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sa wulfs wrote:I've never read anything on OE phonetics across word boundaries in any of the grammars I've stumbled upon. The closest thing was some passing remark in an unrelated Wikipedia article, which said sandhi was a late ME or early MnE phenomenon. I'd say most people assume there wasn't any voicing across word boundaries in OE.
sa wulfs wrote:Now, as for the recording, here's what I noticed:
* fandian: I think you pronounce it as disyllabic, ending in /jan/, although I can't be completely sure because you're talking so slowly. Anyway, just in case: weak class 2 verbs didn't end in /jan/, but in /i.an/ (sometimes spelled <igan>).
sa wulfs wrote:* ancenned: I've never seen it with a dot, so apparently scholars think it had /k/. Note however that the stress should fall on the first syllable, since an- is not a prefix, but the first element of a compound.
sa wulfs wrote:* geoffra: it should be three syllables, ge-of-fra, not geof-fra.
sa wulfs wrote:* aras: the stress falls on the second syllable, since a- is a prefix (MnE arose)
* You stress some words that shouldn't be stressed, or that wouldn't be stressed except for special emphasis. For example, in "Nim þinne ancennedan sunu", 'þinne' would be unstressed. It's more noticeable in far "to þam lande Visionis", where both 'to' and 'þam' should be unstressed.
* I can't comment on vowel length.
hlysnan wrote:Oh weird. I was actually aiming for two syllables because I thought <eo> was supposed to be a diphthong. Actually, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that "Béowulf", for example, is disyllabic.
Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English: "Perhaps the most common error students make when trying to pronounce Old English diphthongs is to break them into two syllables—for example, to pronounce Bēowulf as a three-syllable word when in fact it has only two syllables. Remember that there is a smooth transition between the two vowels of a diphthong, and this is as true of the unfamiliar diphthongs of Old English as it is of the familiar ones of Modern English (like those of site and sound)."
In modern English, vowel length and stress usually happen at the same time, I think, and so I ended up confusing the two here. I think it's weird that long vowels happen one after the other, or at least that's how it was marked in the book with "tó" and "þám". Is it even possible to have unstressed long vowels?
sa wulfs wrote:Yes, that's generally true, and "Beowulf" has two syllables. But here we're dealing with a form of the verb "geoffrian", which is the ge- prefix + the verb "offrian", so there should be a hiatus, at least in theory.
sa wulfs wrote:Well, take into account that modern editions typically mark vowel length according to etymological criteria (although not always), so "to" and "þam/þæm" have a macron even in instances where, in natural speech, they might actually have had short vowels (cf. MnE "you" [juː]~[jə]). That said, yes, it's possible to have unstressed long vowels.
Petrovitch wrote:This is a little off topic, but is there an Old English equivalent of the name Catherine?
sa wulfs wrote:Petrovitch wrote:This is a little off topic, but is there an Old English equivalent of the name Catherine?
Not to the best of my knowledge, no. Can't find any mentions of St Catherine in Old English, no individual called "Catherine" in the Domesday Book. I'd wager the name would have appeared as "Caterina", which I think was the medieval Latin form.
And in what ways does modern English differ from both of these?
sa wulfs wrote:Eald Englisc is totally cool.
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