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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: Peter
Date: 2005-04-08 20:10:57
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
>
> As for sound changes, you and Mr. Christ both state that they are not random, but aren't there ANY exceptions to the rule? I observe them in modern English all the time, and some of them eventually take hold. Also, since the writers of Old English didn't have standardized spelling, couldn't they have blundered just as happily as the rest of us?
A very common source of exceptions is analogy. In the Germanic languages, a vowel is often mutated under the influence of the vowel the next syllable. (This is called UMLAUT.) But sometimes the umlaut would only happen in part of the paradigm, because the culprit vowel wasn't present in some inflections. A sound change will operate over a finite period of time. After this, speakers faced with a word that varies in complicated ways, for no apparent reason, are liable to simpify things. The process of simplifying is called LEVELLING. For example an early umlaut in Proto Germanic, or North-West Germanic (I'm not sure which), caused /u/ to become /o/ when the next syllable contained /a/ or another mid vowel. After this change ceased to operate, each dialect tended to level one vowel throughout a paradigm, either /u/ or /o/. But which vowel was favoured seems quite erractic, e.g. Old English has: buc, fox, god, gold, holt, hlot, oxa, wulf. Old High German: boc, fuhs, got, golt, holz, ((Middle)Dutch) lot), ohso, wolf. Old Icelandic: bokkr bukkr, fox, goð guð, goll gull, holt, hlutr, oxi uxi, ulfr. Eastern Scandinavia tended to favour /u/. I've heard of other trends and tendencies, but in this instance, we're not dealing with regular correspondance of one sound on one dialect matching a particular sound in another.
By contrast, regular change can be seen in the reflexes of Germanic /z/, which where it survives becomes /r/ in English, but /z/ or /s/ in Gothic. Although /s/ is sometimes substituted for /z/ in Gothic, for analogical reasons, there are no examples, as far as I know, of the reverse: English /s/ for Gothic /r/. And if there were, they would require some other explanation.