User:Hurlebatte

Reddit Posts I Want to Record
Why initial /dʒ/ is questionable

Initial /dʒ/ is not native to English, it was brought into English with French loanwords. That being the case, without French influence it's quite likely that English, like other Germanic languages, would avoid allowing [dʒ] to show up at the beginning of syllables. There's plenty of evidence from Middle English showing this, as some writers substituted initial /dʒ/ in loanwords with /j/ and /tʃ/.

Why ⟨gh⟩ is alright

For a long time I thought the Normans are the ones who caused ⟨ȝ⟩ to begin standing for [x], but I recently found that it's only around 1250 when ⟨ȝ⟩ started standing for [x], while beforehand ⟨ȝ⟩ stood for [j] and [ɣ]. Since ⟨ȝ⟩ taking on [x] happened so long after the Norman Invasion there's no particular reason to see this development as outborn.

I now think ⟨ȝ⟩ naturally acquired [x] around two hundred years after the Norman Invasion, and that this was a widening of the letter's inborn ability to make [ɣ]. Eventually it became common to represent [x ~ ɣ] with ⟨ȝh⟩, but this innovation was based on spelling conventions that were in English before the Norman Invasion. So basically put, there's no good reason to say ⟨ȝh⟩ was born from post-invasion influence. The fact that English had two Gees for a long time was post-invasion influence, but this has since been reverted, and now we have ⟨g⟩ / ⟨gh⟩. Clearly we ended up with a Norman-like style of ⟨g⟩, but that's solved by simply changing the font back to an Insular style.

Why ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are alright

I've found that some English documents from before the Norman Invasion used ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ for /tʃ/ and /ʃ/. England had ties to Normandy even before 1066, so it's not too surprising English would borrow a few spelling conventions if the conventions were seen as useful. I'm now of the opinion that English would've ended up with ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sh⟩ even if William had been repulsed, because these documents span decades, and are charters from the highest level of English government, and that's often a good indication of where spelling trends are heading.