A quibble on Engl. _zap_

[Larry Trask]

On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

> In saying some eminently sensible things, Larry managed to pick
> first _pizza_ and then _zap_ as examples of words which might be
> ancient in English but aren't.

> But _zap_ is no more possible than _pizza_, since OE (a) had no
> phoneme /z/ and (b) did not use <z> in writing English words.
> Medially, [z] was common but is written <s>, as befits an allophone
> of /s/.

We seem to be talking at cross purposes here.  I picked `zap'
specifically because it has an anomalous form for a native word and
because an Old English *<zappian> would have been impossible.  That was
the point of the example.

> BTW, was there an "OE Bible" (as opposed to translations of
> individual books) in which a **zapian or **sapian might have
> occurred?

No, I'm not aware that there is a single `Old English Bible' on a par
with, say, the King James Bible.  But I've often seen the label `Old
English Bible' applied informally to the collective body of OE
translations.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk