LL-L 'Phonology' 2006.09.18 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 18 September 2006 * Volume 02
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From: 'jonny' [jonny.meibohm at arcor.de]
Subject: LL-L 'Phonology' 2006.09.17 (02) [E]

Hey, Ron,

you wrote:

> I am wondering about the possible reasons for the Continental Germanic
> language
> varieties -- the Lowlandic ones included -- have lost their old
> interdental
> fricatives: /þ/ (as in "THird") and /ð/ (as in "THere").
> I wonder if it
> started in
> German and spread from there.

It MUST have started here- it's so very hard for a modern German tongue to shift
from 'th''s to 's''s, fore and back in just one sentence, and SOO famous that it
is ;-).
Well- it's becoming much better in our days, specially among folks born after
1960; the pre-war generation obviously couldn't manage it at all...

Could be an interesting matter for investigations to compare people's ability in
this depending on their date of birth- even in the times some hundred years
ago... I'm thinking of persons like Lichtenberg, Mozart etc. who stayed and
worked in England for some time of their lives.

Greutens/Regards

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm

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From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Phonology

Moyen, Jonny!

I'm not sure I know what you mean.

Today's state of affairs ("ability"), and even that in the Baroque or earlier,
have nothing to do with this, I feel.  Distinguishing /T/ from /s/ and /D/ from
/z/ is just as hard for speakers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway
as it is for speakers in Germany, and most of their ancestral language varieties
had these distinctions that are preserved on the more distant islands.  (In
Northern Germany, the latest it disappeared was sometime in the 19th century,
namely from Sylt North Frisian, by the way, and there it shifted to /l/ and /j/.)
If an English person grows up in Germany without learning English, he or she has
the same difficulties, and a German person growing up in England would have no
difficulties with it.  What I'm saying is that I'm sure it's a matter of
individuals' conditioning.

It does seem to be true, though, that the disappearance of interdentals began in
German, because it is evident already in Old German documents written long before
interdentals disappeared in the Lowlands.  Might it be a matter of Celtic
substrates or Frankish influences?  The map Paul mentioned today may lead us to
believe that we are dealing with a substrate of some absorbed southern ethnic
group(s) whose feature came to be spread, perhaps along with political power.

Note also the substitution of interdental fricatives by means of dental stops
(dental /t/ and /d/) in Irish English (including that of native English
speakers), considering that Irish Gaelic and other Insular Celtic languages have
no interdentals but (like Romance languages) have dental /t/, /d/, /n/ and /l/.

Kumpelmenten,
Reinhard/Ron

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