I disagree with the comment about "Phonological Nonsense".

There are literally hundreds of precedents of vowels sliding over each other
to create spelling differences - and I'm only talking about New Yorkers!

Let's not forget these brothers:
"No", "Nay", "Nah", "Naw", and "Nuh-uh"
(though one could argue the latter uses a glottal stop and derives from the
spanish "Nada" - but that's a reach)

-Laz

----- Original Message -----
From: "konrad_oddsson" <konrad_oddsson@...>
To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2003 11:55 PM
Subject: [norse_course] more about the brothers 'ok' and 'auk' -
phonological funnies


> In Old English, we see the word 'êac' listed as an adverb with the
> meaning 'also'. Old English 'êa' is almost always equivalent to Old
> Norse 'au'. Given that Old English and Old Norse both derive from
> what many are calling North West Germanic, we would have to conclude
> that 'auk' is the elder brother. However, their are several problems
> with this position: 1) 'o' from 'au' makes phonological nonsense and
> is without precedent in Old Norse phonology 2) Old English 'auk' is
> listed as an adverb rather than as a conjunction 3) both the brothers
> 'ok' and 'auk' can be found somewhere in every dialect of Old Norse
> from about 800-1250. If we look to Gotlandic, which otherwise shows
> many archaic features not found in other dialects, we see both 'auk'
> and 'ok' on everything from Viking Age runestones to manuscripts of
> the 13th century. Both brothers also make regular appearances on Old
> Danish and Swedish runestones. In the West Norse domains of western
> Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, we see that brother 'ok' is clearly
> in charge by the end of the Viking Age. Nevertheless, 'auk' appears
> as late as the 13th century in West Norse domains. As Moltke pointed
> out, the early Viking Age spelling 'åuk' clearly points to the pro-
> nounciation 'ok', which would also seem clear from manuscripts of
> West Norse where 'ok' is almost universal. Nevertheless, 'auk' does
> occur in West Norse. The late 12th or early 13th century Gotlandic
> writer of the Guta Lagh (laws of the Goths) shows no preference for
> either brother, writing both 'auk' and 'ok' regularly. Nowhere else
> in Old Norse do we see this strange parallelism of 'au' and 'o'. In
> fact, the more we examine the brothers 'auk' and 'ok', the stranger
> they seem. Did they really have the same parent? Is one of them an
> adopted brother? We know that early Indo-European languages used an
> enclitic form of 'and', usually appearing at the end of a compound.
> It is, therefore, possible that the brothers 'auk' and 'ok' each had
> a separate parent: 1) as an enclitic 2) as a free conjuction proper.
> Unfortunately, the brothers' East Gothic cousin 'jah' has little or
> nothing to say about his cousins' parentage, and Old English cousin
> 'and' seems positively unrelated. ok/auk/êak/and/jah more from the
> phonological funnies later. Your contributions to the phonological
> funny pages are welcome.
>
> Regards,
> Konrad.
>
>
> Sumir hafa kvæði...
> ...aðrir spakmæli.
>
> - Keth
>
> Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
>
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