Old English Orthography and A Brief Description of Old English Vowels and their Changes (original) (raw)
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The historical phonology of Old English: a critical review
Papers in Historical Phonology
There is a widely accepted chronology of sound laws, covering the transition from Proto-West Germanic to Old English, found in every handbook of Old English. This chronology contains sound laws whose only function is to cancel the effects of previous ones, such as ‘retraction’ and ‘smoothing’, reversing ‘fronting’ and ‘breaking’. This chronology of sound laws is allocated to the relatively short period between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century and the oldest Early Old English sources around 700. On close scrutiny, some aspects of the theory turn out to be problematic: the series of sound laws is fairly unique in the history of Germanic languages; some of the sound laws are phonetically unlikely (e.g. ‘Anglian smoothing’); the extensive, sometimes repetitive, sequences (up to 5 stages) of forms in only 250 years seem hardly realistic; none of the questionable developments is positively confirmed by runic evidence; the theory requires the interpretation of many attest...
A Historical Phonology of English
2013
A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH 3.2 The Indo-European family of languages 3.3 The Germanic branch of Indo-European 3.4 Some pre-Old English segmental and prosodic changes 3.4.1 Grimm's Law, or the First Germanic Consonant Shift 3.4.2 Some IE vowel changes in Germanic 3.4.3 Early prosodic changes: stress and syllable weight in Germanic 3.4.4 Lengthening of fi nal vowels in stressed monosyllables 3.4.5 West Germanic (Consonant) Gemination (WGG)
Old English and its sound correspondences in Old English and Middle English
English Language and Linguistics, 2019
This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g. midgern <micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc *g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It ...
Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2023
The present study analyzes the transformation of the vowel system and especially the process of vowel mergers based on the Latin inscriptions of the Gallic and Germanic provinces. With the help of the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of the Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age (http://lldb.elte.hu/), it tries to draw and then compare the phonological profiles of the selected provinces and to describe the dialectal position of Gaul and the Germanic provinces regarding vocalism in three periods (AD 1-300, 301-500 and 501-700). The analysis, which also covers comparisons with certain provinces of Italy, Spain and Dalmatia, is carried out considering four aspects: the ratio of vocalic versus consonantal changes, the ratio of vowel mergers compared to vocalic changes, the ratio of e-i and o-u mergers compared to each other, and the ratio of vowel mergers by stressed and unstressed syllable. As a result of the present study, it was revealed that Gallic provinces cannot be treated as a unit or as clearly separate from the other areas studied according to either aspect of the study, especially not in the early, pre-Christian period. Gallic provinces appear to behave in the same or a levelled manner at most in the later and/or latest periods. The Germanic provinces, especially Germania Superior, have, albeit with some delay, adapted to the Gallic provinces in their late development. The present study, which continued József Herman's research, managed to explore the hitherto little-known linguistic and dialectological features of Latin in the Gallic and Germanic provinces.
Middle English: Phonology. In: Bergs, Alex and Laurel Brinton (eds.) 2012. Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1). Berlin: de Gruyter. 399–414.
This chapter describes segmental and suprasegmental developments in Middle English phonology. It identifies major historical trends as well as the causalities behind them. Its focus on explanation also motivates a departure from the traditional order of presentation. Taking into account that rhythmic patterns are historically more stable than the properties of segments and impose strong constraints on their transmission, this chapter discusses Middle English word stress first, and explains how the integration of French loan words affected the system behind it. Next the rhythmic patterns are described which emerged from the expression of lexical stress and which constituted the environment for the phonetic realization of Middle English speech sounds. The final section describes developments in segmental phonology, both in unstressed and in stressed environments. An attempt is made to show how most of them can be understood as adaptive responses to rhythmic constraints on the phonetic realization of segments.
The patterns of vowel length indication in printers’ graphemic systems in Early Modern English
2013
The focus of this paper is both graphemic and phonological. It describes the early printers' methods of indicating the vowel length in the editions of the Kalender ofShepherdes, an almanac published over the 150 years between 1506 and 1656. Beside morphological spelling, orthographic distinction between homophones, and etymological spelling, vowel length indication belongs to the most important criteria to be taken into consideration in the research on orthographic standardisation in English (Salmon 1999:21).
2016
Old English (ca. AD 450-1100) constitutes the only stage in the historical development of the English language, at which the standard spelling conventions prescribed a graphemic differentiation between the back vowel [u] and the back approximant [w]/[ʋ]. While the former has always been spelled with versions of the Latin letter , the scribes of Old English manuscripts introduced the originally runic character wynn < w>/<ƿ> to mark the latter. The present dissertation examines the issue in a transdisciplinary fashion, combining in a novel way the research tools offered by current models of generative phonology, statistical analysis in the programming environment R, and Latin and runic paleography. By the same token, the dissertation introduces insightful developments into the methodology of diachronic phonology, which has been somewhat neglected hitherto, in comparison with synchronic phonology. The phonological representations are couched in Feature Geometry (Sagey 1986; Halle 1992, 1995), while the derivations follow the practice of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993; McCarthy & Prince 1995). The combination of the two models allows for an explanatorily adequate reconstruction of a [+consonantal] labial approximant [ʋ] in Old English. The results of the phonological analysis are confirmed and further enriched by means of a statistical analysis, conducted in two models: Multiple Correspondence Analysis, and Generalised Linear Model. The statistical analysis demonstrates how generative phonology constitutes a highly accurate research methodology, and one that can be used for corpus studies – despite the increasingly common accusation that it is excessively abstract. Furthermore, statistics reintroduces time-depth into the diachronic phonological considerations by providing precise dating of the particular stages in the consonantisation of Old English [ʋ]. Finally, the results are verified by a paleographical study of how the rune wynn < w>/<> was introduced into the Latin scripts used by the Anglo-Saxons. The paleographical part of the dissertation is pioneering, because the letter wynn has not yet attracted scholarly interest, which traditionally focuses on letters used for writing Latin. The dissertation shows how paleography can ground diachronic phonology in historical reality by reflecting details of phonological development in minute characteristics of letter shapes.
Interpreting the Old and Middle English close vowels
Language Sciences, 2002
In a series of publications, including volumes two and three of the Cambridge History of the English Language, Roger Lass has advanced the view that the short vowels spelled < i> and were phonetically [i], [u] in Old and Middle English, and that their modern values [i] and [ ] developed after the middle of the seventeenth century. This position forces him to propose a simultaneous lowering and lengthening rule for the Middle English short high vowels which undergo Open Syllable Lengthening. We argue that there are no obstacles to reconstructing [i] [ ] for Old English, that positing a simultaneous lowering and lengthening of the short high vowels in Middle English is an unnecessary contrivance, and that the lengthened [i] [ ] did not lower, but rather merged with the raised reflexes of ME [e:] and [o:].