The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 2 part 2 pdf

Roger Lass and more in the south than the north: see Brunner (1963: §12) for a summary.) The overall effects of OSL can be summed up by the following examples: OE / i / : wicu 'week' /wiku/ > /wika/ > [we:ka] OE / u / : wudu 'wood' /wudu/ > /wuda/ > [wo:da] OE / e / : beran 'bear' /beran/ > /bera(n)/ > [be:ra(n)] OE / o / : nosu 'nose' /nosu/ > /nosa/ > [no:za] OE / a / (LOE/EME / a / ) : sama 'same' /sama/ > /sama/ > [sa:ma] (On the change of final vowels to / a / see 2.5.3.) With the loss of final / a / (2.5.3) and the dropping of various endings like the infinitival -en (2.8.3), the new qualities became distinctive The effect on the vowel-quality systems overall can be illustrated this way (southern vs northern inputs as in (14)): ( 15 ) i: e: i u u: i: j u u: e o o: e: e o o: D: Southern Northern The circled qualities are new ones produced by OSL Observe that after OSL and loss of / a / the vowel systems of the north and south were identical — even if the etymological sources of particular units, and hence the incidence of phonemes in particular lexical items, were different Thus the south had /a:/ only from lengthened /a/, whereas the north had it also from OE / a : / (see 2.3.2); the south had /o:/ both from OE / a : / and from lengthened / o / , whereas the north had it only from the latter So southern /a:/ in same, as in the north, but northern /a:/ also in home (OE bam); northern /o:/ in nose, as in the south, but southern /o:/ also in borne We now have in both major macrodialect areas long vowel systems with four distinctive heights at the front and three at the back, and short vowel systems with three heights at the front (a gap between / e / and /a/) and two at the back This basic configuration remained stable until the seventeenth century 48 Phonology and morphology 2.3.3 The new Middle English diphthongs Recall that the Old English diphthongs were 'height-harmonic': one front and one back element of the same height This was a relatively short-lived departure from the original Germanic input with /ai au ei eu/; these older types were revived in Late Old English or Early Middle English I have so far given the impression that during the whole set of'gapfilling ' operations on the early Middle English vowel system it remained in its Late Old English diphthong-free state This is merely an artefact of the narrative While the developments in 2.3.1—2 were taking place, a set of other changes, running to some extent in parallel, were creating a new diphthong system Indeed, there is evidence for the combinative changes leading to the new diphthongs in Old English spellings as early as the eleventh century (Colman 1984), and a strong likelihood of Scandinavian loans with closing diphthongs of a non-Old-English type coming in quite early Diphthongal or 'perhaps-diphthongal' spellings are common in twelfth-century texts In the Peterborough Chronicle we find < ei > for OE < e g > [ej], for OE [asj] (Seines 'thane's', dxi 'day' 1127), suggesting /ei/, / a i / ; we also find < uu > for postvocalic / w / in fanned < liwed 'unlearned' These are perhaps ambiguous, since < uu > could serve as a spelling for / w / and < i > for /]/; but it seems quite likely that they did represent genuine diphthongs rather than / V C / sequences Early texts also show non-diphthongised forms like nocht 'nought' in the thirteenth-century Kentish Sermons, later typically noiqt Diphthongal spellings appear sporadically throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, increasing and stabilising in the thirteenth; it seems likely that the basic Middle English system was established in its final form by around 1250 The new diphthongs from native sources (on borrowings see below) arise by two related processes, both involving original postvocalic consonants: (a) 'vocalisation' of [j] and [y w] in syllable codas, yielding respectively [i] and [u]; and (b) what is best called 'Middle English breaking' (see vol 1, ch on breaking in Old English) — i.e insertion of [i] or [u] between a vowel and a following / x / To illustrate: (a) Vocalisation OE [oy] > ME [ou]: boga 'bow' >bowe; OE [ej] > ME [ei]: weg ' way' > wei 49 Roger Lass (b) Middle English Breaking OE [ox] > ME [oux]: dobtor 'daughter' > doubter; OE [eg] > ME [eic]:/oft/aw 'fight' > feitfen The principles are simple and natural: in (a) a voiced velar or palatal fricative or liquid after a vowel becomes a vowel with the same place of articulation (high front vowels are palatal and high back vowels velar); in (b) a high vowel with the same backness value as the following allophone of / x / (which is in turn conditioned by the original preceding vowel) is inserted between the vowel and /x/ Both these diphthongisations result in the neutralisation of vowel length: e.g /ox/ as in dohtor and /o:x/ as in sohte ' sought' both give ME /ou/ The Middle English length system did not allow for diphthongal length contrasts of the Old English type, e.g **/DU/ VS /OU/, one behaving like a short vowel and the other like a long Middle English allowed only monomoric (simple) and bimoric (two-piece complex) nuclei The main native sources of the new Middle English diphthongs are shown below; conventionally spelled Old English forms are given for identification Note that, as above, both diphthongisation processes may give the same output: (16) weg way feohtan 'fight' eox da.*g ' day' ii-j gnEg'grey' dragan 'draw' uyclawu 'claw' aw - seah 'he saw' it'X - screawa 'shrew' hreowan ' r u e ' snTwan 'snow' agan ' o w n ' cnawan ' k n o w ' dah 'dough' -flogen 'flown' °Y dohtor 'daughter' ox plogas 'plows' o:y sohte 'sought' o:x growan 'grow' 5° Phonology and morphology Note the later Middle English mergers of /ei ai/ in /ai/, and of/eu iu/ in /iu/ These are all non-northern developments; diphthongisation was more restricted in the north, and did not occur before /x/, hence N socht, fecht vs S sou$t, feip, etc Further, because of the different development of OE / a : / in the north and south, a number of categories that fell together in southern /DU/ remained separate in the north: southern grow, know (OE growan, cndwan) but northern grow, knaw The southern development of OE [a:y], [a:w] is parallel to that of OE /a:/ to / D : / ; it looks as if [a] before a vowel or vowel-like segment in the south always became [o] Thus (given neutralisation of length as described above), the history of [a:w] (= [aaw]) would be: [aaw] > [aw] > [au] > [ou], parallel to that of / a : / (= [aa]), i.e [aa] > [oo] Diphthongs in borrowed words, and later native developments as well, increased the incidence of some of the new clusters Thus F /au/ infant 'fault', /eu/ inpeutre 'pewter'; F / ieu/ and /yi/ gave /iu/ {rule, fruit), and palatal /ji/ and /X/ formed diphthongs with preceding nonhigh front vowels: OF plen /plen/ ' plain' > plein/plain, OF bataille /bataXe/ > bat{f)aile In addition, / v / frequently vocalised to [u] before velars and syllable-final / I / , giving new /au/: so hauk/hawk from a late syncopated form of OE hafoc (e.g pi hafces), crawl < OScand krafla [kravla], etc In line with these developments, the Old English high vowels in the relevant environments generally give Middle English long high vowels: [uy] > [uu] (Jugol 'bird' > fowl: < o w > = /u:/, see 2.1.5), [yj] > [ii] (ryge 'rye' > rie /ri:a/) There were further developments in some cases: OE bogas ' boughs' and a number of others show [oy] > [au] > [ou] (?) > [uu]: hence PDE /au/ in boughs, rather than expected /au/, the normal reflex of ME /ou/ (as in bow for shooting) Another case where monophthongised output was common was in the reflex of OE /e:x/, as in heh 'high' Whatever the diphthong was here (the usual Middle English spelling is < e i > ) , it was apparently distinct from /ai/, and monophthongised to / i : / in Late Middle English: hence PDE /ai/ in high (the normal continuation of ME /i:/) rather than expected /ei/ < ME /ai/ as in day The phonological effects of these diphthong formations go beyond the addition of new nucleus types to the system The segment [y] vanishes completely, and /j w/ no longer occur in codas, but only syllable-initially The other major addition to the diphthong inventory comes from Roger Lass French (though with some later additions from other sources) The Anglo-Norman dialect accounting for the bulk of French loans had two diphthongs of a distinctly non-Germanic type: / o i / and /ui/, the former reflecting (among other things) Lat /au/ (Joie < gaudium, cloistre < claustrum), the latter largely Lat / o : / (puison < potionem) and special developments of short / u / (puitit < punctum) While there was some transfer of items between the / o i / and / u i / classes, and an increasing tendency in later Middle English to spell both with < o i / o y > , there is no doubt that they remained in principle distinct until the mid-seventeenth century (see vol Ill, ch 1) With this French contribution, then, we can assume for non-northern Middle English of around 1250 the diphthong system (18a) below, and around 1350 the reduced system (18b): (18) (a) ei (b) /Vi/ oi ui oi ui /Vu/ iu eu su au ou EU au ou iu The borrowing of F /oi ui/ is of particular interest, as it violates a long-standing developmental principle in English It is one of the rare cases (there are perhaps only two others of any consequence — see 2.4.1.1 and 2.6.2 below) where a foreign phonological element with no direct English parallel was borrowed and retained in its original form, rather than being assimilated to some already existing native category A more characteristic treatment is that of Scand /ey/, which falls in with the reflexes of OE / e j / and /aej/ (traisten 'trust' < OScand treystd) The borrowing from French is atypical behaviour: when dialects of English borrow without radical modification of the borrowed forms, the sources tend to be other dialects of English (see Lass & Wright 1986) The peculiar type of borrowing involved in /oi ui/ and the fact that it has no native sources (all non-French examples are from other Germanic languages, like loiter, toy from Middle Low German and buoy from Dutch), are in a way reflected in both its later history and its modern status It is the only Middle English diphthong that has undergone no major change since its first appearance (I use 'it' to refer to the conflated category /oi ui/, since overall it has been historically unified.) The most that has happened, in some varieties, is lowering of the first mora along with the lowering of ME / o / , so that its basic range now is [ O I ~ D I ] , with some dialects still having [oi] Structurally, it participates in no productive (or even marginal) morphophonemic alternations of the kind entered into by the other long vowels and Phonology and morphology diphthongs, e.g /ai/ ~ / i / in divine /divinity, /ei/ ~ /as/ in sane/sanity, / i : / ~ / s / in clean/cleanliness, etc (Unless pairs like point/punctual, joint/ juncture could be claimed to be genuine alternations of this kind, which seems pretty far-fetched.) In other words, /oi/ has just sat there for its whole history as a kind of non-integrated 'excrescence' on the English vowel system 2.3.4 Front rounded vowels, old and new The southern English standard and its relatives are among the few modern Germanic dialects (aside from Yiddish) entirely lacking the front rounded vowel types [y oe] (as in G kiihne, Goethe, Goiter) The usual account is that at some stage /y(:) ©(:)/ 'were lost', and that 'English' has been without them ever since This is indeed true by and large of the south-east and southeast midlands, but elsewhere such vowels are alive and well Archaic rural Northumberland dialects have [0 ce] for ME / o / (see Orton et al 1962-71 at fox IV.5.11); in Scotland [y(:)] is common in many varieties for ME / o : / (boot) and/u:/ (out) And many varieties both in England and abroad (South Africa, New Zealand) have a mid front rounded (slightly centralised) [0:] or [ce:] in bird, hurt and the like The early loss — and continued absence — of such vowels is a southeastern mainland English phenomenon The loss of these vowels in the ancestor of the southern standard by 1300 (with one possible exception: see below) is part of a complex and interesting evolution, which needs looking at as a whole We can begin by recapitulating the history up to the end of Old English (see 2.2.1 above): Neither Proto-Indo-European nor Proto-Germanic had vowels of this type; they first appear in later West and North Germanic as the results of /-umlaut of back vowels: OE mys 'mice' < */mu:siz/, early doehter 'daughters' < */doxtri/ Around the ninth—tenth centuries, /&('•)/ unrounded and merged with /e(:)/, leaving only /y(:)/ During Old English times /y(:)/ lowered and unrounded to /e(:)/ in Kentish; thus the extreme southeastern dialects had by Late Old English reverted to the original state of having no front rounded vowels Beginning around the eleventh century, the diphthongs /eb eo/ (see 2.3.1) monophthongised to /&(:)/, thus (except in Kent) restoring the early Old English system with both /y(:) o(:)/ We now see the beginnings of what might be called a 'southeastern distaste' for front round vowels 53 Roger Lass We can assume, then, everywhere except in the south-east, an input to Middle English that had four vowel types in the high-to-mid front area: (19) i: i y: y e: e o: Thus we seem to have recycled to the early 'full' front vowel system of the kind found in pre-Alfredian Old English By the early to mid-twelfth century, judging by the testimony of the Peterborough Chronicle, both /y(:)/ and /©(:)/ had unrounded in the north and east, once again producing the old (pre-West Germanic) system type with only /i(:) e(:)/ in front This is clear from the confusion of < e > and < e o > mentioned above (2.3.1), and the parallel treatment of < i > and < y > • For example, we get both graphs for OE / y / (cine ~ cyrce 'church' < OE cyrice), and for OE / i : / [suyde 'very' < swide, rice 'powerful' < rice) In the south-west, west midlands and much of the central midlands, on the other hand, both front rounded categories remained unchanged into Middle English, and in one form or another persisted into the fifteenth century - as well as being added to by instances of the same vowels in French loans Thus we have essentially three types of treatment of the Old English front rounded vowels, and three main patterns of distinctiveness and merger We can illustrate this for the long vowels as follows: (20) Old English hydan 'hide' bldan ' wait' beon'be' grene 'green' North, east midlands hiden /i:/ biden /i:/ ben /e:/ grene /e:/ South-west, south-west midlands hu(y)den /y:/ biden /i:/ bon /o:/ grene /e:/ South-east heden /e:/ biden /i:/ ben /e:/ grene /e:/ Things in detail were unsurprisingly more complex than the neat trichotomy in (20) suggests; populations were mobile, and important places like London sat more or less on the borders of different areas For instance, both the east midlands and south-east types of OE /y(:)/ reflex, at least in particular items, moved from one region to another; manuscript forms and place names show < e > spellings moving up as far north as south Lincolnshire, and the east midlands type < i > spreading westward into the south-west and west midlands (see Wyld 1927: 109) This complex evolution and movement of forms has implications for 54 Phonology and morphology the emerging London standard; London being where it is, the total speech community contained speakers of all three types, and southeastern (including Essex) and southwestern forms apparently remained available for a long time Early London is southwestern: the Proclamation of Henry III (1258), for instance, shows only < u > for OE /y/, and < o > , < eo > spellings for /eb eo/ {kuneriche ' kingdom' < cyneric, beop 'be (3 pi.)' < be'op) Later texts show mainly < i / y > , with an admixture of < u > and < e > As late as the Mercers' Petition of 1386 we find, among general < i / y > like kyng < cyning, the westernism lust 'to wish' < lystan The mid front rounded forms of 'be' and the like vanished from London earlier; and indeed there is evidence in westerly areas for early raising of/o(:)/ to /y(:)/> a n d merger of both in the latter value: the westerner John of Trevisa in 1385 has bup 'they are' < beop and burp 'birth' < (ge-)byrd In the late fourteenth century it seems as if the court/Chancery language had available all three OE /y(:)/ reflexes (though only /e(:)/ for OE /eb eo/) Poets in particular whose basic dialects had /i(:)/ often used 'Kenticisms' or 'Essexisms' with /e(:)/, especially in rhyme; and there are some < u > spellings, whose interpretation is problematical For instance, a single text (The Pardoner's Tale) in the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales has three spellings for ' merry' (OE myrig): myrie, murie and merie, the last rhyming with berie ' berry' < OE berie It is not clear what the < u > in murie means; it could be / y / (but see below); or more likely / u / , which seems to be the usual outcome of short / y / that did not unround (PDE / A / in cudgel, crush, rush < OE cycgel, crycc, rysc presupposes ME / u / , and this could only come from an earlier western / y / : see Luick (1914-40: §375)) Some scholars have suggested that the fourteenth-century London standard did in fact have a front rounded /y:/, in French loans like commune, fortune, nature, excuse, refuse One problem here is that the vowel spelled < u > in these forms falls in later with native /iu/, giving later /(j)u:/ (cf native new vs F nude) The argument is that since French was actually a spoken language in educated circles, it was a priori likely that at least upper-class speakers retained /y:/ in forms that had it in French The primary evidence is that, with one exception, Chaucer rhymes /y:/ only with itself (the exception is Complaynte of Venus 22 3, aventure\honoure, which rhymes it with F /u:/ = ME /u:/) A check of the first 3,000-odd lines of Gower's Confessio amantis (ca 1390) reveals the same pattern: F /y:/ rhymes only with itself, and ME /iu/ only with itself 55 Roger Lass What are we to make of this? Absence of a rhyme is at best weak evidence for its non-existence: as William Wang once remarked (1969: 21) you can't prove that the platypus doesn't lay eggs with a photo of one not laying eggs But it is at least curious Part of the problem, however, may be that the sources of ME /iu/ (see 2.3.3) are such that it does not appear in the same environments as French /y:/, e.g before / r / and / n / ; the number of possible rhymes is drastically limited in advance A further difficulty is the bland assumption that in fact upper-class Englishmen spoke good French in the fourteenth century; John of Trevisa remarks that in 1385 the teaching of French was so bad that 'now childern of gramer-scole conne]? no more Frensch pan can hire lift hele' ('grammar-school children know no more French than their left heel') The problem of/y:/ will surface again in the sixteenth century (vol Ill, ch 1); for the fourteenth I think the evidence for it is at best ambiguous, at worst absent (see Sandved 1985: 18ff.) At least this is the case for London Front rounded vowels, however, appear once more - this time unambiguously - in a dialect from which they had apparently already been lost This is in the north and outside my direct remit here, but it is important for two reasons: first, it helps to fill out the total evolutionary picture; and second, it has important repercussions for our understanding of the later history of the long vowels in all dialects (vol Ill, ch 1; and Lass 1976: ch 2) Beginning in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, ME / o : / from all sources fronted in the north, at first to / o : / ; later, but still in Middle English, it raised to /y:/, and then generally unrounded south of the Tweed Thus modern northern dialects typically have a front reflex of ME / o : / (good, foot); in England most often [ia] or [i:], in Scotland typically [y(:)] This change is evidenced partly in < u > spellings for / o : / : Richard Rolle, from Yorkshire, has gude 'good' < god, lufe 'love' < lufu (with h'-l < l°'-l < / u / b y OSL: see 2.3.2), which also rhymes with F/y:/, suggesting that in the north at least this French vowel may have been retained, not merged with /iu/ This can be seen as a 'co-operation' with the native development o f / o : / : the quality [y] was not 'foreign' here, hence no pressure for alteration Some of the more interesting rhymes in fact show no respelling: Rolle (see Jordan 1934: 54) has fortune rhyming with sone ' soon' < sona The end result in the north is something like a 'reversion' to an earlier system type, rather like that of Late Old English: Phonology and morphology 2.3.5 l: u: i: e: e: a: (21) o: e: u: I: e: 0: E: D: E: a: a: Recapitulation: the standard Middle English vowel system ca 1350-1400 The changes discussed so far created, in effect, a quite new type of vowel system By the fourteenth century, the incipient standard southeast midland dialects, as exemplified by those of Chancery and upper-class poets like Chaucer and Gower, would have had the following vowel inventory (I give it here with modern ' key words', to illustrate roughly which Middle English phonological classes are ancestral to which modern ones): Long (22) Short i {bit) e {bet) a {bat) u {but) o(pot) i: {bite) e: {beet) e: {beat) a: {mate) u: {out) o: {boot) a: {boat) Diphthongal iu {new) EU {dew) au {law) ou {grow) {day) oi {boy) ui {poison) This is the input to the next major set of changes, which will be discussed in detail in volume III, chapter For various quantitative changes that affected not primarily the vowels themselves but their distribution and the inventory of legal syllable types, see section 2.5 below 2.4 Consonantal developments 2.4.1 The obstruent system 2.4.1.1 Degemination and the voice contrast Major systemic changes, like those discussed above for the vowels, are not prominent in the history of English consonants Indeed, the consonant system has as a whole remained relatively stable since Old English times Except for the major restructuring discussed in this section, most of the consonant changes have been low level: adjustments 57 Phonology and morphology 2.9 Morphology: the major syntactic classes 2.9.1 The noun phrase 2.9.1.1 Categories, paradigms and concord: the noun The received wisdom is that Old English nouns 'were inflected for case, number and gender', or 'had three genders, four cases and two numbers' This is globally true, but in detail just false enough to make the post-Old English developments explicable This is not as paradoxical as it sounds: while the categories of gender, number and case were real enough, it was virtually impossible for any single noun form to be uniquely marked for all three (not so for determiners and pronouns: see 2.9.1.2—3) To illustrate this, and set the scene for the following discussion, it would be useful to review the inflection of the major Old English noun classes, so we can see what kind of system formed the input to Middle English In the sections that follow I use the traditional stem-class names for the declensions (for details see vol I, ch or any handbook) A name like 'a-stem' means that in ProtoGermanic there was a thematic vowel * / a / normally intercalated between the stem and the case/number ending: so the a-stem masculine stan 'stone' goes back to */stain-a-z/ (nom sg.), as opposed to the ustem sunu 'son' < */sun-u-z/ or the /-stem masculine eyre 'choice' < */kur-i-z/ Most of these distinctions are already opaque in historical Old English, but they are useful cover terms for the declensions Here are the case/number endings of some of the most important noun types: (51) a-stem tf-stem o-stem «-stem (masc.) (neut.) (fem.) (masc.) I nom -0 -es Singular { ° dat -e \ ace -0 'lural 103 nom -as gen -a dat -um ace -as -0 -u -u -es -e -0 -e -e -a -a -e -u -u -a/-e -a -a/-ena -a -a -um -u -um -a/-e -um -a Roger Lass /-stem «-stem Consonant-stem (fern.) (masc.) (masc.) nom -0 gen -e -a -an -0 -es -e -0 -an -an -0 -e/-a -a -um -e/-a -an -ena -um -an Singular { , & dat ace nom gen dat ace „ -0 "-0 -a -um "-0 Neuter ^-sterns were endingless in nominative/accusative plural if they had heavy stems; the same was true for nominative singular