著者

松瀬 憲司

出版者

熊本大学

雑誌

熊本大学教育学部紀要 (ISSN:21881871)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.65, pp.65-72, 2016-12-19

---

In English there are pairs of semantically related words in which the one has gone through both palatalization and assibilation (Palatal Softening), while the other has not: for example, speech vs. speak, Old English giefan vs. give, etc. Among the conditions that trigger both sound changes, the existence of front vowel(s) before or/and after the /k/ or /ɡ/ sound involved and what we call i-Umlaut are very crucial. In addition, the reason why the palatalized and assibilated /ɡ/ in Old English giefan has been replaced by the original /ɡ/ in Present-Day English give cannot be accounted for by a sound change theory, but by a sociolinguistic point of view; give, a word borrowed from Old Norse, has been adopted into the standard variety of English instead of the native word giefan.And we also find tush, which has changed the original /sk/ sound of Proto-Germanic tunþskaz, as a dialectal variant in tandem with tusk, which has not and was taken into the standard English. This fact suggests that it just happened in the history of English that the former is regarded as a vernacular form and the latter a standard one; it just depends upon our selection whether they become a standard variety or not.