Sujet : Re: How to pronounce the letter "H"
De : naddy (at) *nospam* mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
Groupes : sci.langDate : 21. Jun 2025, 20:25:38
Autres entêtes
Message-ID : <slrn105e1pi.14jp.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
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On 2025-06-16, guido wugi <
wugi@brol.invalid> wrote:
/ˈaka/ > /ˈatʃa/ > /ˈatʃə/ > /aʃə/ > /aʃ/
>
Presumably Middle English picked up /ˈatʃə/ as /ˈaːtʃə/ and then
you have loss of final schwa and the Great Vowel Shift > /eɪtʃ/.
>
I find it more likely that the palatisation of k accompanied the
"schwa-ing" of final a.
Why?
/ka/ shifted to /tʃV/ throughout, no matter whether the eventual
outcome of the vowel was /a/, /ɛ/, /jɛ/, /e/, /ə/, or by way of
monophthongization /o/, or whatever. In fact, it must have happened
early as indicated by causa > chose, which palatalized before Latin
au monophthongized--not to be confused with the later development
of /aɫ/ > /aw/ > /o/, etc.; caulis > *chol > chou even combines both
monophthongizations.
The painfully detailed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Frenchlists the palatalization along with most vowel changes to the
original /a/ in the same section, "To Early Old French (c. 840)",
so the exact chronology isn't clear there.
There's also the question what phonetic detail triggered /ka/ >
/tʃa/ and /ga/ > /dʒa/. In Modern French, /a/ is distinctly fronted,
[a], not the central [ä] of Spanish or German. If it was also
fronted in Old French, that at least would help to explain the
palatalization. Meanwhile it's hard to imagine schwa of all vowels
to trigger such a development.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de