On Feb 14, 2005, at 5:13 AM, Daniel Wolf wrote:
This is true when looking at the orthography retrospectively, but there were local occurrences of "sz" for the long s in German, and it survives in Hungarian orthography (which generally follows a German pattern albeit with a very different phonological basis) in which "s" is <sh> and "sz" is <s>.
One of the interesting things I learned while investigating the ligature yesterday is that this "long s" sound evolved from earlier Germanic words which had a "t" sound.
It never occurred to me to notice how many � words have an English cognate where the � is a t -- fu�, foot; s��, sweet; da�, that; la�, let; gro�, great; gr��, greet; etc.
(I had a similar revelation last year about the circumflex in French, which usually indicates a consonant after the vowel which became silent and then was dropped.)
mdl
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