At 5:44:55 PM on Saturday, December 6, 2008, Richard
Wordingham wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
> <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
[...]
>> The word siècle "century" is regular as regards the vowel
>> e > iè it's irregular because it should be siègle with g.
> Shouldn't it be *sieille or *sile if it were regular?
It actually produced OFr <seule>. To quote Pope:
In early borrowed words /g/ (< /g/ and /k/), if brought in
contact with /l/ by the fall of unstressed /u/, was opened
and vocalised to /w/ (cf. sauma < sagma, § 359): O.F.
reul& < reg(u)la, teul& < te:gula > tiul&, seul& <
**sEg(u)lU, saeculum.
Without that, it should probably have been *sieille or the
like; you can probably blame <siècle> on Alcuin's reform of
Latin pronunciation, which was largely based on orthography
and so would have restored /k/ but not necessarily have done
much with the vowels.
Brian