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Science Forum Index » Languages Forum » The "u" and "v" in older written English is...
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| Trond Engen... |
 Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 7:14 pm |
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Trond Engen skreiv:
Quote: Not much of a reference but perhaps useful as a hint of something. I'll
try to refine my Google search tomorrow.
.... and days went by and it was all forgotten when suddenly:
<https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/pdfs/07-Kostakis.pdf>
It's not the article I was looking for, though. This one is strongly
supportive of a French origin of the uvular r in Germanic, but sees the
Romance uvular r as internal development(s). But I haven't had time to
read it thoroughly.
--
Trond Engen
- waking the dead |
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| Richard Wordingham... |
| Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 4:57 pm |
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"John Atkinson" <johnacko at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:_ygZj.3562$IK1.3454 at (no spam) news-server.bigpond.net.au...
Quote: "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0602 at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote...
"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote...
Richard Wordingham <jrw0602 at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
A great many English speakers do not know how to pronounce
"won" - they pronounce it with a short 'o'. (I was
going to write '/wA.n/ or equivalent', but that is
probably less clear a statement.)
Where? I don't think that I've ever heard a native speaker
do this.
Certainly in England. I don't know whether the distribution parallels
the pronunciation of _one_ as /wA.n/ - that pronunciation is supposed to
be commoner in Northern England.
Surely in northern England they're both /wUn/ (since the STRUT/FOOT split
didn't take place there).
I presume this is a reference to Wells's labels, but they're horrible
examples, deriving from Old English _stru:t_ and _fo:t_ respectively. SUN /
PUSH might be a better description. Although Modern English has developed a
three-way split BLOOD / GOOD / MOOD, Standard /U/ has many sources. For
example, the shortening of <-ook> to /Uk/ from /u:k/ has not happened in
areas further south than the non-splitting of the short reflexes of Old
English *u, and I spent much of my childhood in a village where <glove> was
/glu:v/ (the regular development of the oblique forms of Old English
_glo:f_). This village lacked the SUN / PUSH split.
Quote: Except for people who are trying to acquire a near-RP accent, of course,
who I suppose may well approximate RP /V/ using [A.], since they don't
have [V] in their local dialect. Are these the people you're thinking of?
Unlikely, since any non-standard [A.] for [V"] occurred in words spelt with
<o>.
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| Richard Wordingham... |
| Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 5:43 pm |
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<ranjit_mathews at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:d66a440d-bacd-4b7b-8b97-54d0d736d2be at (no spam) d19g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
Quote: On May 21, 4:07 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0... at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:76553ecc-75e5-4e9d-889e-7be92eb33573 at (no spam) u6g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
Richard Wordingham wrote
A renderer of text in ISCII is supposed to be able to take text
basically encoded in one of the major scripts and automatically
transliterate it to the Roman script. I don't know how well it's
achieved
in practice - Unicode doesn't actually support reversible conversion
of
such
things from ISCII to Unicode.
Why would it not be reversible?
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/multi_sys/exist_codes.php
Consider the ISCII sequences <0xFF ATR, 0x42 DEV, 0xFF ATR, 0x41 RMN,
0xC2
SOFT TA, 0xC2 SOFT TA, 0x20 SPACE>, which has the same visual appearance
"tat " as <0x74 SMALL T, 0x61 SMALL A, 0x74 SMALL T, 0x20 SPACE> (Or
would
the former be "Tat " at the start of a line?) and as <0xFF ATR, 0x42 DEV,
0xFF ATR, 0x41 RMN, 0xC2 SOFT TA, 0xC2 SOFT TA, 0xE8 HALANT, 0x20 SPACE>.
How do you suggest they would be reversibly converted to Unicode?
When transliteration to Latin script is done with a transliteration
font like CSX, the characters remain ISCII; only the graphemes become
Latin-like. A program that converts ISCII to Unicode would not need to
know or care that a transliteration font's graphemes are similar to
Latin graphemes. It would look only at the binary codes. It would need
to know that it is converting from ISCII and it would need to know
which Unicode page it is converting to.
What do you mean by Unicode page? If you mean 'block', e.g. Devanagari
Block, Tamil Block, what you should actually mean is that it would need to
know what the default script of the ISCII text is. The ICU ISCII-to-Unicode
conversions do heed changes of script within a piece of ISCII text, but I
don't think they explictly record the transition points (what character
would they use?), so in a sequence of Devanagari, ASCII, Tamil, the
converted text would not record where the Indic text changed from Devanagari
to Tamil - yet another round-tripping failure.
A simpler example of what I have in mind is the transitions between Bengali
and Assamese could not generally be recovered in a text encoded in ASCII. A
conversion to Unicode would generally lose the changes between Bengali and
Assamese, because for the most part Unicode does not distinguish Bengali and
Assamese letter forms. Similarly, there is a loss of distinction between
transliterated Indic and ASCII, though there are many cases where the
distinction would be preserved. So while <bandh> would be ambiguous, some
at least of <rāṣṭra> would have to be from Indic - though which script is
another matter!
Quote: ASCII <tat> on a webpage can be converted to a Unicode Indic code page
by designing the source webpage with different typefaces for different
languages so that only letters in the typeface designated for Indic
text get translated.
You're using mark-up, which is not what one means by converting to Unicode.
In this case you might try <span lang="hin">...</span> for transliterated
and untransliterated Devanagari, though still haven't recovered the presence
or absence of final halant in the form rendered "tat ". You can have other
fun and games preventing reverability of conversion by using transliterated
half-forms in consonant clusters - marking as half-forms gets lost in
transliteration!
Richard. |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 11:50 pm |
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On Sat, 24 May 2008 23:40:16 +0100, Richard Wordingham
<jrw0602 at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote in
<news:HP0_j.5045$Ht.1098 at (no spam) newsfe05.ams2> in sci.lang:
[...]
Quote: Now, the RP vowel of SUN is or was [ɐ] (What's the
Kirshenbaum symbol for this?),
There isn't one, so far as I know. Unless he's changed his
system, Miguel uses [a"].
Quote: though educated Yorkshire is reportedly (J.D. O'Connor)
actually [ə] (K. [ at (no spam) ]). I therefore think that
Kirshenbaum [V"] is a reasonable approximation to both
my pronunciation and to the RP pronunciation.
Reasonable or not, it's distinctly unhelpful as a
representation of any common realization of the SUN vowel:
it *will* be interpreted as the NURSE vowel.
[...]
Brian |
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| Peter T. Daniels... |
| Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 6:56 pm |
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On May 25, 11:10pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
Quote: On Sun, 25 May 2008 16:58:56 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
news:567cc49d-7864-4022-9a7a-6f1afe58715f at (no spam) h1g2000prh.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
[...]
It's a general 17th c. development: ME /A/ became [O] after
[w]. Other examples are <warm> and <wash>.
Do the two have the same quality of vowel? [...]
Not in general. The vowel of <wash> is now RP /A./, U.S.
/O/ (which in my opinion is typically close to [A.]) or /A/.
It's /O/ in St. Louis ("Warshington University"). It's /a/ in most
places. |
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| Peter T. Daniels... |
| Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 7:05 pm |
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On May 26, 12:59am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
Quote: On Sun, 25 May 2008 21:56:05 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
news:5b68eb0b-9b05-4be5-9dd2-0165b6320dfe at (no spam) e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
On May 25, 11:10pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
On Sun, 25 May 2008 16:58:56 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
news:567cc49d-7864-4022-9a7a-6f1afe58715f at (no spam) h1g2000prh.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
[...]
It's a general 17th c. development: ME /A/ became [O] after
[w]. Other examples are <warm> and <wash>.
Do the two have the same quality of vowel? [...]
Not in general. The vowel of <wash> is now RP /A./, U.S.
/O/ (which in my opinion is typically close to [A.]) or /A/.
It's /O/ in St. Louis ("Warshington University"). It's /a/ in most
places.
In this case your /a/ is my /A/.
And let us not forget the places in which <wash> is [wOrS];
I remember that from Indiana in the early 60s.
That's what I just said. (St. Louis is just across the river from
Hoosierland and has lots of suburbs there.) |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 10:10 pm |
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On Sun, 25 May 2008 16:58:56 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_mathews at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_mathews at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
<news:567cc49d-7864-4022-9a7a-6f1afe58715f at (no spam) h1g2000prh.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
[...]
Quote: It's a general 17th c. development: ME /A/ became [O] after
[w]. Other examples are <warm> and <wash>.
Do the two have the same quality of vowel? [...]
Not in general. The vowel of <wash> is now RP /A./, U.S.
/O/ (which in my opinion is typically close to [A.]) or /A/.
Brian |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 10:38 pm |
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On Sun, 25 May 2008 23:23:29 +0100, Richard Wordingham
<jrw0602 at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote in
<news:0Gl_j.10248$ri6.8939 at (no spam) newsfe18.ams2> in sci.lang:
Quote: "Brian M. Scott" <b.scott at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote in message
news:1n3l2tap18qv5$.1fmjwmqfucxc1.dlg at (no spam) 40tude.net...
Are you telling me that PDSBE gives the spelling <hat> the
same vowel as standard German? If not, we have different
notions of what IPA [a] is.
Nearer to IPA [a] than to IPA []. An example of the reporting of the
change is at
http://coelang.tufs.ac.jp/common/pdf/research_paper9/title_10.pdf . There's
another discussion at http://www.yek.me.uk/ipadicts.html (Section 6).
I'm aware of the fact that it's moved in that direction.
I'm not convinced that it's closer to (my notion of) [a]
than it is to (my notion of) [].
Brian |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 11:59 pm |
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Guest
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On Sun, 25 May 2008 21:56:05 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
<news:5b68eb0b-9b05-4be5-9dd2-0165b6320dfe at (no spam) e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
Quote: On May 25, 11:10pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
On Sun, 25 May 2008 16:58:56 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
news:567cc49d-7864-4022-9a7a-6f1afe58715f at (no spam) h1g2000prh.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
[...]
It's a general 17th c. development: ME /A/ became [O] after
[w]. Other examples are <warm> and <wash>.
Do the two have the same quality of vowel? [...]
Not in general. The vowel of <wash> is now RP /A./, U.S.
/O/ (which in my opinion is typically close to [A.]) or /A/.
It's /O/ in St. Louis ("Warshington University"). It's /a/ in most
places.
In this case your /a/ is my /A/.
And let us not forget the places in which <wash> is [wOrS];
I remember that from Indiana in the early 60s.
Brian |
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| Peter T. Daniels... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 12:14 pm |
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Guest
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On May 26, 2:45pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
Quote: On Mon, 26 May 2008 03:44:52 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
news:1b441c51-6522-45e8-926c-d6cccdc680cb at (no spam) w5g2000prd.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
[...]
Ah! In dialects where "hoarse" != "horse", would you call
the hoarse vowel ([o:]?) an allophone of / at (no spam) U/?
The U.S. varieties that preserve the hoarse/horse
distinction don't have a phoneme that could plausibly be
represented by / at (no spam) U/. In Fromkin & Rodman terms <go> and
stone> have /o/; in Trager-Smith terms it's /ow/. I don't
know whether it contrasts with the <hoarse> vowel in these
varieties; I suspect that it does, and that /oH/ would be a
reasonable T-S representation.
Actually it was Gleason who changed T-S's /h/ to (small cap) /H/,
because he _didn't_ identify the centralizing glide with the breathed
consonant, complementary distribution notwithstanding. |
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| Peter T. Daniels... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 12:16 pm |
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On May 26, 1:15pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0... at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Quote: "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote in messagenews:17qr6v8fst0c0.gg7a9c7vuv1$.dlg at (no spam) 40tude.net...
On Sun, 25 May 2008 12:04:48 GMT, John Atkinson
johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote in
news:ABc_j.4457$IK1.1171 at (no spam) news-server.bigpond.net.au> in
sci.lang:
"Richard Wordingham" <jrw0... at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote...
While /wV"/ > /wA./ seems plausible, I note that words
like <worth> are *not* pronounced */wO:T/.
It's <worth> that's exceptional: ME /O/ before /r/ normally
remains in monosyllables (with lengthening in non-rhotic
varieties). In the U.S. it is sometimes unrounded in longer
words like <sorrow>.
I now see that OE had <weor>, <wor>, and <wur>, and that
ur> spellings are found throughout the ME period, so this
may just be a case of dialect mismatch between modern
pronunciation and spelling.
We seem to have had a change /wOr/ > /wur/ that has made the 'wor' spelling
unambiguous - for those who know the subtle details of English spelling. It
didn't stop me thinking that <wort> was pronounced /wO:t/ when I was a
child.
Well, (except for the /r/) how else would you pronounce it? <wort> <wart> = /wOrt/. |
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| Richard Wordingham... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 5:43 pm |
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Guest
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"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote in message
news:10nrxxg0wv3n7.18unpdu2ve1xr.dlg at (no spam) 40tude.net...
Quote: The source that I was paraphrasing doesn't recognize a PDE
/O:/, taking it to be /O/, and it seems to take the view
that open-syllable lengthening didn't affect this word.
How does it categorise the lengthening? Or does it just treat the
lengthening of the vowel in _water_, _father_ and _rather_ as 'obscure'?
Quote: According to the OED, Orrmulum has <waterr> but plural
wattress>, and there are 14th and 15th century <wattre
spellings, so /wA/ > /wO/ > /wO:/ may actually be a
possibility. I suspect, though, that practically any
combination of lengthening (or not) and rounding (or not) is
possible, depending on variety, so it would be just one
possibility of several.
The question was the apparent rounding of the SUN vowel to the TOP vowel in
some varieties of English English. If it is a phonetic effect, and not an
orthographic effect, is it related to the rounding of the early Modern
English precursor of /&/ to /A./ (or its precursor)? I think the date rules
it out - _wart_ was composed of /w&rt/ precursors, coming to be composed of
/wA.rt/ precursors, whereas _word_ is not subject to the apparent rounding.
I had wondered whether vowel length had any effect on whether rounding
happened under the change rounding the vowel of 'what'. I think that if it
is a phonetic effect, the rounding in _one_, _won_, _wonder_ and _worry_ is
a much more recent change. (I'm by no means persuaded that it is not an
orthographic effect.)
Richard. |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 6:33 pm |
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Guest
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On Mon, 26 May 2008 15:14:22 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
<news:2b8e9ba9-f558-48ad-a0fb-c7c917425d49 at (no spam) k30g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
Quote: On May 26, 2:45pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:
On Mon, 26 May 2008 03:44:52 -0700 (PDT),
"ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com" <ranjit_math... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote
in
news:1b441c51-6522-45e8-926c-d6cccdc680cb at (no spam) w5g2000prd.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang:
[...]
Ah! In dialects where "hoarse" != "horse", would you call
the hoarse vowel ([o:]?) an allophone of / at (no spam) U/?
The U.S. varieties that preserve the hoarse/horse
distinction don't have a phoneme that could plausibly be
represented by / at (no spam) U/. In Fromkin & Rodman terms <go> and
stone> have /o/; in Trager-Smith terms it's /ow/. I don't
know whether it contrasts with the <hoarse> vowel in these
varieties; I suspect that it does, and that /oH/ would be a
reasonable T-S representation.
Actually it was Gleason who changed T-S's /h/ to (small
cap) /H/, because he _didn't_ identify the centralizing
glide with the breathed consonant, complementary
distribution notwithstanding.
I know; I just didn't consider it worth mentioning.
Brian |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 6:42 pm |
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On Mon, 26 May 2008 23:43:49 +0100, Richard Wordingham
<jrw0602 at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote in
<news:M2H_j.13984$%B6.11727 at (no spam) newsfe13.ams2> in sci.lang:
Quote: "Brian M. Scott" <b.scott at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote in message
news:10nrxxg0wv3n7.18unpdu2ve1xr.dlg at (no spam) 40tude.net...
The source that I was paraphrasing doesn't recognize a PDE
/O:/, taking it to be /O/, and it seems to take the view
that open-syllable lengthening didn't affect this word.
How does it categorise the lengthening? Or does it just
treat the lengthening of the vowel in _water_, _father_
and _rather_ as 'obscure'?
???
It takes <water> to be ['wOt at (no spam) (r)]; the other two of course
have /A:/.
Quote: According to the OED, Orrmulum has <waterr> but plural
wattress>, and there are 14th and 15th century <wattre
spellings, so /wA/ > /wO/ > /wO:/ may actually be a
possibility. I suspect, though, that practically any
combination of lengthening (or not) and rounding (or not) is
possible, depending on variety, so it would be just one
possibility of several.
The question was the apparent rounding of the SUN vowel to
the TOP vowel in some varieties of English English.
At no point was I addressing that question.
[...]
Brian |
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| Brian M. Scott... |
| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 6:44 pm |
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Guest
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On Mon, 26 May 2008 15:16:25 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
<news:a69c1959-ff13-4627-ad32-7e371e47b6b8 at (no spam) f63g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
Quote: On May 26, 1:15pm, "Richard Wordingham"
jrw0... at (no spam) yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
Quote: We seem to have had a change /wOr/ > /wur/ that has made
the 'wor' spelling unambiguous - for those who know the
subtle details of English spelling. It didn't stop me
thinking that <wort> was pronounced /wO:t/ when I was a
child.
Well, (except for the /r/) how else would you pronounce
it? [...]
The traditional pronuciation apparently has the vowel of
<worth>.
Brian |
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