Re: Scientist's etymology vs. scientific etymology

From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 59181
Date: 2008-06-10

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
>
> English lost /y/ twice --once in Old English for
> native words and once in Middle English for French
> words, so it did pick up French <u> as /y/.

That's not what I have understood from the books I have read (I can't
give a citation because I have only a portion photocopied of the book
on hand), which say that only those dialects which already had /y/(
either, as in the west midlands, from preserved OE /y/, or, in the
north, a new /y:/ which developed out of OE /o:/) were the ones which
adopted OF /y/ and /y:/ as such. All the dialects which no longer had
the /y/ sounds borrowed OF /y:/ as the diphthong /eu/ which they had
in words like <trew>, "true"; OF /y/ was mostly borrowed as /u/ but
occasionally as /i/.
>
> >So if Latin,
> > being a descendant of PIE, didn't have any /a/
> > inherited from PIE, why
> > then did they adopt an entirely new unfamiliar
> > sound?
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> >
> Languages pick uo unfamiliar sounds all the time
>
That's a very broad statement. I understand that in more recent times
this occurs, e.g. in Finnish which apparently now has /b/ and /g/ in
words of foreign origin, which it never had before, or /g/ in words of
foreign origin in Czech, but before the modern period (which can serve
as an idea of what might have happened prehistorically), in historic
times, what examples are there?

Andrew
Andrew