Old English Orthography and A Brief Description of Old English Vowels and their Changes (original) (raw)
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 ...
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).
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.
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:].
On a Short Vowel Shift in Early Modern English
Schendl, Herbert and Nikolaus Ritt. 2002. “Of vowel shifts, great, small, long and short”. Language Sciences. 24. 409-421., 2002
This paper argues that the development of Early Modern English short vowels can be accounted for in terms of a chain shift which essentially lowered and centralised them. The shift, which we propose to call Short Vowel Shift, is as coherent and systematic as the comparably well established Great Vowel Shift. At the same time it is argued that both shifts represent historiographic constructs, or stories, whose plausibility depends not only on their truth value but at least as much on their fruitfulness and on the consiliences they produce. # Language Sciences 24 (2002) 409-421 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci 0388-0001/01/$ -see front matter # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. P I I : S 0 3 8 8 -0 0 0 1 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 4 1 -9
Transactions of The Philological Society, 2010
The problem under consideration is the exact nature of the application of High Vowel Deletion (HVD) in Old English. As discussed in §1, according to what has come to be the most prevalent view, a form such as nom.acc.pl. hēafdu‘heads’ in Late West Saxon, from earlier *hēafudu, is the phonologically regular result of the application of HVD. In §2 a recent alternative explanation is discussed, whereby *hēafudu should have produced *hēafd, which was subsequently reformed to hēafdu in West Saxon on the basis of analogy. Some initial difficulties that confront this latter explanation are discussed. The earlier analysis of Eduard Sievers maintains that neither of these analyses is correct, and that hēafudu, one of the forms actually attested in early texts, including the Vespasian Psalter, represents the purely phonological result of HVD, which applies vacuously to this form. Evidence is adduced in §3 demonstrating that the treatment of the phonological results of HVD in interrelated declensional categories in the dialect of the Vespasian Psalter are preserved with impressive conservatism, evincing little or no analogical disruption. This conclusion lends strong support to Sievers’ analysis of forms like hēafudu and renders it extremely improbable that West Saxon hēafdu can be anything but an analogical creation or that the proposed *hēafd could ever have existed. In §4 a rationale is offered for the changes, analogical or otherwise, that must be assumed for West Saxon in forms like hēafdu, as well as in ja-stem neuter nouns with plurals like rīċu, wītu, along with feminine nouns in Germanic *-iþō, such as and .
2012
Old English is in many respects a typical Indo-European language. This is particularly true of its morphological categories and its complex inflectional systems. It is mainly due to this complexity that this article cannot treat all aspects of OE morphology in full detail. It therefore focuses on the most important inflectional systems of Old English. Morphological word-formation patterns are necessarily treated only marginally (Kastovksy, this volume). Moreover, there is a considerable degree of dialectal variation in Old English which is also manifested in the morphological paradigms. This variation cannot be covered here comprehensively. This article therefore has a strong bias towards the later stages of the West Saxon variety-the dialect and period from which the greatest share of our extant sources is transmitted. For more comprehensive accounts, including the details of the diachronic and diatopic variation, I refer the reader to the relevant sections in Hogg/Fulk (2011) as well as to the older, but still valuable works by .
Remarks on the Changes of Consonantism in Pannonian Latinity as Evidenced by the Inscriptions
The research of the Latin language as reflected on the inscriptions in Pannonia is hardly to be regarded as a completed matter; on the contrary it can rather be regarded as a project just started. This is not to deny the fact that some studies on partial topics have already been published, and some of them, like the excellent studies of József Herman, treated aspects of Pannonian Latinity in a wider context, among others concerning dialect geography. However, there is no solid and detailed description of the language of Pannonian Latin inscriptions so far that could serve as a reference like the excellent study of Zamboni on the Latin language as reflected in Venetia and Histria. As far as the phonology of Pannonian Latinity is concerned, there are only two studies: one written by Herman on dialectal aspects of the vocalism and the other written by Fehér on some questions concerning the consonantism, published recently. 1 The latter is the starting point for our remarks on some details that concern the changes of consonant clusters, especially of consonant plus [j].
Some Aspects of the Historical Development of English Consonant Phonemes
Transactions of the Philological Society, 1991
1. I. The main facts of Middle English phonology are well charted in the standard 'grammars' (Luick 191 4-40, Jordan 1974, Dobson 1968). Writing from the standpoint of traditional philologists I have attempted to accommodate their ideas to a structural approach as appropriate. The purpose of this article is to survey briefly the system of consonant phonemes inherited from Old English, to indicate their use in initial, various medial, and final positions, and to discuss and try to clarify in certain respects the development of some of them in Middle English and beyond. Attention will be drawn to the effects of (a) certain Middle English sound changes, @)the order of these sound changes varying according to dialect, and (c) the introduction of loan-words. 1.2. In Old English there were five plosive consonant phonemes, three voiceless, /p t k/, and two voiced, /b d/; two affricates, one voiceless, /g/, and one voiced, /@/; two nasals, /m/ and /n/; two liquids, /I/ and /rk six fricatives, /f 0 sJh y/, of which /h/ was voiceless and /y/ voiced; and two semi-vowels, /j/ and /w/ (see Kuhn 1970). Instances of their occurrence in various positions are given in Table 1, including a separate column for geminates, sometimes referred to as long consonants. For the present purposes it is safe to assume that geminates survived only in intervocalic position or between a vowel and a liquid (Severs-Brunner 19655231; also, for geminate /r/, Kuhn 1970: §6.22). They are treated as geminates because of the probability that they straddle a syllable boundary. In Old English poetry the metre requires habban 'to have' to consist of two 'long' syllables, as must be the case if the geminate straddles the syllable boundary. If the first syllable in