Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!newsfeed.pitt.edu!dbisna.com!psinntp!psinntp!psinntp!psinntp!scylla!cdh
From: cdh@oracorp.com (Douglas Harper)
Subject: Re: words without vowels
Message-ID: <1995May9.185433.19267@oracorp.com>
Organization: ORA Corporation, Ithaca, New York
References: <3ocjek$6km@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <3oe9gl$iq6@news.primenet.com>
Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 18:54:33 GMT
Lines: 33

In article <3oe9gl$iq6@news.primenet.com> farquhi@primenet.com 
(Iain Farquhar) writes:
|In article <3ocjek$6km@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, iad@cs.brandeis.edu says...
|
|>
|>Incidentally, I don't see _gh_ on the list; it stands for [@]
|>in _Edinburgh_, so I contend that it is a vowel.  (I'm serious.)
|>
|
|For those Americans puzzled by this, the common pronunciation of the
|capital of Scotland in Britain is e-din-bru.  Of course, Americans say
|e-din-burg, so it is pronounced here!!  I read somewhere that the gh
|is a soft consonant in Gaelic, sort of like a vocalized ch.  

It would be interesting to know what relationship the current
Gaelic-influenced pronunciation of "Edinburgh" has to the Anglo-Saxon
original.  How *was* the final syllable pronounced?

|As my last name attests, the English had ( and may still have for that
|matter) severe difficulty pronouncing the ch sound of Gaelic, so i can
|imagine that they preferred not even attempting to pronounce the
|Gaelic gh sound!

My ignorance of historical linguistics is showing (I read a.u.e, not
s.l), but *does* it attest to that, or does it just attest to a change
in orthography?  Do you know when the English spelling of your name was
standardized?  A lot of sounds have fallen out of English over the
years...

|
|Iain
-- 
Douglas Harper          cdh@oracorp.com         +1 (607) 277-2020
