Mōtung:Hāligmōnað

Form of Old English accents -- rename page?

According to Old English Translator, "Old English accents should take the form é not ē ." Accordingly, this site represents the word as Háligmónaþ not Hāligmōnaþ.

If this is more correct, perhaps this page should be renamed to Háligmónaþ. 71.219.214.9 16:41, 29 Gēolmōnaþ 2016 (UTC)

Authentic texts do not have accents. Academic texts use it to indicate vowel lengths, and this Wicipædia is essentially an academic project. Bosworth & Toller's typesetters chose to use acute accents to indicate a long vowel. Clark & Hall and Bright use macrons, as do most textbooks. Hogweard (mōtung) 19:57, 30 Gēolmōnaþ 2016 (UTC)

There has been a vote on whether to use the acute accent or the macron (see Wikipǣdia:Macron or Accent vote), which should be respected. However, Hogweard, your factual statement clashes with the little I have read about Old English. This is to a high extent coming from Angelsächsische Grammatik by Eduard Sievers (Halle, 1898). The book is old, and probably obsolete in some respects; but he does claim precisely what you claim is not the case, namely, that the Old English sources at least sporadically do use the acute accent for denoting long vowels.

Sievers write exactly the following (the third section under the general heading Die vocale):

Quantität

§ 8. Diese sämtlichen vocallaute, auch die diphthonge, kommen sowol kurtz als lang vor. Die länge wird (am häufigsten in den ältesten hss. und wiederum in einsilbigen wörten) bisweilen durch doppelschreibung der einfachen vocalzeichen (doch wohl ausser y) angedeutet: aa, breer, miin, doom, huus; die ligaturen und diphthonge werden nicht verdoppelt. Später dient zum ausdrück der länge ein acut auf dem vocalzeichen oder der gruppe, á, brér, mín, dóm, hús, mýs, sǽ, óeðel oder oéðel, éac oder eác, tréowe oder treówe, u. s. w., aber auch dieses zeichen wird nur sporadish und ohne feste regel angewant. Im folgendem bedienen wir uns durchgehends der handschriftlichen bezeichnungsweise durch den acut, schreiben also

a æ e i o œ u y

á ǽ é í ó * ú ý

und ebenso bei den diphthongen mit acot auf dem ersten gliede

ea eo ie io

éa éo íe ío.

(The * stands for œ with an accent; I have not succeeded in convincing my tangent board to produce this.) I suspect that you read German well enough to follow this text. Sievers first writes that long vowels sometimes (most often in older texts and in one-syllabic words) are doubled, and exemplifies this usage. He then writes: "Later, the length is denoted by an acute [accent] on the vowel sign or group, á,...,treówe, a.s.o., but also this sign is employed only sporadically and without a fixed rule." He then goes on to explain the conventions to be used in his grammar, which he presents as "the manuscript way of denoting by means of the acute", and examplifies.

I find it rather improbable that he should be wrong. Later research may have discovered new sources, expanding the corpus, and shifting the proportion of mss. employing or not employing the acute accent for long vowels. It hardly could have invalidated the manuscript examples he gives, could they?

It may be noted, that using the acute accent for denoting long quantity was not isolated to Old English. I know for sure that it was done in many of the oldest Latin letters North Germanic language(s) manuscripts. (It is still done in Icelandic; but since there the pronunciation but not the orthography has changed considerably, the accents in modern Icelandic do not correspond to quantitative but to qualitative differences. I have recently read that Polish has gone through a similar development. Of course, the acute accent is still the mode to write long vowels in Hungarian; where there however (at least now) sometimes also exist some qualitative difference. (Thus, as Hungarians have explained this to me, the a is short and the á is long, but moreover, the a is pronounced more "closed" (with the tongue further back in the mouth), and the á as a more "open" sound.)

As I said, the voting is done and over; and there were other arguments for using the macron. However, the statement that neither the macron nor the acute accent was used in the manuscript simply appears to be wrong. JoergenB (mōtung) 02:12, 2 Se Æfterra Gēola 2017 (UTC)

I long ago accepted the decision to use the macron to mark long vowels, and I do not want to reopen that question. I would nevertheless like to see any authentic, contemporary text which actually uses it. Textbooks are creatures of the editor and typesetters. We would need to review actual, written texts of the time.

If you can find a pattern in the marks here, for example, you will advance my knowledge immensely. Hogweard (mōtung) 20:39, 2 Se Æfterra Gēola 2017 (UTC)