QuoteReplyTopic: and no longer in English, why? Posted: 28-Dec-2007 at 11:05
I have rarely met an English person (let alone English-speakers from other areas) who didn't pronounce 'th' properly (both voiced and voiceless).
It's true traditional Cockney substituted 'f' and 'v' but Cockney is dying out fast (how many people are born within sound of Bow bells nowadays?), being replaced locally by estuary English, which has no trouble with 'th'.
I suspect, as someone said, the letters were dropped because they don't exist in the Latin alphabet, and Latin was the primary written language in most of the middle ages.
This would be accentuated by the arrival of the printing press, mostly developed in countries where the vernacular didn't have the 'th' sound.
Incidentally, Spanish (in Spain) has the 'th' sound but uses 'c' and 'z' to represent it.
It seems to me that the adoption of the printing press had something to do with it. It also appears to me that the lack of these letters in the latin alphabet had something to do with it as well. But I think there is something more to the explanation. Germany adopted a latin alphabet and printing press and kept letters like . English which used latin as an official documentary language well before the printing press came still used , while using and adopting a latin alphabet.
To the person who made the distinction between the pronunciation of
and in Scandinavian pronunciation, it's my understanding that by the
time the various Angle and Saxon dialects had merged into the first
semblance of a standard English (which would have been the Mercian
dialect with Offa's rise) there was no distinction between the
pronunciation of the two letters: they seem to have been used
interchangeably. Maybe this is one reason why they died out.
No offence but I find the idea that because Cockneys often choose
not to pronounce 'th' (they are not physically incapable - it is a
idiomatic habit, albeit engrained) to be the reason why these letters
have died out to be a bit unrealistic.
1) Cockneys have spoken with round about the same accent since at least
the Great Vowel Shift, by which time the letters had already fallen out
of use.
2) The Cockney accent is probably descended from Midland dialect (which
stretched from London up to Staffordshire, albeit the Cockneys accent
would have been mixed extensively with Kentish) and was the lingua
franca by the time of Chaucer (who also used that dialect and helped
further popularize it), again by which time at least the eth had died
out.
3) The pronunciation of eth and thorn as f/v is not restricted to Cockney.
4) Mockney is not the same as Cockney, and I suspect that if you did
any kind of study of Mockney, you'd find that the f/v pronunciation is
one of the last to be mimicked. This is because the 'th' is one of the
last sounds for babies to acquire and such a hard-won sound is less
likely to be lost, and also because the similarly common 'd'
substitution for the hard 'th' is easier to say than f/v: themselves
not so easy. Also it's because the f/v pronunciation is one of the most stigmatized elements.
5) True Cockney is getting more and more eroded by Estuary English
itself (which like Mockney doesn't use the 'th' mutation), and some linguists have suggested that it's dying out, or at
least getting more and more restricted in geographical area. Anyway, its influence is definitely waning.
I agree with those who have suggested that the Normans were the biggest
influence on their disuse. Norman dialects had already lost the 'th'.
Does anybody know of any books, essays, or other writings on the topic at hand? I am going to have a lot of free time soon and would like some more things to read.
Oh yeah, btw... One of David Crystal's books mentions it in passing... maybe it's 'the English Language' which has been reprinted under a different name now, but I can't remember what. And Simeon Potter's book 'Our Language' also covers similar ground (actually, Crystal's book is almost identical in places in terms of order and conclusions, but I suppose that's inevitable - and Potter's book is so dry and boring I can't really recommend it over Crystal's!).
I have a book by Chrystal called "the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'. Bought it only a few years ago (second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004), so I'd say it is still available under that title.
In a nutshell: The That or Eth () has an unknown origin, but perhaps came from the Irish. In sound and spelling it was used interchangeable with Thorn (), but the Thorn started to get an upper hand in the Later Old English period. Oddly enough, Thorn is younger than the -th spelling, which has preference in very early Old English, so I (me, that is, not Chrystal) assume the Scandinavian influence had something to do with its popularity in the High Old English period. The return of -th starts in the very Early Middle English period, such as in the Petersborough Chronicle, where it is used sporadically. Nevertheless, Thorn was the only of the five specific Old English letters (Eth, Thorn, Yogh, a long s shape used for g, Wynn, a roud W-shaped rune later replaced by W and Ash, the ) to survive well into the Middle English period.
Crystall also mentions that indeed the French had a big influence on English spelling, using new spellings for several sounds. Qu was used for Cw (as in cwen - queen) Gh for H (night, enough) Ch for C (church) OU for U (house) C before an E instead of S (cercle/circle, cell), and for legebilty, they replaced a lot of U-s with O-s when a sequence of u-n-w-v letters made a word hard to read (come, love, one, son). They also increased the use of K and Z (the last one was not used in OE).
Funny detail: the Thorn was still used in Middle English, but its shape changed for faster writing, to a symbol that looks more like a y. In this shape it was used into the nineteenth century, by which time the original sound belonging to the symbol was forgotten. Hence: Ye Old Coffee Shoppe is no more or less than e Old Coffee Shoppe.
The answer to the question is: the Thorn is still used to this day.
Edited by Aelfgifu - 25-Feb-2008 at 18:00
Women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears.
I have a book by Chrystal called "the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'. Bought it only a few years ago (second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004), so I'd say it is still available under that title.
Oh yeah, that's it, thanks. Great book. It's Crystal btw, no 'h'.
Funny detail: the Thorn was still used in Middle English, but its shape changed for faster writing, to a symbol that looks more like a y. In this shape it was used into the nineteenth century, by which time the original sound belonging to the symbol was forgotten. Hence: Ye Old Coffee Shoppe is no more or less than e Old Coffee Shoppe.
The answer to the question is: the Thorn is still used to this day.
Jacob, thanks for the Beowulf text. Another question for anybody who wants to attempt an answer. Why is Icelandic the only language in which the letters � and � survive? At least it is the only one that I can think of. I'm not talking about the sounds produced by these sounds but rather strictly the letters. Does Icelandic use the letter combination of 'th,' as in English the or that, or does it simply use the � and/or � in its place?
Icelandic is not the only one...I can think of Dalecarlian:
While not quite the language expert of the above posters, I would just like to add an American version of the sound that is vocalized by many of our citizens, especially 50 years ago or more. In this case "that, them, those, this, etc." or pronounced as "dat, dem, dose, dis, etc.!
Just what could have caused this distinction or at least this distinctive pronounciation? Which was or is, still heard in mainly New York City and environs, as well as in parts of Louisiana.
Of course in African American pronounciation it is more accepted, at least according to most people who work and live around certain areas. And, it was ridiculed by many people for years as a racist distinction.
Certainly there exists only two seperate American dialects or accents that still retain their ancient English pronounciations, this would be the New England accent, and the common Southern accent. Of course variations of both of these exist (I have no personal knowledge of this however, in the N. East, since I have never visisted that part of America) but I do recognize commonalities of speech in the Southern States, as well as subtle distintions.
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