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Voicing of Initial Interdental Fricatives in Early Middle English Function Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

Beverly A. Thurber
Beverly A. Thurber*
Affiliation:
Shimer College
*
Shimer College, 3424 S. State St., Chicago IL 60616, USA, [b.thurber@shimer.edu]
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Abstract

In Modern English, function words such as this, that, and the are pronounced with a voiced onset, while content words have the original voiceless onset. A statistical analysis of the distribution of <ð> and <þ> in Vices and Virtues, a text preserved in London, British Library, Stowe MS 34 (circa 1200), reveals a distribution, whose most plausible interpretation is that these two letters were used to encode stress-conditioned differences in voicing. This sets the voicing of function words, normally dated to the fourteenth century, back to circa 1200 or earlier.*

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ARTICLES
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Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 65 - 81
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Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2011

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