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 Originally Posted by eugmac
stuff like this interests me quite a bit. learning german, i discovered some interesting things about common roots between english and german. the verb to bring is bringen in german. the past perfect form in english is "have brought", or "habe gebracht" in german. the ge- prefix is standard for most verbs in the past perfect tense. the latter part, "-bracht"... see, it's the same! Except that the "ch" sound is pronounced in german, whereas the "gh" has become entirely silent in english. i would assume this means at some point of old english, those consonants would have been pronounced in one way or another.
FWIW, the spelling as of Chaucer (Middle English) was "broghte." As in: "And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree." No idea when or why the "u" came in. The "e" is likely some weird antiquated tense thing because it shows up elsewhere as "ybroght" (which is definitely a tense thing that I've since forgotten).
Doesn't help with the evolution of pronunciation, obviously, but that's not near as easy to find. Based on how universally the softer, hock-a-loogie-sounding c's fell out of the English language from its Germanic patrons, I'd imagine it was bound to go that way regardless of the particular history. Maybe it was a dialect thing on the Brittish isles; maybe it was an influence of the Norman overlords, whose Romantic tongues tend to be more flowy.
Clearly I'm no expert, but I also find all that stuff very interesting. The language has had such a loooooong arc of overwhelming changes, even since 1066, and yet you still every-so-often come across things in English that are straight from sanskrit.
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