I was too hasty -- you are absolutely right about the GVS: u => [au]. I am
still unsure as to whether u == [ju] came from the French pronunciation of u
as [y] or not. Anyone else have any ideas?
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2001 07:39
Subject: RE: Transcriptions of "Unicode"
> {Notice: way off-topic}
>
> Mark Davis wrote:
> > There was a period well after the Norman invasion where a
> > large number of words came into English directly from
> > Latin, which was still in widespread use among scholars.
>
> Right. And it also was the language of priests, on both sides of the
> Channel.
>
> > [ju:] isn't an approximation to the French [y]. There was a
> > phase in the development of English called the Great Vowel
> > Shift, where certain long vowels shifted back: a => [e:],
> > e => [i:], i => [ai], o => [u:] (as in fool, move), u => [ju:].
> > I don't remember when this was -- it's been a long time -- but
> > I seem to recall that it was a bit before Shakespeare. The
> > pronunciation of u in French shifted at some point from [u]
> > to [y]; I have no idea when this change happened, or if it
> > would have affected the Latin spoken by the English at the time.
> > Perhaps someone else knows.
>
> No, sorry. Middle English [u:] normally became modern [au] -- e.g.: "hus"
> [hu:s] -> "house" [hauz].
>
> I insist that [ju:] was the English rendering of the alien French phoneme
> [y]. The fact that it did not become [jau] simply testifies that most
French
> words (re-)entered English *after* the GVS was concluded.
>
> Marco
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