Re: Phonetic scripts and diphthongs ...
|From:||Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>|
|Date:||Monday, July 19, 2004, 19:48|
Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
> Similarly, I suspect the OE 'soft c', which we conventionally, pronounce
> as /tS/, was in fact pronounced in the various ways that |k| before front
> vowels is pronounce in the Scandinavian langs which, I believe, varies
> between [C], [tC] and similar sounds. It would've been the adoption of
> Norman French words with /tS/ that helped fix the pronunciation (with the
> respelling |ch| instead of just plain |c|).
Amusingly, that '|k| before front vowels' is, in my 'lect of Swedish, [S]. The
commonest version, in Swedish, is, I'm left to understand, [s\], while [C] (and
[cC]) are now quite rare.
(Needless to say, I find it perfectly plausible that OE 'soft c' might have been
[tS], at least in some varieties.)