last laugh on awe-dropping

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

It turns out that awe-dropping is nearly as old as English itself.

After the Norman Conquest, the Norman scribes found themselves with the problem of representing sounds in Anglo-Saxon that were not in Norman French.  Included were one or more of the sounds that laypeople call "guttural", such as the velar fricative of German "ach".  (Do I have the terminology correct?)  They decided to use "gh" to represent the velar fricative and related fricatives.  (I don't know how many of these fricatives Anglo-Saxon had.  Does anyone else?  I am guessing that since Northern German has two such fricatives, Anglo-Saxon did as well).

Hence we have such English spellings as "aught", "eight", "light", and "thought".

Early on English dropped these phonemes but these spellings persisted.

Notice the spelling "aught", which I am guessing was pronounced with an "awe" sound followed by the fricative followed by a /t/.

The following words retain the /aw/:

aught
caught
faugh
fraught
haughty
naughty
taught

However, there are two "augh" words which perpetrated awe-dropping.

One is "draught" which, at least in its variant "draughtsman" ("draughtswoman"?  "draughtsperson"?) is pronunced to rhyme with "craft".

The other is "laugh" which now rhymes with "calf".

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And an awe-insertion.

I checked the written transcript of Flight 1549 talking with New York TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control).  There were only a few words with "awe".  One, repeated several times, was "LaGuardia", which is most often pronounced /l@ 'gwawr dee @/.  This is odd, since it is an Italian name which Fiorella pronounced I don't know how but his ancestors pronounced /lah gwahr dee ah/.

           James A. Landau
           test engineer
           Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
           8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
           West Atlantic City NJ 08232 USA
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YEYLC UYQXK GHZHQ SOOYC KAZJU JPZNO CFFZ AXCDT
XLJJS ROBAQ SPBPL WYGXL MDQA ~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^






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