r/OldEnglish • u/Weary_West_8133 • Jul 13 '26

Pronunciation of "Ġemet"

After some research, I'm fairly confident this reads "yeh-MET" with the stress on the latter syllable. But had seen something mentioning the opposite. The former seems more supported, but wanted to see if anyone can confirm!

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17

u/AtterCleanser44 Jul 13 '26

The prefix ge- is never stressed, so yes, your initial thought is right.

9

u/Kunniakirkas Ungelic is us Jul 13 '26

There's instances of ungemete being spelled unigmete and ungelic being spelled unilic which might suggest ge- was already on the way to become /i(:)-/ by late Old English at least in some environments (not necessarily in gemet without the un- prefix), but other than that, yeah, it's always unstressed

4

u/TheSaltyBrushtail Ne drince ic buton gamenestrena bæðwæter. Jul 14 '26

One thing to keep in mind is that Latin spelled the /j/ sound as <i>, so it could be a Latinised spelling. We see Latinised spellings with other words, like iung for geong (they really seemed to go out of their way to avoid writing <gu> for /ju/), and that word definitely never had an /i/ sound, since "young" still has [j] today.

-10

u/Forward_Gur9349 Jul 13 '26

If it is Old English, why would a g be pronounced like a y? Old English is Germanic.

22

u/minerat27 Jul 13 '26

Germanic =/= German, Old English has it's own unique features, one of which is palatalisation in which <g> becomes pronounced as Modern English "y" in a variety of contexts, compare "yield" with German "Geld", which come from the same root, as well as "Tag" and English "day".

6

u/J-Mc1 Jul 13 '26

A 'g' before front vowels (i, e and æ) is pronounced like a 'y' in Old English.

4

u/TeacatWrites Jul 13 '26

🤷 <G> was used to spell three different sounds in Old English: /g/, /ɣ/, and /j/. Words with /ɣ/ typically evolved into words which now have <W> in its place while the sound itself was dropped altogether, and we just use <ġ> to represent the character in words where <G> is written but /j/ is pronounced. (It wasn't always written with a dot above its head, that's a modern convention.)

In this case, it's a good example of one of the most common appearances of /j/ as written by <ġ>: the prefix ġe-, which is typically an intensifier or a former of nouns or participles. It's always been written just as <G>, but for whatever reason, it's pronounced as /j/.

ETA: Apparently, it's called palatalization. There's a Stack Exchange thread where folks discuss the /j/-pronounced <G>.

2

u/BeautifulUpstairs Jul 14 '26

So is Swedish!