Wiktionary talk:About Old Saxon

b

For what I read, OSX is generally or even unanimously thought to have continued PG /b/, with it becoming a fricative within vowels. Native OSX writers used <-b->, <v> and <ƀ> next to each other and several (disconnected) Low German dialects closed /v/ from earlier /ƀ/ to [b] sometime in the 18th century, which did not happen for instances of [v] which stemmed from earlier /w/, with GML oven > NDS oben. This multi-phonic/uncertain nature is reflected in scholary <ƀ> and hence I think it should be kept not to confuse the uneducated reader. As you (CodeCat) pointed out yourself, neighbouring Frisians and Franks uses <v> exclusively, so I'd consider <ƀ> to be a rather distinguishing OSX feature.Korn (talk) 19:01, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure if that is really a good argument, though. It may help to look at it from a phonetic point of view. In that view, the phone represented by Germanic noninitial *b has three main characteristics: it is voiced, it is bilabial, and it is a fricative. None of the dialects in question changed the voicing, so that can be ignored for now. German changed fricative > plosive. Dutch changed bilabial > labiodental sometime in its history. But now consider the writing system they were using to write their language. Latin had three phonemes that overlapped in some aspects with these ones: f, a voiceless labiodental fricative (but do we know it wasn't bilabial?), b, a voiced bilabial plosive, and v, a voiced bilabial approximant. None of these fit the original Germanic sound perfectly, so whoever used the alphabet in this form would have had to compromise. However, another important point is that the phonetics of Latin itself changed over time as well. How was v pronounced in Latin at the time? Was it bilabial or labiodental? Was it an approximant or a fricative? Old English and Old Norse writers chose f to represent *b, which may be an indication that writers there still pronounced v as an approximant. But what about b? It's quite well known that b and v merged in most Romance languages. These are important considerations, especially because it's quite possible that Old Dutch and Old Frisian did not have labiodental consonants at the time either, but that *b and *f were both still bilabial in those languages. So if Old Dutch and Old Frisian writers chose v to represent *b, did they do so because it represented a fricative, or because it was bilabial, or both? And if Old Saxon writers chose b, did they do so because it was pronounced the same as v when they first learned the alphabet from Latin speakers? Hence, the fact that Old Saxon writers used b is no guarantee that Old Dutch pronunciation was not still bilabial. They may have just happened to choose one out of two possible bilabial consonant letters to represent the sound. —CodeCat 19:57, 7 April 2012 (UTC)