Talk:Old English phonology

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From the text:

  Consonant allophones
  The sounds marked in parentheses are allophones:

I don't see any parentheses in the subsequent list, though. Only brackets. Is this what was meant? --Godtvisken 18:10, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes. The symbols ( ) are called parentheses in American English, which this article is written in. Angr/talk 19:23, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Voiced þ and ð

In The Cambridge Old English Reader by Richard Marsden (Cambridge 2004), it says that these letters are voiced ‘at the start of a word or medially’ (he gives the examples þis and hwæþer), whereas this article seemes to say that they were voiced only medially. Is Marsden wrong? Widsith 10:51, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

English is pretty conservative with consonants (except for c, g, and h). This means that you should be able to use your knowledge of Modern English to infer the voicing in Old English. So the OE ancestors of the, this, that, there, and then would have been voiced, and the ancestors of thane, thatch, thin, think, three, and through would have been unvoiced. Does Marsden say þ and ð are always voiced medially? My understanding is that they were not voiced when doubled or adjacent to an unvoiced consonant. (I can’t think of any NE examples, but siþþan and æfþanc are OE examples.) --teb728 09:01, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

the story i've normally heard is that the initial voicing of þ did not occur until middle english, at the time when þ and ð split phonemically. note that southern middle english dialects showed a similar voicing of initial /f/, which comes down to modern english in certain words like "vixen" (cf. "fox") and "vat". it's likely that the /f/, /v/ distinction became phonemic as a result of borrowing from french, and that this was reinforced by certain late middle english changes (loss of final vowels and double consonants) that also introduced phonemic /z/ and /ð/. Benwing 02:41, 9 January 2007 (UTC)