Archive for the ‘Language’ Category
Sunday, September 13th, 2015
From the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501). The OE text is presented as in Mitchell & Robinson (2012) A Guide to Old English (8th edn) Wiley-Blackwell:UK pp. 261-3. They note several emendations of the OE text, but only the reconstruction of line 12 is really significant. As usual ...
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Thursday, November 6th, 2014
Over the course of several centuries beginning in the early 15th (probably) in the South of England (probably) there were a series of regular unconditioned (= not affected by their phonetic environment) vowel changes that affected the long vowels of ME. Those vowels were raised - or if they were ...
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Friday, October 31st, 2014
Proto-Indo-European Origins
It is proposed that Proto-Indo-European had a single original vowel timbre: e (though I've also seen original e and o claimed - by G. Bourcier, for example, in History of the English Language, (Stanley Thornes:Cheltenham, UK:1981, pp. 30ff.)
The three proposed basic vowel timbres of the reconstructed system are ...
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Sunday, October 26th, 2014
The standard reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop consonant system is:
voicelessvoicedvoiced aspirated
labialpbbh
dentaltddh
velar, palatovelark, k'g, g'gh, g'h
labiovelarkwgwgwh
The remaining consonants are:
fricative: s
laryngeals: ...
Posted in History, Language | 1 Comment »