ preserving lexical class contains Germanic
>> words as well, cf. <wolf, wood, full, bull, wool>.
>
> And that would be consistent with the existence of a gradually
> germanicized originally NWBlock speaking underclass. Dutch has o: ->
> u: (spelt oe) too, eg doen /du:n/ "do".
A GRADUALLY GERMANICISED NWB underclass in the 17th century? This time
the change can be dated very precisely using phonological evidence (it's
relative chronology with respect to other changes) combined with the
direct testimony of 17th-c. grammarians.
Piotr