Angnother one (was: Heard in passin')

[Wilson Gray]

On May 2, 2005, at 8:52 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Angnother one (was: Heard in passin')
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>> So, Swedish uses the Classical Latin pronunciation of Latin.
>
> Maybe not systematically. My ignorance of Swedish and Latin is pretty
> impressive, but I think "centrum" looks Latin enough although
> pronounced in
> Swedish with /s/ for "c", and the "g" in "magister" is pronounced /j/
> [i.e., like English "y"] (says my book). OTOH "vagn" /vaNn/ (=
> "carriage"
> etc.) doesn't look very Latin at all.
>
> Maybe the same phonetic tendency operated on /gn/ in different
> languages
> independently.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>

I see what you mean. It looks like the Swedish Classical-Latin
pronunciation of Magnus is just coincidental. Otherwise, "centrum" and
"magister" would be pronounced with "hard" [k] and [g]. Your intuition
WRT "vagn" is correct. It's pure Swedish, cognate with obsolete English
"wain."

-Wilson Gray