The Phonemic Split of Germanic k in Old English

Anglo-Saxon Pennies and Old English Phonology

“…Because the OE spelling System was based on the modification of the Latin alphabet to represent the vernacular, the spelling of OE can suggest a phonological reconstruction (see e.g. Campbell 1959: § 31;Penzl 1957: § 2.1); the correlation between graph and phoneme may not always, of course, be one-to-one: for evidence of one graph (c) representing two phonemes Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 5/27/15 4:48 AM (/k/ and /t{/) in OE see Penzl 1947; for two graphs (a and ae) representing (arguably) one phoneme (/a/), see Colman 1983a; for a summary of the controversy over the phonological representation of OE digraphs see Lass and Anderson 1975: 75 -9.…”

“…b) Inorganic compositional vowels sometimes appear in comnames (äs in common compound words, especially in Gmc. Penzl 1947). c) Parasitic vowels within elements occur in forms of OE common words, in accented syllables after the vowel, between [r] or [l]+consonant (Campbell 1959: § 360).…”

English: Eine Sprachgeschichte nach Texton von 350 bis 1992. By Herbert Penzl, with the assistance of Margaret Austin Hall. (Germanistische Lehrbuchsammlung, 82.) Bern: Peter Lang, 1994. Pp. 202.

“…In the course of this, his last book (of, I believe, ten, not to mention more than a hundred articles), there is perfectly apt reference to published work of his own dating back as far as 1938. One relatively early article for which he became particularly well known was his 1947 argument that the phonemicization of affricates in Old English was accomplished not by affrication itself, but by the effect of front mutation on the distribution of velar and palatal allophones (Penzl 1947)-a short study that had a profound effect on the way Germanicists conducted business, such a clear demonstration as it was of the logic of structuralist methods. And so it seems to me singularly appropriate that although his linguistic interests were varied, his final book should have returned to the subject of English linguistic history.…”

Old English Palatalization

“…Although this would not agree with the parallel shift in Frisian, it would agree with the distribution of the umlauted vowels in Primitive Old English, where * i and * j generally remain, as against the position in the written period, where * i and *j largely disappear or are reduced, creating the environments for phonemic as opposed to allophonic contrast. But this type of approach is ruled out of court by Penzl(1947), who shows that the palatal consonants only became phonemic by virtue of the phonemicization of umlaut. In any case, it is difficult to see how the umlaut of, for example, */a:/ could have resulted in anything other than Is:/ immediately, since the phonetic change was [a:] 7 [ae:].…”