Godne dæg,

          You’re right about the first <g> not being a plosive. But the second one in <gealdor> was also a palatal fricative.

The modern English word <gallows> is not a direct descendant of West Saxon Old English <gealga> (which would have given something like *<yallowe>. <Gallows> is derived from Anglian Old English dialects. Anglian went through different early fronting a backing processes where the phoneme /æ/ is concerened. So in areas where the <a> was further back> /g/ developed into a plosive, and where /æ/ was fronted /g/ developed into a fricative.

 

Dan 

 

 

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Daniel Bray [mailto:dbray@...]
Gesendet: Freitag, 20. Juni 2003 09:06
An: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
Betreff: Re: [norse_course] Re: SIGALDRY

 

Heill, Haukur!

Well, the first 'g' (in sige/syge) is definitely not a plosive, and seems to have disappeared in later forms. However, the 'g' in gealdor seems to have remained a plosive, and there are examples where this has occurred in other words (ie. gealga "gallows" and geador "to-gether"). I cannot say whether this is dialectical, a result of ON influence or just an idiosyncracy of OE.

Kveðja,

Dan

Haukur Thorgeirsson wrote:

Heill, Danr!

Consulting my Old English Dictionary (or rather, the glossary in 

Mitchell and Robinson), I think the best interpretation is sige-gealdor, 

cognate with the ON sig-galdr "battle magic" that Haukur suggested. 

I should note that I don't think the compound 'siggaldr' is actually

attested so we should mark it with an asterisk; *siggaldr. The closest

attested word seems to be 'sighljóð' meaning "battle sound".

I'm not fluent in Old English but it seems to me that in 'sige-gealdor'

neither of the g's is a plosive. I assume that when you read 'sigaldry'

you use a stop for the g. So my question is: Does it come from another

dialect? Does it come from Old Norse? Or is the modern word a "learned"

borrowing from the old language that doesn't show the historical phonetic

development?

And of course we could still be dealing with something different :)

Kveðja,

Haukr

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School of Studies in Religion A20

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"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

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