On the Syllabic Phonemes of Old English | Language | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)

Extract

The phonemic system of Old English has become a matter of increasing interest to linguists in recent years. Twenty years ago, structural linguists seldom concerned themselves with the phonemes of a ‘dead’ language, while traditional linguists and philologists generally regarded phonemes as something exotic, something outside the purview of normal language activities and studies. Since 1939, however, we have seen a fair number of publications dealing with the Old English phonemic system or portions of it, written either from a structural viewpoint or in a manner which indicates an awareness of the structural problems of the language.

References

1 Marjorie Daunt, Old English sound changes reconsidered in relation to scribal tradition and practice, Transactions of the Philological Society 1989 108–37 (1940) ; J. W. Watson, Northumbrian Old English ēo and ēa, Lg. 22.19–26 (1946); id., Non-initial k in the North of England, Lg. 23.43–9 (1947); Herbert Penzl, The phonemic split of Germanic k in Old English, Lg. 23.34–42 (1947); W. F. Twaddell, The prehistoric Germanic short syllabics, Lg. 24.139–51 (1948) ; Norman E. Eliason, Old English vowel lengthening and vowel shortening before consonant groups, Studies in philology 45.1–20 (1948); A. S. C. Ross, Old English æ ~ a, English studies 32.49–56 (1951); R. P. Stockwell and C. W. Barritt, Some Old English graphemic-phonemic correspondences—ae, ea, and a, Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers. No. 4 (Washington, D. C., 1951); Karl Brunner, The Old English vowel phonemes, English studies 34.247–51 (1953); Sherman M. Kuhn and Randolph Quirk, Some recent interpretations of Old English digraph spellings, Lg. 29.143–56 (1953) ; Alfred Reszkiewicz, The phonemic interpretation of Old English digraphs, Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Jezykoznawczego 12.179–87 (1953); M. L. Samuels, The study of Old English phonology, TPS 1952 15–47 (1953); Daunt, Some notes on Old English phonology, TPS 1952 48–54 (1953); C. E. Bazell, rev. of Stockwell and Barritt (1951), Litera 1.75–7 (1954); W. G. Moulton, The stops and spirants of early Germanic, Lg. 30.1–42 (1954); Stockwell and Barritt, The Old English short digraphs: Some considerations, Lg. 31.372–89 (1955); Kuhn and Quirk, The Old English digraphs : A reply, Lg. 31.390–401 (1955) ; Gerd Bauer, The problem of short diphthongs in Old English, Anglia 74.427–37 (1956); Hans Kurath, The loss of long consonants and the rise of voiced fricatives in Middle English, Lg. 32.435–45 (1956) ; The binary interpretation of English vowels: A critique, Lg. 33.111–22 (1957); Seymour Chatman, The a/æ opposition in Old English, Word 14.224–36 (1958); C. F. Hockett, A course in modern linguistics 372–9 (New York, 1958) ; J. A. Nist, Phonemes and distinctive features in Beowulf, SIL 13.25–33 (1958) ; James Sledd, Some questions of English phonology, Lg. 34.252–8 (1958) ; Stockwell, The phonology of Old English : A structural sketch, SIL 13.13–24 (1958) ; Hockett, The stressed syllabics of Old English, Lg. 35.575–97 (1959) ; Kemp Malone, Diphthong and glide, Mélanges de linguistique et de philologie: Fernand Mossé in memoriam 256–66 (Paris, 1959); Stockwell and Rudolph Willard, Further notes on Old English phonology, SIL 14.10–13 (1959); Stockwell and Barritt, Scribal practice: Some assumptions, Lg. 37.75–82 (1961).

2 Linguistic analysis normally proceeds from the individual and specific to the general. The order of the analysis itself is reversed here for clarity of presentation.

3 For the earlier studies, see A. G. Kennedy, A bibliography of writings on the English language from the beginning of printing to the end of 1922 (Cambridge, Mass., and New Haven, 1927). For more recent work, see the various annual bibliographies and those in recent grammars, such as K. Brunner's Altenglische Grammatik nach ... Eduard Sievers 2 (Halle, 1951) and A. Campbell's Old English grammar (Oxford, 1959).

4 Henry Sweet, The oldest English texts = EETS OS 83.35–121 (1885); W. M. Lindsay, The Corpus Glossary (Cambridge, 1921).

5 Sweet, OET 132–47, 149–51; A. H. Smith, Three Northumbrian poems (London, 1933); E. V. K. Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon minor poems 104, 107, 109 (New York, 1942); Charles Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae historiam ecclesiasticam (Oxford, 1896).

6 Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society 4.87–265.

7 I agree with Hockett 578 (1959) that any analysis of OE phonemes must account satisfactorily for scribal practices. To be more specific, I am certain that the OE writing system (or any other alphabet system used for a language before the invention of dictionaries) was roughly phonemic ; otherwise it would have been like an elaborate cipher, unintelligible to anyone who did not possess a special key. I am equally certain that the graphemes were roughly phonetic; otherwise how would anyone identify the phonemes?

8 I agree with Kurath 114 (1957).

10 Ibid.; see also Hilmer Ström, Old English personal names in Bede's history 117 (Lund, 1939).

11 This must be inferred from later WS, for there are no surviving WS texts comparable in date to the glossaries and early Nhb. texts.

14 I once tried using Bülbring's [æe] for this, but I find this symbol often misinterpreted as a diphthong. — The diacritic here is intended to indicate a vowel simultaneously raised and fronted.

16 For WS, see Ross 49; Stockwell and Barritt 37–8 (1951). For Merc., see Chatman 229–36. The proofs for WS can be extended to Nhb., those for Merc. to Kt.

20 Chadwick 204–6, 250; Ström 93.

21 K. Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache 349–50 (Leipzig, 1921); cf. ME pani ‘penny’, pans ‘pence’, etc.

24 For a and ea in the early Bede MSS, see Ström 92, 103–4.

27 Except in the Northern dialect.

28 Page 181. His set of minimal pairs are all WS, but similar pairs can be adduced for all dialects except Kt., in which the surviving texts contain insufficient materials.

30 They are customarily left unmarked, as though short.

31 According to Samuels 43, the short diphthongs became phonemic in the seventh century. /æ/ must have become a phoneme considerably earlier through the loss of inflectional endings, etc.

33 Chadwick 216–8; Ström 106–7.

35 There is doubt, however, about the lengthening of vowels after loss of /h/ in the clusters /lh, rh/; see Randolph Quirk and C. L. Wrenn, An Old English grammar 137 (1955).

38 Ibid. 99–101, 147. Similar confusion of /eo, æa/ and /ēo, ǣa/ occurs to a limited extent in the Vespasian Psalter gloss and other Merc. texts.

39 The apparent examples given by Chadwick 228 are actually due to velar umlaut.

41 Hockett 575–7 (1959). This view is attacked by Stockwell and Barritt (1961).

42 Hockett 596 (1959). The spellings cited by Hockett as reflections of early pronunciation are from the eighth-century glossaries and the early Bede MSS.

43 I do not have space to discuss Hockett's five orthographical principles (590–1). They are admirably set forth, but I see no necessity for explaining io, eo, ea by principle 5; his principle 4 would explain them equally well.

44 Malone distinguishes between true diphthongs and ‘glides’ (256). He holds that OE io, eo, ea, ie represented true diphthongs until almost the end of the OE period (258–61).

45 See Stockwell and Barritt 388 (1955); Stockwell 23 (1958).

46 Pp. 111–2, 121 (1957).

48 My article, The dialect of the Corpus Glossary, PMLA 54.1–19 (1939), presents the data, which can readily be interpreted in structural terms.

49 Both are available in Sweet's OET 174, 188–420. Errors, chiefly in Sweet's Latin text of the Psalter, do not materially affect the general phonemic analysis.

50 Hockett would not use later historical evidence in a synchronic article. Since this article is both synchronic and diachronic, I have no scruples about using any valid evidence that I can find.

51 E and Æ in Farman's Mercian glosses, PMLA 60.631–69 (1945).

53 W. W. Skeat, editions of the four Gospels in WS, Merc., and Nhb. (Cambridge, 1871–87); Uno Lindelöf, Rituale Ecclesiae Dunelmensis, Surtees Society, Vol. 140 (1927).

54 The MSS are of the late 14th century, and some of the spellings probably reflect the late ME shift of /er/ > /ar/.

55 For a summary, see Watson 19–20 (1946); see also Campbell 117–20.

57 Otto Strandberg, The rime-vowels of Cursor Mundi 106–7, 118, 145, etc. (Uppsala, 1919). I omit studies of later Northern texts for lack of space.

58 C. Plummer and J. Earle, Two Saxon chronicles parallel, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1892, 1899); Sweet, King Alfred's Orosius = EETS OS 79 (1883); Sweet, King Alfred's West Saxon version of Gregory's pastoral care = EETS OS 45, 50 (1871–2; repr. 1909).

69 For a useful analysis, see P. J. Cosijn, Altwestsächsische Grammatik, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1883–6).

60 Daunt, Samuels, Stockwell and Barritt, Barritt, Bazell, Reszkiewicz, Malone, Kuhn and Quirk; see fn. 1.

62 According to Brunner 249–50 (1953), /ie/ acquired a 'palatoguttural pronunciation ' in late WS. Although not actually rounded, the sound was often confused with /y/ and hence written y. He concedes that 'a rounded [y] may have been substituted for it by some speakers or in some areas.'

63 Henning Hallqvist, Studies in Old English fractured ea 9–77 (Lund, 1948).

64 Especially Dan Michel's ayenbite of inwyt, ed. by R. Morris, = EETS OS 23 (1866); and William of Shoreham's poems, ed. by M. Konrath, = EETS ES 86 (1902).