A History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period, With Full Word-Lists (Classic Reprint)

Transactions of the Philological Society for 1873-4. Additional copies were struck off for the members of the Dialect Society. I also put a few hundred copies into the hands of Mr. Triibner, so as to make the work accessible to the general public; these have long since been sold out. My investigations were due to the combined influence of Bell s Visible Speech, Ellis s Early English Pronunciation, and the German school of comparative and historical philology, of which Grimm s Deutsche Grammatlk was to me still the chief exponent. In attempting to trace the connection between the Old English vowel-system as revealed by its comparison with the cognate languages, with the early Modern one deduced by Mr. Ellis from his contemporary phonetic authorities, certain difficulties became manifest. It was evident that if the present distinction between oo and o, as in moon, stone, already existed in the Old English uwun, xtan, it must also have existed in the intermediate Chaucer period, so that Chaucer so in mone, ston could not possibly have stood for one and the same sound, as Mr. Ellis assumed. This self-evident objection to Mr. Ellis sview had also been made by Dr. Weymouth, and had been, indeed, I nn-shadowed by Rapp (see Ellis EEP II, 675). But with the es the parallelism did not seem to hold good.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text.