a few good

OE websites, although I get the impression that knowledge about the original pronunciation may have been lost. Is there any free ebook for studying Old English for Beginners?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word blue, a loanword from “Anglo-Norman blew, bliu, blu, blwe, bluw”, had a number of spellings that were used during the Middle English period, among them : eME

blu, ME bleu, ME bleuh, ME bluwe, ME blw, ME blyu, ME blyw, ME–15 blwe, ME–16

The Wikipedia article about the term blue moon uses a verse from the pamphlet “Rede me and be nott wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe” that was published in 1528: Yf they saye the mone is belewe I say it is true (These lines also appear in the OED entry on moon as the earliest and only quotation for

the now-obsolete expression “to say that the moon is blue”, which the OED compares

For the word “true,” the OED entry for the word “true” has more details about the pronunciation of that word

in Middle English: the. Forms show the usual development of Old English ow to the Middle English diphthong u, w (with long close ). By the 10th cent. This diphthong had fallen together (perhaps as/U/) with the reflex of Old French u (i.e., 4-// /). This diphthong had been connected (proximally as/f//*/) with the reflex of Old French u (like the u/f/ /u/) and this diphthong had fallen together; perhaps as /u/). (/y/), giving rise to Middle English, and later (>). Forms tru, true, etc.

The symbol represents a diphthong that is not found in most common British accents, but that consists of a vowel, like the “ih” in the modern English word “kit” followed by an “oo” or “w”-like offglide, like at the end of the /i/ dipthong in the modern English word “cow”. I have also seen this diphthong transcribed as iu, , and i (“Diphthongs”, English Language and Linguistics Online ). The IPA symbols u00ab, i, and etc.u00bb and u00ab and uu00bb refer to theoretically adjacent and in practice actually overlapping areas of the “vowel space”, so the variation in transcription mentioned here doesn’t actually correspond to much if any difference in the sounds that are being referred to.

In Middle English the consonants /b/ and /l are pronounced about the same as they are now.

Silent s

I am more uncertain about the pronunciation of the first and last s. In Middle English, the letter could represent a number of sounds: an unreduced short vowel /e/, one of the long vowels /e/ or//, the schwa //, or no sound at all (a “silent e” as in many modern English words).

When word-final schwa was lost in English have In’t read most of it? Isn’t the overall trend of word final schwa loss noncontroversial? Minkova says:

there is no scholarly disagreement on the full-blown progress of final schwa loss from the 12th century onwards. What is the best way to reduce or minimize in your context? Inflective final vowels are more likely to reduce or apocope than regular vowels. The loss of schwa in word-final position, both inflectional and stem-final, was more advanced in the northern dialect areas, where by the mid 14th-century its realization would have been an archaism. The insertion of unetymological is a good test for the instability of base-final. Let is introduce one of the bases. The Ormulum, an autograph manuscript dated c. 1180, written in Lincolnshire, shows a number of nominatives in in nouns which had no final in OE: ax e OE x ‘axe’, bliss e OE bliss, wund e OE wund ‘wound’. In the southern dialects apocope spread more slowly, with inflectional’s leading the way. When it comes to nouns, it is consistent only in monolingual nouns in prepositional phrases. The dialectal details are much discussed in the literature (see Minkova 1991: Ch. 2; Fulk 2012: 30). Of interest in the context of the overall history of the change is that at the beginning of the 15th c, the idea of the system had only been realised earlier, rather than before. the realization of schwa in word-final position in base forms of nouns in all dialects had become obsolete. This allows us to posit an active constraint on the distribution of /-/ as defined in (3):

(3) */-/#: Avoid the realization of schwa in word-final position

Based on this information it seems that the final in was most likely silent and did not constitute a distinct syllable, since the passage it appears in seems to have been written in the 1500s, not only soon after the 12th century but well past Chaucer’s time also.

“The second is puzzling, since it is not consistent with the etymological origins of the word. Basically, “The tenth” refers to “The seventeenth” while “Near the end line”. Is it possible that it was an inserted unetymological silent letter, somewhat like the examples given by Minkova, although it does not occur in word-final position like these examples. If the first ff somehow corresponds to some actual vowel sound, I would guess that the schwa would be most likely.

The pronunciation of the word

in a passage seems to me that the pronunciation of the word in this passage was most likely monosyllabic /bliu/, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to break the word into syllables at all. If you are making a distinction between The Netherlands and Belgium, which you should consider as “Belewe”? The /l/ falls in the same syllable as the following diphthong /iu/: even if there was some kind of vowel preceding it, that vowel would have almost certainly been unstressed, based on the word’s etymology and the rhyme with true. E.g.: Is it about an idea or a rule I should follow? things like /bel. E.g. iu = be/. E.g. liu/ seem completely impossible to me; and while I’m not confident enough to completely rule out /bliu/, (whose syllables would be divided as belewe), it seems less probable to me than /bliu/ belewe.

Which is my all time best shot..? I know enough about Middle English and I want to give an answer that covers all spelling variants of the Middle English audio system, but I don’t know about the Difference spelling variants all the way thar what I can say without mentioning the differences.

When you arrive in a full answer that talks about things like what the unusual spelling of blue in this particular document, with instead of, is most likely to have corresponded to in terms of pronunciation, you may have to get in touch with professors or other kinds of experts who seriously studied Middle English phonology and paleography.

My question

about the etymology of the blue moon in Wikipedia is something about it. (Notify me when I add the question on Wikipedia)

What is a good rule of thumb for a successful story?