Re: Scientist's etymology vs. scientific etymology

--- Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:

> --- 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/.

I've read that Middle English did adopt French /y/ but
the source didn't go into details, just that within
200 years or so, it unpacked the sound or mutated it
to /u/.

> >
> > >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?
>

English acquired initial /z-/ and /v-/ from French.
That's indisputable. Gaelic acquired /p/ from Latin,
French and English --although Torsten is trying to
throw a monkey wrench into this by claiming a
substrate /p/ or whatnot.
French /R/ has spead to Germanic languages.
English /S/ has spread to Spanish --most people now
say /So/ and /SopiN/ instead of /CHo/ and /CHopiN/ for
show and shopping. /S/ already existed as a regional
allophone for /CH/ or in indigenous substrate in some
areas, but most everybody pronounces it in loanwords.
English glottal stop exists in hypercorrect Spanish
and is widespread in Salvadoran Spanish where <Santa
Ana> comes out as /santa?ana/ and not standard
/santaana/. You hear the glottal stop a lot in US
Spanish, of course.
Porteño Spanish has /S/ for <ll> probably due to the
influence of Portuguese --see Spanish lluvia vs.
Portuguese chuva.