On 2009-03-31 01:21, Rick McCallister wrote:
> I'm thinking about other common ea- words such as beard, dear, dearth,
> heart, hearth, etc. For English ear, we have German Öhr, Latin
> auriculus, right? But the others don't seem to fall in place. Is this
> due to the initial consonant or is -ea- just an ill-considered spelling
> convention here?
The modern spelling is a poor guide to the history of such words. As
Brian has already pointed out, they are a mixed bag.
The vowel of <beard> comes from short *a, which underwent Anglo-Frisian
"brightening" to *æ, then Old English breaking to _short_ <ea> (= [æA]),
and then Late OE lengthening before a voiced homorganic cluster. The
resulting <e:a> developed into ME E:, etc., thus falling together with
words like <ear> or <hear> (with "etymological" <e:a> from *au).
<dear> has been given a non-etymological spelling, presumably in order
to distinguish it from <deer> (both had the same OE long diphthng,
namely <e:o> from PGmc. *eu).
<heart> had PGmc. *e, broken to short <eo> in OE heorte. In the
transition from OE to ME the vowel was monopthongised again and 'heart'
became ME herte, which was affected with the pre-/r/ lowering of /e/;
the spelling is again aberrant (other words in the same lexical set,
like <star>, <fart>, <starve> etc., usually have <ar> today). Another
case of homograph avoidance involving cervids? Why, let the stricken
deer go weep, the hart ungalled play...
Piotr