Comment by usrnm

Comment by usrnm 7 hours ago

> ‘ȝ’ was used to write two completely different sounds in Middle English

Was it, though? By comparing English and Dutch you can clearly see that one of the ways this harsh "gh" changed in English is it became "y" as in "yesterday". "Weg" (Dutch) - "way" (English), "gister[en]" (Dutch) - "yester[day] (English), etc. I wonder if at the time pronouncing it as "gh" was still common and this would make using the same letter in some words much more logical.

yorwba 3 hours ago

The other sound ȝ was used for in words now written with 'gh' like 'laugh' and 'night' corresponds to 'ch' in Dutch/German 'lachen' and 'nacht'. If ȝ had corresponded to a single sound in Middle English, it's implausible that it would've split into two different sounds in exactly the same way as in other Germanic languages. So it's more likely that the two sets of words had always been pronounced with different sounds even in Proto-Germanic, and Middle English scribes merely didn't consider it important enough to distinguish them in writing.

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seszett 7 hours ago

Even in Dutch today, weg is pronounced very differently between Holland and West Flanders.

In Holland the g will be hard while in West Flanders "weg" is much closer to English "way" with a very soft g.

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dep_b 4 hours ago

They still treat the g consistently the same in every word. It's silent-ish in all words, not some.
The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".

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geoffbp 5 hours ago

Such a difficult language to learn! I’ve been learning it for a long time

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- usrnm 5 hours ago
  
  Dutch is a very easy language to learn if you already know English. The main problems are the lack of content to consume and the fact that everyone in the country would rather speak English than tolerate your bad Dutch.
  
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  bojan 4 hours ago
  
  As someone who learned Dutch from scratch in adulthood, these points come up very often but I don't think they are true.
  1) Dutch is not an easy language to learn if you speak English. Both the grammar and the vocabulary are way closer to German than to English. The grammar works in a different way, there is an actual grammatical gender, the vowels sound different, etc.
  2) There is a lot of content to consume. Let's just start with programming oriented to older children, like the Klokhuis or Jeugdjournaal, which are both in simple language and interesting to adults as well. It's really all there.
  3) when taking to people, they want to have a conversation and will switch to a language where that goal can be reached. If people consistently switch to English to you, the sad fact is that your pronunciation and/or grammar are not good enough yet, and you can't assume that the role of random people is to be your teachers.
  
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  usrnm 3 hours ago
  
  I learned several languages as an adult, so I compare the effort needed to learn Dutch to the effort needed to learn a much more different language, like French.
  1) Yes, Dutch is even closer to German, but it doesn't change the fact that it's very close to English. The grammar is very close, a lot of words are clearly related, learning to read Dutch when you are already profficient in English is a breeze. I never said they were mutually intelligible, but they are close enough to make the leap from one to the other much simpler.
  Just as an example, let's consider three words from three different languages that mean the same thing: "gestolen", "volé" and "украденный". Which one of them is closer to the English word "stolen"? Not only in its stem form, but even in the way this irregular verb is conjugated.
  2) Some content does exist, but not much. Again, comparing to a language with a much bigger speaker base, like French, let alone English. The difference is orders of magnitude, it's very noticeable when trying to find something interesting to watch or listen.
  3) Every time I go to a country where English is less prevalent, I'm forced to learn and practice the language. The same pressure just does not exist in the Netherlands, and the sad fact is, people do not like making unnecessary effort. It is an obstacle and it doesn't help, no matter how you look at it
  
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  dep_b 4 hours ago
  
  I speak Dutch to anyone that serves me in English. Which is pretty common at bars or shops in The Netherlands nowadays. At first I thought doing that was rude, but I'm actually doing people a favor to have the chance to learn Dutch. We can always switch to English when it gets too hard or confusing.
  And to be honest, somebody that refuses to even try to understand that "Twee croissants en een koffie, alsjeblieft" means "Two croissants and a coffee, please", but replies with "English please" instead can kindly go fuck themselves.
  At least TRY
  
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  bojan 4 hours ago
  
  While I agree with your point, don't underestimate how different the pronunciation is between languages, especially if you have an English monolingual on the other side of the counter that is not used to ever hearing anything other than English.
  Especially the word "croissant" is tricky. Chances are they they only got "koffie" in your example sentence and had no idea what came before it.
  
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ccozan 4 hours ago

wait, now I realize, is not only Dutch but German as well. TIL!

yesteday -> gestern way -> weg

But the mistery is: how was it pronounced in the old English? The modern y was possibly a norman induced change, and people started reading it as modern y instead of "g" ?

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int_19h 2 hours ago

In Old English it was already pronounced /j/ there, even though the spelling was still "weg". Ditto for Old Frisian, so Normans had nothing to do with it.
The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].
In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.
Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.

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singularity2001 4 hours ago

something in between obviously ghjesterdaj

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- usrnm 4 hours ago
  
  The "y" in "day" went through the same process, so in your theory it would be something like "ghjesterdaghj". Or maybe it was still just "ghjester" back then, dunno. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know exactly what it sounded like.
  
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singularity2001 4 hours ago

I think the article is very bad and that it assumes that modern pronunciation is what it was pronounced back then while as you stated all the sounds of one sign might have been identical back then

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yorwba 3 hours ago

The article is describing the generally accepted reconstruction of Middle English pronunciation, which is based not only on the modern pronunciation, but also on comparison with related languages.

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