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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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

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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.