thy thigh etc.

[Douglas G Kilday]

Leo A. Connolly (16 Nov 2000) writes:

>On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English
>interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the
>German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs.  _Kuhchen_
>'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/.  The gist of his
>argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which
>he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also
>fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the
>distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English.

>He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological
>boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be
>located precisely between morphemes.  It is therefore to show them in
>phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter
>for the phonetic realization.  But information such as "native/foreign" or
>"content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any
>real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at
>least) "syntactic".  There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are
>phonologically relevant while other information is not.  (I do not mean to
>imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never*
>is, only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.)

>A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former
>developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and
>_the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative.  The loss of the
>final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial
>voicing.

The loss of final consonants probably is later than the establishment of
initial [T:D] distinction, but one should not assume that this distinction
arose by the selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely
labels "function words". (It escapes me how <thy> has any more "function" or
less "content" than <through>. What English words with initial [D] share is
definiteness, not some murky "functionality".)
   Old English clearly did not consider [T:D], [f:v], and [s:z] to be
phonemic oppositions. The characters "thorn" and "edh" are used
indiscriminately in the manuscripts, and no special signs for "v" or "z" are
found. In the usual treatment the OE fricatives are regarded as unvoiced
when doubled, when adjacent to unvoiced stops, and when occurring initially
or finally in words or compound-elements. The first two conditions are
solidly established, but the third may be doubted: did morphemic boundaries
in OE necessarily make adjacent fricatives unvoiced in connected speech?
   Some light is shed on the problem by the "Cuckoo Song" manuscript of
circa 1240, which contains an Early Middle English folk-song in parallel
with a Medieval Latin hymn. The English of the song shows no significant
influence from Norman French or Latin. The scribe uses typical ML
orthography with "u" and "v" indiscriminately representing both the vowel
[u] and the voiced fricative [v], which creates no ambiguity in practice.
For the English text, the scribe requires "w" and "thorn" to convey the
non-ML sounds. More importantly, he carries the ML graphemic distinction
"f:u/v" into his English transcription. We find "f" in <after>, but "u" in
<nauer>, <calue>, and most significantly <bucke uerteth> '(the) buck farts'.
Here the scribe has preserved initial [v], conditioned by a final vowel in
the previous word. This verb appears in later ME as <farten>; it is
unattested in OE but is a transparent cognate of Greek <perdomai> and
Sanskrit <pardate>.
   The manuscript does not distinguish [s:z] and [T:D] because these
oppositions are unknown in Medieval Latin. In my opinion the Early ME
dialect recorded here most likely made no phonemic distinction between
voiced and unvoiced fricatives, but maintained an allophonic contrast on the
basis of adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and this scheme
was probably inherited from OE. For the composer of the "Cuckoo Song" the
words <thin> and <thih> would have begun with [T] or [D] according to the
unvoiced or voiced nature of the preceding sound.
   Turning now to Chaucer we find the "f:v" distinction consistently made,
initially and medially, even in native words like <yeven> 'to give' from OE
<giefan>. The character "z" is used only in foreign words, mostly from
French and Arabic: <zeles>, <zodiak>, <azimut>, etc. Chaucer retains "s" for
medial [z] in native words: <hasel>, <hasard>, <bosard>, etc. Printed
editions give no information about the dental fricatives, using "th"
everywhere.
   Chaucer's language has a large component of recent loanwords in <v->
sometimes forming minimal pairs with older words in <f->: <vailen> 'to have
value' ~ <failen> 'to fail', <vers> 'verse' ~ <fers> 'chess-queen'. It
appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v] which does not
alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the older words beginning with
[f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone and become words beginning with
invariant [f]. That is, this influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic
distinction /f:v/ in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's
time (late 14th cent.) regards as fully established. For initial [s:z]
Chaucer has only the sub-minimal pair <zeles> 'zeals' ~ <seled> 'sealed',
and since "z" is otherwise used to denote loanwords this provides no direct
evidence for a phonemic opposition. The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer
is equivocal. Contractions like <artow> 'art thou' and <seistow> 'sayest
thou' suggest that <thou> already had invariant [D], since the old rule
would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which would yield
*<arthow> etc. However, this argument is extremely weak. Statistical
analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th" might resolve the issue, but I
am not aware of such a study.
   At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction resulted from
loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's time. The /s:z/ distinction,
if not already made by Chaucer, followed shortly. It can be attributed
partly to loanwords, partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as
phonemic. The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair, very
difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial position. They
would have been obliged to enunciate some words with invariant initial [f],
[v], [s], [z] and others with variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding
sound. Under these circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in
particular words would have operated rather strongly. In my opinion this
probably began with the statistics of utterances: demonstratives like <the>
and <this> commonly follow prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in
voiced sounds. Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common
demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other "th"-words of
pronominal origin which carry definiteness. The situation would then have
resembled the pre-Chaucerian stage of ME in which one class (recent
loanwords) had invariant initial [v] and another class (older words) had
variable initial [f/v]. In that case the older class was forced to fix its
initial sound as [f], establishing /f:v/ as a phonemic distinction. In the
case under discussion the non-pronominal, non-definite words beginning with
[T/D] were forced to fix their initial sounds as [T], which yielded the
fixed opposition in initial [T:D] that is found today. I would guess that
the process was complete (in East Midland at least) by 1500, if indeed it
was not by Chaucer's time.
   Hence one should not say that <thy> or its antecedent "developed" a
voiced fricative. What happened, one way or another, is that the
pronunciation with the unvoiced fricative, occurring after unvoiced sounds,
was lost in this word.
   So is the initial [T:D] distinction phonemic in present-day English?
Absolutely; it can and should be written /T:D/. It was phonemic as soon as
the process of fixing invariant [T] and [D] on particular words was
completed, even though minimal pairs for these phones probably did not exist
at that time. Minimal pairs are luxury items. They are nice to have, but one
can (and in many situations must) establish phonemic oppositions without
them. When distinct phones occur in contrastive distribution in
corresponding morphemic positions, they are either allophones of one phoneme
or represent distinct phonemes. Allophones are regularly distributed
according to phonologic environment. No conceivable phonologic rule could
predict the distribution of [T] versus [D] in modern English words. They are
indeed distinct phonemes.

Doug Kilday