LL-L "Phonology" 2008.01.24 (02) [E/German]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  24 January 2008 - Volume 02
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From: James Ward <jamesward at earthlink.net>
Subject: "Phonology"

Dear Joachim,

I can't remember ever seeing "ʒ" used for the velar spirant in any
phonological studies, although in Middle English it is found for both
palatal and velar spirants, voiced and voiceless.  Note too that these
examples from Niblett that you quote (below) all seem to contain front
vowels, which indicates to me that we are probably dealing here with a
palatal spirant, close to English "y"/German (etc.) "j".

> "Ein neues mwf. g hat sich entwickelt aus dem palatalen
> halbkonsonantischen Nachschlag von and. ī, ōi, ei, āi vor Vokalen(...)
> sniʒn [written: sniggen - jk] "schneien"; bløʒn [written: blöggen -
> jk] "blühen";..."

After having written that, I looked to see if this book might be
available on the internet.  Unfortunately it was not, but I had a look
at the _Emsländische Grammatik_ at

http://books.google.com/books?id=i6NMAAAAMAAJ

On page 16 we have an explicit association of the symbol "ʒ" with a
velar sound:  "Der velare Engelaut g (ʒ) ist zwischen Sonorlauten in
verschiedenen Wörtern im emsl. stimmhaft, im ling. (wie auch im mstl.
und osn.) stimmlos."

So now I don't know what to think anymore.

Anyway, this Emsländische Grammatik seems to be an interesting book.
You might want to compare some of the phonological information
available on pages 35, 156 ff, and perhaps others.  Also, this symbol
might possibly be explicitly associated with a palatal sound elsewhere
in the book -- I didn't look carefully enough to be able to find out,
but I thought you might be interested to see this before I look at it
again.

Best wishes,

James Ward

> From: Joachim Kreimer-de Fries <Kreimer at jpberlin.de>
> Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2008.01.22 [E/G]
>
>  Thanks so far, Jan and Ron,
>
> 22.01.2008, 19:34 Jan Strunk:
>
> > So my next question would be, does Niblett ever
> > systematically use ordinary "g", too?
>  > I am asking this to exclude the possibility that "ʒ"
> > is simply only a graphemic variant of "g".
>
> The latter hardly can be the case, despite that there is no "g" in
> Niblett's phonological writing (exclusively applied by him to the
> Osna-Westphalian words, not for Old Saxon, Middle Westphalian etc).

[...]
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