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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Tendency of Inflections to Disappear - Why?
In-Reply-To: markrose@spss.com's message of 8 Aug 1996 14:57:58 GMT
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Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 18:58:18 GMT
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In article <4ucv9m$255@netsrv2.spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
writes:

>The gown/con pun has always seemed a bit remote to me.  Is there any evidence
>that 'gown' was pronounced [goun] rather than [gaun] in those days, which
>would make the two words a tolerable rhyme?

The Great English Vowel Shift was at a stage at which modern [gaun] was still
[g@un], much more tolerably close to [kon].  The language sounded much like the
modern Anglo-Irish dialects.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
