Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>]

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