From: Torsten
Message: 67988
Date: 2011-08-18
>Latin poetry shows a similar rule of elision of colliding word-final and word-initial vowels as Italian does (try matching the text 'La donna รจ mobile' to the music; the -a goes). So does French, completely disregarding original Latin h- in the process. But Germanic loaned h- stays, not as a sound, but as an elision-breaker ('Le Havre', not 'L'Havre'). I was wondering if the H- of Heruli might have served the same purpose in late Latin, with emerging articles (thus 'le Erulo', not 'l'Erulo', 'lji Eruli', not 'i Eruli' (vel sim.))?
> W dniu 2011-08-07 19:27, stlatos pisze:
>
> > OE heorl \ eorl corr. to L Heruli , so that is one with ev., and
> > ev. that the version w/out h- became much more common. The giants
> > Ymir , Hymir , and Gymir show the variation.
>
> Much more common indeed. <heorl> is a late 10th-century hapax, while
> <eorl> occurs hundreds of times in Anglo-Saxon texts of all ages, so
> obviously their status is very unequal and nothing justifies placing
> <heorl> berore <eorl>, as you do above. At the end of Old English,
> Cockney-style h-dropping was already beginning to spread in England,
> especially in Mercia, and we have examples of both <h>-omission and
> unhistorical <h>-insertion. All that has precious little to do with
> the interpretation of Germanic names recorded hundreds of years
> earlier. Incidentally, the "Heruli" were first mentioned in th 3rd
> century, when even upper-class Romans surely dropped their aitches
> all the time.
>
> Ymir anf Gymir were nor even the same fellow.
>