The Influence Of Anglo French Pronunciation Upon Modern English

Author : W. W. Skeat
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331973386
Total Pages : 42 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (733 download)

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Download or read book The Influence of Anglo-French Pronunciation Upon Modern English (Classic Reprint) written by W. W. Skeat and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Influence of Anglo-French Pronunciation Upon Modern English In some remarks upon "The Proverbs of Alfred," printed in the Phil. Soc. Trans, for 1895-8, p. 399, I endeavoured to draw attention to certain curious peculiarities of spelling to be found in some MSS., particularly of the thirteenth century, and I showed that they can all be accounted for by the simple supposition that the scribes who wrote them were trained in Norman schools, and were more accustomed to the pronunciation of Anglo-French than to the true English sounds of the words which they were trying to write down. I cannot find that much use has yet been made of this discovery, except by myself. However, I am now prepared to go very much further, and to say that students of Middle English will have to recognize the practical side of the principles which I have laid down. For there is a great deal more in it than might be supposed. It has now become quite clear to me that the Norman pronunciation did, in many cases, overpower and divert the native pronunciation of native words; and this influence has to be reckoned with in a very much larger number of instances than any scholar has hitherto suspected. Indeed, I find in it an easy answer to a great many peculiarities of pronunciation that seem, at first eight, to contradict the usual phonetic laws. In order to make the chief points clearer, I have drawn up a list of sixteen canons, showing in what respects a Norman would naturally vary from an Englishman in matters of pronunciation. These I have reprinted, and renumbered, in an article entitled "Observations of some peculiarities of Anglo-French Spelling," which appears at p 471 of my "Notes on English Etymology," to be published by the Clarendon Press in the present year; and they are briefly recapitulated below, at p. 25, followed by a list of early texts in which A.F. spellings occur. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.