Front rounded vowel question

[Enrique L. Palancar]

Dear E-Ching, You may now this already, but I thought a precision about English was desirable as Middle English is often taken as being a unitary system. The Old English > Middle English unrounding from /y/ > /i/ only occurred in the Northern and East-Midlands dialects (in Kentish, the historical reflex is already found as /e/). In the city of London there was a great deal of variation, but eventually it was resolved to favoring the East Middlands pronunciation, with isolated words from other dialects, in spelling, pronunciation or both, e.g. - Kentish spelling and pronunciation: "merry", "knell"- Southern spelling, but East-Midlands pronunciation: "build", "busy"- Southern spelling, but Kentish pronunciation: in both the verb "to bury" and the stem in compounds such as "Canterbury"- Southern spelling and pronunciation, but unrounded to /u/: "lust" (the current pronunciation comes from an unrounding and lowering that happened later seen today in most dialects including the standard) or "worse" (with central vowel of a later period). Very best,Enrique




Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 01:01:02 -0400
From: e-ching.ng at yale.edu
To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: [Histling-l] Front rounded vowel question

Dear all,

I'm looking for languages which lost front rounded vowels, e.g. German /y/ > Yiddish /i/. So far I've got Old > Middle English, OHG > Yiddish, French > creoles. If you know of other languages with front rounded vowels and descendants, I would be very grateful. I will of course post a summary to the list.


Hopefully,
E-Ching

___________________________________

E-Ching Ng
Department of Linguistics, Yale University
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~en27/



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