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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] CV syllables, was music in Hebrew

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  • From: Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] CV syllables, was music in Hebrew
  • Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:22:22 +0200

At 09:46 AM 2/9/2006, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

On 2/9/06, Peter Kirk wrote:

> You misunderstand me. I was not referring to cases like qtl, qwtl and
> qtwl, which in modern Hebrew are clearly different words (different
> forms of the same verb) with different pronunciations. I was referring
> to cases, which I know do occur in modern Hebrew as well as in biblical
> and probably inscriptional, where the same word with the same meaning is
> spelled in different ways e.g. by different authors - but without
> implying a different pronunciation. Similarly "liue" and "live" in a
> Shakespeare text (from the two versions of Romeo and Juliet you linked
> to), and "colour" and "color" in modern English, are pronounced the same
> despite the variant spelling conventions.

Read again the section from the Cambridge History of American and English
Literature that I linked to earlier in the discussion. It directly
contradicts what
you just said: "But, if a chapter from The Authorised Version or a scene from
one of Shakespeare's plays were read to us with the contemporary
pronunciation, the ear would be considerably puzzled to recognise certain of
the words." Perhaps the words you cite remained the same, but at least
"colour"'s spelling/pronunciation may be related to the GVS -- so that the
variant spelling convention does indicate an attempt to modernize after a
sound change.

[snip]

Yitzhak,

Yes, the Cambridge Lit History is correct "the ear would be considerably puzzled" but there is a misunderstanding here. It's because (among other things) the great vowel shift was happening during this period; however, as all other linguistic changes, the shift did not happen at the same time in all dialects in all words or in all cases. .

No, Peter is right in his examples; "colour" and "color" do not indicate a sound change. What you are looking at is the ideas of a school of 19th-century grammarians who wanted to standardize spelling and decided that loans from French should be spelled as in French to show their etymological origins. They added "u" and doubled "m" and added an 'e', for instance. Hence, "programme" for "program," "honour" for "honor," and so on. There was no change in pronunciation.

Still, the vast majority of those "French" loan words date back to Norman French, not to 16th and 17th-century borrowings from ModF..More often than not, the many attempts to standardize the orthography of a language (e.g., Latin, Greek, Old English) recorded down the millennia are based upon some assumed "pure" ideal.of how the language was spelled and pronounced in antiquity.

If you wish to show a change in English rthography that reflects a change in the spoken language, it might be a good idea to look at the changes from OE > ME > ModE in the first person genitives. Not "his," though; that's OE and the spelling does NOT indicate the sound change at all: the vowels were Continental in OE.

The procession is as follows:
-es > long -is (Chaucerian) > short--is > (Elizabethan) > 's (ModE).

But, you also have to take into consideration the morphology of a word (also within a sentence) that results from the Enlish. very strong tendency towards progressive accent -- stress moves towards the front of a word. In OE, the stress was on the final syllable of the genitives: -Es (/a/s). 500 years later, the orthography reflected the pronunciation -- -/e/s. 200 years later, stress had moved to the penultimate syllable -- "-/:i/s." The movement of the accent to the first or second syllables weakened the long 'i' to a short 'i' .In Shakespeare's day, the 'i' was shortening, but not in all dialects.The complete disappearance of the short-i that resulted in the ModE genitive, apostrophe s ['s], was only standardized in 19th-century orthographic reformation.

Jane Austin spelled phonetically -- editors comment on her "quaint" orthography. The Yorkshire dialect preserves "archaic" pronunciation. Elizabethan and Jacobite hand-written documents still were written using stress and duration notation.

This is a record of a living language across more than 1,400 years; look at time frames; implications?

Sorry, I simply couldn't let this misunderstanding of why Elizabethan and Jacobite English might cause some difficulties to the modern ear pass.

I'm out of here!

Rochelle






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