Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 September 13

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September 13

Icelandic ð

According to the ð article, the letter never appears as the first letter of a word in Icelandic; only þ is used. Does this mean that þ is voiced in such words, or does it mean that (even more than in English) the Voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative appears only in the middle of words? Nyttend (talk) 20:51, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

The same was true of Old English. Thorn (letter) was a phoneme of these languages, like ess or eff. Word-initially, they were not voiced consonants, like edh, zee or vee. These latter were voiced allophones that existed intervocalically only, and were not distinct. Initial edh developed in English in pronouns and adverbs, which were often de-stressed (thy, these, though, then, than), but not in nouns, adjectives, or verbs (thigh, thin, think).

The voiced set edh, zee, vee existed implicitly, but only became distinct in Middle English when contrasting pairs appeared, due to the voicing of initial thorn in unstressed positions and the introduction of initial zee and vee (zeal and veal vs the native seal and feel) from French and Latin words. Then the context-dependent voiced allophones became autonomous phonemes in their own right.

μηδείς (talk) 22:24, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm well aware of the paucity of these word-initial voiced consonants in English (I was just discussing it with someone this afternoon), but I had no clue that it was present in other Germanic languages a thousand years ago, let alone today. Thank you for the pointer. Nyttend (talk) 22:31, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

User:Nyttend, see Middle_English_phonology#Voiced_fricatives and corrections and links added to my original response. μηδείς (talk) 22:34, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Nyttend -- Old English had the sounds [v], [ð], [z], [ɣ] but they were not really phonemic, and there were no letters in the Old English orthography devoted to writing a voiced fricative sound alone (the graphemes "þ" and "ð" were not distinguished by function). The sounds [v], [ð] and [z] did not occur at the beginnings of words, but [ɣ] did occur initially (as it still does in modern Dutch). Over the course of the Old English period, palatalized [ɣ] merged with [j] (as in "yard"), while non-palatalized [ɣ] at the beginnings of words became [g]...

Medeis -- In addition to [θ] becoming [ð] at the beginning of selected destressable function words, other changes that undermined the allophony of [θ]/[ð] in English were the simplification of geminate consonants, and the disappearance of final unstressed schwa vowels (sometimes preserved as orthographic "silent e"). AnonMoos (talk) 00:23, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

I know that the loss of final schwas led to words like arrive, sneeze and breathe where intervocality became irrelevant. But this belongs to the latter Middle English period, and is of little effect word-initially. I am curious, though, at what period were you referring to re the loss of gemination, and can you give some examples of words affected?

We can also mention the Gothic language which had voiced fricatives, but except for z, they were intervocalic allophones of b, d, and g, not of eff, ess and thorn. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 00:37, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Old English had at least a few words such as smiþþe meaning "smithy". This and final [ə]-dropping are relevant to the general question of when [θ] and [ð] were no longer allophones, but phonemes. The English invariable [ð] at the beginning of function words (as opposed to contextual [ð] when the previous word ended in a vowel, so the fricative was then intervocalic) probably didn't occur until fairly late in Middle English (though perhaps not as late as the deletion of word-final [ə] vowels). AnonMoos (talk) 02:58, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

P.S. In some cases in Old English, [v] spelled "f" alternated with [b] -- look at the paradigms for the verbs habban "to have" and libban "to live"... AnonMoos (talk) 15:20, 18 September 2017 (UTC)