The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 3 part 3 ppt

[ŋ] in morphologically complex words remains (variably) for quite some time; there are reports of /g/ in hanging, singing and the like as late as Elphinston (1765). The stages by which /g/ was lost after [ ŋ] and /ŋ/ became phonemic were more or less these: (54) sing sing-er strong strong-er finger I OE-16th century ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ II Late 16th century ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ III 17th century ŋŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ That is: first deletion in final position; then deletion at morpheme bound- ary except if the following suffix is an adjective inflection. Original / / now remains virtually only in adjectival forms and within words that are not obviously morphemically complex. So [ ŋ] since a finger is not ‘that which fings’ (though etymologically it is, as the root is the same as in fang, and cf. G fing ‘seized’), and in longer, Hungary, Bangor with v. bang-er without the [ ]. The story of weak -ing (in gerunds, present participles or simplex words like herring, shilling) is rather different. Here, after early / /-loss, there is a change [ ŋ] > [n]; this shows up first in the fourteenth century (Wyld gives some Norfolk spellings of the type holdyn, drynkyn), and becomes commoner in the fifteenth: the Pastons have hangyn, hayryn ‘herring’. In our period this is first attested by a single spelling in Hart (1570): <ru∫-in> ‘rushing’. But it was familiar: Clement (1587: 13) urges teachers not to let pupils ‘pronounce in, leauing out the g, as: speakin for speaking’ (cited in Danielsson 1963: §290). It becomes increasingly widespread: Queen Elizabeth writes besichen ‘beseeching’, and Henslowe has makyn, ten shellens. By the end of the seventeenth century it no longer needs comment: Cooper simply lists coffin: coughing, etc. as homophones. Inverse spellings also begin to appear in the seventeenth century, e.g. chicking, fashing, Dubling (Verney Letters). Like / h/-loss (3.5.1), this begins to reverse in the later eighteenth century; the /- ŋ/ pronunciation is institutionalised, except in rapid colloquial speech. The modern usage was not fixed until well into the nine- teenth century: Batchelor (1809) allows / n/ after stressed /ŋ/ as in singing, but not elsewhere. Both upper-class and vernacular speakers however con- tinued to use /- n/. Wordsworth, Byron and Keats and Tennyson have sporadic -in/-ing rhymes (Byron Don Juan II.43 children: bewildering, etc.); and we are all familiar with the huntin’, fishin’, shootin’ stereotype. By the end of the eighteenth century both types coexisted in educated speech, but the normative authorities recommended keeping [ ŋ], and not ‘dropping the g’; as usual, they seem to have won. Roger Lass 120 3.5.3 Palatalisation and the origin of /  / The palatoalveolar series / ʃ, , tʃ, d/ is not a Germanic inheritance. The affricates / tʃ, d/ first arise in OE through palatalisation before front vowels: e.g. / tʃ/ < */k/ in cinn ‘chin’ (cf. OHG kinni), /d/ < */j/ in mycg ‘midge’ (cf. OS muggia). Originally / d/ occurs only after vowels, but later appears initially in French loans ( joy, jewel ), and new / tʃ/ also come from French (chase, bachelor). The original source of / ʃ/ is palatalisation of */ sk/ as in sco¯h ‘shoe’, fisc ‘fish’, but there are later French sources (chemise, machine). Beginning in the fifteenth century, but becoming established mainly in the seventeenth, new / ʃ, tʃ, d/ arise from palatalisation of /s, t, d/ respectively in weak syllables before / i, j/ (cautious, christian, soldier); less frequently / ʃ/ comes from initial /sj/ in strong syllables (sure, sugar); and – variably – / tʃ, d/ from initial /tj, dj/ (tune, due). Seventeenth-century palatalisation of / zj/ produces // (vision). The first signs of / sj/ > [ʃ] are fifteenth-century spellings like sesschyonys ‘sessions’ (Paston), oblygashons (Cely). There is variation in the sixteenth century; Hart has <-si->, Mulcaster (1582) writes <-shon> for -tion,-sion. By the mid-seventeenth century the change is nearly complete; Hodges (1644) has / ʃ/ (noted <s ˇ i, t ˇ i, c ˇ i>) in -ation-, -cian, and -tion (the latter already /- si-/ a century earlier), and most -sion words (but see below). The only exceptions seem to be the sequences / sju/ (assuredly, consume), and /ksj-/ (complexion, connection). Hodges also has a distinct sound he calls ‘zhee’, which is clearly [ ], and occurs where we would expect it, e.g. in derivatives in <-si-> from Latin stems in /- d/: thus -sion has // <s ˇ i> in circumcision, derision, occasions (< Lat. circumcidere, etc.); compare / ʃ/ <s ˇ i> where the Latin stem is in /-s/ (passion, confession, transgression < L passio-n-, etc.). Hodges is the first writer to show an unambiguous / /; we have little more information until the identification with French / / by Miège (1685). Palatalisation of / t, d/ lags behind that of /s, z/; Hodges still has /tj/ in christian, creatures, mutual, righteous, and / dj/ in fraudulent. This is not so for all speakers: in the sixteenth century Henry Machyn writes sawgears ‘soldiers’, and the Verneys in the seventeenth have teges ‘tedious’, sogers ‘soldiers’. By the eighteenth / d/ is established: Jones (1701) has soger, Indjan, and by the end of the century the pattern is similar to the modern one. Nares (1784) notes / d/ in grandeur, soldier, but does not know if ‘it is a pronunciation of which we ought to approve’ (100). But he accepts / tʃ/ in bestial, celestial, courtier, frontier (the last two would not have it now), and Phonology and morphology 121 says it is ‘heard frequently’ before -eous, -uous (beauteous, virtuous). He also gives / ʃ/ in nauseate, Persian, issue, and // in evasion, confusion, azure, roseate. Modern varieties would have different palatalisations (e.g. / / in Persian), or none: / zi/ is common in nauseate, roseate,/sj/ in issue,/zj/ in azure.As so often, both conservative and innovating lineages leave traces in the final disposition of a lexical class. Palatalisation in strong syllables has a different history, distinct for / s/ and / t, d/. In some late sixteenth-century varieties a few /sj/ words already have / ʃ/: the spellings shue, shooter ‘sue, suitor’ appear in the First Folio text of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Verneys have shur, shuite (of clothes), ashoure. Such pronunciations are condemned as ‘barbarous’ as late as Cooper (1687). By the eighteenth century / ʃ/ was established at least in sure, sugar, and sewer < F essuier (lost, but cf. Shoreditch, where the first element is ‘sewer’; sewer, sure are homophones as late as Walker 1791). Palatalisation of initial / tj/, now extremely common in British speech (so that Tues(day) ϭchoose), is noted in the eighteenth century; Nares records it in tune, tumult, but not used by ‘elegant speakers’. Curiously he does not mention the par- allel case of / dj/, which is unlikely not to have had a variant /d/ (dewϭ Jew), as now. 3.5.4 Onset-cluster reduction Witch/which, not/knot, Nash/gnash, rite/write are homophones in most vari- eties of English (see below on the first pair); conservative spelling pre- serves an earlier state. During our period English underwent the most extensive simplification of onset clusters in any Germanic language. Old / wr, wl/ and /xn, xr, xl/ were lost in many other dialects, but /kn/ was generally retained (E knee / ni/ v. German, Swedish, Dutch /kni:/). By late Middle English / wl/ had reduced to /l/ (wlispian > lisp), and /xr, xl, xn/ to /r, l, n/ (hracu > rake, hlu¯d > loud, hnacod > naked). The only (from a modern perspective) ‘exotic’ clusters remaining were / xw/ (hwilc ‘which’), / wr/ (wrı¯tan ‘write’), and /kn, n/ (cna¯wan ‘know’, gnagan ‘gnaw’). All except / xw/ (> /hw/: 3.5.1) simplified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; / hw/ remained for some standard southern speakers until well into this century, and is still stable in Scotland, Ireland and parts of North America. The first post-Middle English simplification is of / wr/: while most six- teenth-century sources are uninformative, Coote (1596) gives wrest/rest, wrung/rung as homophones. There is sporadic retention in Hodges (1644), and Jones (1701) seems to be the last mention of possible / wr/. In general / wr/ > /r/ during the seventeenth century. Roger Lass 122 Reduction of /kn, n/ began in the seventeenth century; the history is obscure, but two separate paths seem later to have converged. Some sources show a change to /tn, dn/ in the seventeenth century; this remains, at least for / kn/, in the eighteenth. The anonymous ‘G.W.’ (Magazine, 1703: see Abercrombie 1937) transcribes <tn> in knave, know, knew; foreign grammarians report it as well. (This may reflect a more general assimilation in / k, /ϩcoronal clusters, rather than a stage in deletion: Daines (1640) has <dlory> for glory, and G.W. <tlox> for cloaks./ tl, dl/ for /kl, l/ occur now in some Northwestern English rural vernaculars, and are reported for certain RP varieties in Jones 1909.) By the 1640s loss begins in / kn, n/; Hodges (1644) gives /kn/ as an alternative in gnat, gnaw. Forty years on Cooper says that <kn> is pro- nounced ‘hn or n aspirated’, which probably means [ hn] or [nn]; he does not mention <gn>, which suggests that it had already gone to / n/. On the other hand, Jones (1701) says that <g> in <gn> is silent, though Tuite (1726: 52ff.), while not commenting on <kn>, says that / n/ for <gn> is ‘common’, implying that some cluster pronunciations still survived. It seems that / kn/ in some form or other lasted longer than /gn/, perhaps because the voice difference between the two members allowed a distinc- tion to be maintained even after the stop was lost or modified. The simplest story is that both / kn/ and /n/ developed into premodified nasals of some kind (there is evidence of [ ŋn] for /n/), and that eventually the first elements dropped, giving merger with /n/: (For a more complex scenario see Kökeritz 1945.) The history of / hw/ is initially complicated by a problem of interpre- tation: was the input a cluster / hw/ that ended up as /w/ by deletion of / h/, or a voiceless /w/ that later voiced? The early testimony supports the former (and it is more coherent with the story of the other clusters). The inimitable (and reliable) Abraham Tucker (1773: 42) tells us that ‘We speak “wh” by the figure “hysteron proteron,” anglice, preposterously, a cart before the horse, as in “when, huen, whim, huim”.’ There is sporadic / x/-loss in ME, but spellings like wich for which, etc. are rare before the sixteenth century, and then common only in prosodically weak words. The first good evidence for general loss appears to be Jones (55) kn ŋn kn tn gn nn n  Phonology and morphology 123 (1701: 18); what, when, etc. ‘are sounded wat, wen by some’. Later Johnston (1764: 9) claims a distinction, but / h/ ‘is very little heard’. Three decades on / h/-loss is prominent enough for Walker (1791: 64) to call /w/ in what, etc. a ‘feeble, Cockney pronunciation’. Once again, a change acquires social value in the course of its diffusion. The merger of / hw/ and /w/ was afoot by around 1700, but took at least a century to get well established; Walker seems to have been fighting a (not uncharacteristic) rearguard action. 3.6 Stress, vowel reduction, vowel loss 3.6.1 Conceptual background Vowel reduction and loss in English depend largely on position in relation to main word stress; stress in turn is intimately connected with syllable and word structure. Our vantage point and descriptive language now shift from the segmental to the suprasegmental. Stress has no unique phonetic correlates: a stressed syllable is simply more ‘prominent’ (in loudness, length, pitch or any combination) than any other syllable(s) in the same rhythmic or prosodic unit. As an expository convenience (not a fully serious matter of theory), ‘prominence’ may be defined as a binary relation between adjacent elements such that one is (relatively) strong (S) and the other weak (W). E.g. in bútter the first syllable is more prominent than the second, in rebút the second more than the first. In a compound like péanut-bùtter, while both peanut and butter retain their original contours, butter as a whole is less prominent than peanut, i.e. it has ‘secondary’ or ‘subordinated’ stress. In this section our main concern will be with stress at (non-compound) word-level, since this has shown the most striking historical change. The ‘rhythm’ of a language is its alternation-profile of strong and weak elements; the primary rhythmic unit is the foot. In this (phonological) sense, a foot consists of a strong syllable (its head), and one or more weak syllables. Unlike verse-feet, which may be either left-strong (‘trochaic’ or ‘dactylic’) or right-strong (‘iambic’ or ‘anapaestic’), English (like other Germanic) prosodic feet are uniformly left-headed. A purely relational definition of prominence has a major disadvantage: it makes the extremely common monosyllabic foot theoretically problem- atic (a stressed monosyllable has no phonetic weak syllable to contrast with the strong one). This is often escaped by calling such feet ‘degenerate’. I will not address this issue here, but take the stressed monosyllable as a foot like any other. Roger Lass 124 English word-stress is not ‘free’, but is and always has been determined (largely but not exclusively) by phonological and/or morphological regu- larities. Prominence contours are assigned to words and other constituents on the basis of syllabic and morphological structure. The principles of assignment are normally called stress rules; we can visualise them as taking bounded strings of segments organised into syllables as inputs, and choosing one of these syllables as ‘main stress’ or (prosodic) word-head. Subsidiary rhythmic principles (e.g. those assigning secondary stress to the second element of a compound or to the first element of a complex word with a stress toward the end (ànthropólogist)) then flesh out the whole word contour. A stress rule then (computationally speaking) is both a procedure for locating the relevant prosodic word-head, and an instruction to build a foot. Our historical concern is the evolution of the procedures for locating this syllable. Some languages assign stress solely on the basis of word-position: in Finnish the initial syllable gets primary stress, in Polish the penult. So stress systems show ‘handedness’: Finnish is ‘left-handed’, Polish ‘right-handed’ (defined by which end of the word you have to count from). Stress may also be sensitive to syllable weight or to morphosyntax; more than one (even all) of these parameters may be involved. Syllable structure is a theoretically contentious matter; my approach here is somewhat old-fashioned, but at the worst historically useful. I take a syllable (␴) as a hierarchical branching structure, onsetϩrhyme, the rhyme branching into a nucleus and coda. Syllables have quantity or weight: one with a -VV (long vowel or diphthong) or -VCC rhyme is heavy (␴¯): e.g. eye, out, hand. One with a -V or -VC rhyme is light (␴˘): a, the, at. (In many languages, like Latin, a /-VC/ rhyme counts as heavy, only /-V/ counting as light; Germanic in general organises the contrasts as above, and always has.) This distinction (often given as ‘long’ v. ‘short’ in the handbooks) plays a major role in post-Old English stress-assign- ment. 3.6.2 Origins of the modern stress system English has undergone major changes in its stress system (see Lass CHEL II 2.6.2). Since both older and newer stress types coexisted throughout our period (and could be argued to do so still), it will be useful to outline the major early developments. Oversimply (as usual), Old English stress was assigned by the Germanic Stress Rule (GSR), which worked (for non-com- pound words) roughly as follows: Phonology and morphology 125 (56) Germanic Stress Rule (GSR) (i) Starting at the left-hand word-edge, ignore any prefixes (except those specified as stressable), and assign stress to the first syllable of the lexical root, regardless of weight. (ii) Construct a (maximally trisyllabic) foot to the right: SSW rætt ‘rat’ wrı¯t-an ‘to write’ S W S W W ge-writen ‘written’ bæcere ‘baker’ The GSR is left-handed, sensitive to morphology (prefix v. root) and insen- sitive to syllable weight (s on heavy wrı¯t-, rætt, light writ-, bæc-). At the end of the OE period, the huge influx of Latin and French loans prompted the introduction of a new type of stress rule; this competed with and eventually (in highly modified form) largely replaced the GSR. The Romance Stress Rule (RSR), as this Latinate rule is usually called, can be characterised as follows (examples from a rhyming dictionary, Levins 1570): (57) Romance Stress Rule (RSR) Beginning at the right-hand edge of the word, select as word-head the syllable specified as follows: A (i) If the final syllable is (a) heavy, or (b) the only syllable, assign S and construct a foot: SSSS ␴˘ ␴¯ ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴¯ ␴¯ ␴˘ deface vndertake twelfth twig (ii) If the final syllable is light, go back to the penult. B (i) If the penult is (a) heavy, or (b) the only other syllable, assign S and construct a foot: SW S W S W ␴˘ ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘ ␴˘ ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘ ␴˘ vnable occidental shouel (ii) If the penult is light, go back to the antepenult. C Assign S to the antepenult regardless of weight, and construct a foot: SWW S WW ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘␴˘ ␴˘ ␴˘ ␴˘ ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘ histori ographer industri ouse Roger Lass 126 The RSR is right-handed, insensitive to morphology and sensitive to syl- lable weight – virtually the inverse of the GSR. Much of the subsequent history of English stress is (arguably) a story of mutual adjustment between two sets of contrary tendencies: initial stress versus attraction of stress to heavy syllables close to the end of the word, morphological versus phonological conditioning. Modern English stress is based on a complex modification of the RSR, with some GSR or GSR-like elements, as well as some quite new depar- tures. The core can be seen in (57): the examples chosen already show their modern contours. It is worth noting, though, that perhaps the bulk of orig- inal GSR stressings are in fact subsumed under the RSR as default cases. That is: (a) Any disyllabic word of the type ␴¯ ␴˘ (wríter) or ␴˘ ␴˘ (wrítten) will get the contour S W by RSR subrule B(i) (b) Prefixed ␴˘ ␴¯ disyllables (belíeve) will get W S by the same subrule (c) Any trisyllable ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘ (cráftily) or ␴¯ ␴˘ ␴˘ (sórrier) will get S W W by subrule C (d) Monosyllables ␴˘ (writ) or ␴¯ (write) will of course get their contour assigned by A(i). But there are cases where what looks like the GSR, or a simplified version, survives (though there may be other ways of interpreting these). The most important are (a) final stress on prefixed disyllables with light finals (begín); and (b) initial stress on di- or trisyllables with post-initial heavy syllables that ought to attract stress by RSR but fail to: tórment (N), bástard, cónfiscate. Group (a) are probably best taken as straight GSR survivals (even if their etymologies are Romance); group (b) may be something rather different, an internal evolution of the RSR in a new direction. Tórment, bástard and the like (móllusc, mónarch) show a tendency for nouns to be initial- stressed, regardless of their syllabic structure. There is in fact a quite general distinction between S W nouns and (cognate) W S verbs, e.g.: (58) Noun Verb Noun Verb óbject objéct tórment tormént próject projéct férment fermént súbject subjéct súspect suspéct Some differentiations of this kind also involve adjectives, which may behave like verbs (Áugust v. augúst), or occasionally like nouns (cómpact (A) v. compáct (V)); but the basic distinction is trochaic noun versus iambic verb. (Most of the examples above are in Cooper 1687, and instances occur in Levins 1570: e.g. súrname v. to surnáme; the pattern is fully established by the late seventeenth century, and noted by most writers on the subject.) Phonology and morphology 127 This tendency can be read in two ways. Either the GSR survives, but is largely restricted to nouns, and it and a (modified) RSR coexist; or there is a special provision that marks the final consonants (or syllables) of nouns ‘extrametrical’, outside the domain of stress assignment. From the histor- ical point of view, GSR survival in a complex or ‘mixed’ system is proba- bly the better option. The Present-Day English stress system, as ongoing controversy about how to treat it synchronically shows, is in fact the relic of an ‘unresolved’ history, each problematic area a scar left by its evolution. Another kind of GSR-like stressing also needs to be accounted for: the exclusion of certain heavy derivational suffixes like -ate, -ise, -ance (as in légate, récognise, rather than **legáte, etc.: but see next section). Modern lexical phonology would assign these affixes to a stratum of the grammar ‘after’ stress assignment, which in effect makes them extrametrical as well. I will ignore the vexed issue of the internal organisation of synchronic grammars here, as this account is primarily a history of ‘surface’ phenomenology. 3.6.3 English stress to the late eighteenth century The examples in (58) are from Peter Levins’s Manipulus vocabulorum (1570), one of the earliest sources of marked stressings for English words. Levins notes that stress difference may signal meaning difference; he has therefore ‘commonly set the accent, which is onely acute, in that place, and ouer that vowell, where the sillable must go vp & be long’ (3). Aside from this inter- esting early comment on the phonetics of stress, the book itself (though somewhat inconsistent in actually marking accent) gives us several thousand words with their primary stresses indicated, a testimony of enor- mous value at this date. Levins’s material, as well as evidence from verse practice and grammar- ians through the 1780s, tells us that while the RSR was by and large well established, and showing signs of the modifications described above, there were still many words with GSR stressing, either as sole or alternative con- tours. Levins for instance has numerous words with initial stress regardless of post-initial heavy syllables. We might call these ‘blind’ or simplified GSR stressings, as they take the leftmost syllable as word-head, but do not observe the prefix/root distinction. (59) GSR stressings in Levins (1570) délectable, éxcusable, óbseruance, míschance, cónuenient, díuert, séquester, défectiue, pérspectiue, próclamation, súggestion, dístribute, cóntribute Roger Lass 128 This type persists up to the end of our period (and to some extent still), as we can see from these later examples: (60) Seventeenth- to eighteenth-century GSR stressings Price (1665) ádjacent, ácademy, cómplacency, cóntroversy Cooper (1687) ácademy, áccessory, réfractory, témperament Dyche (1710) ádjacent, quíntessence, únawares Kirkby (1746) ácceptable, áccessory, córruptible Johnston (1764) ábbreviation, áccommodate, állegorical Nares (1784) phlégmatic, splénetic, víbrate, ábsolute Many (most? all?) of these apparently had secondary stress on a later syllable. Cooper notes a ‘fainter’ accent on the penults of academy, accessory, etc.; Johnston has ‘double’ stress on advertise, allegorical, without distinguish- ing relative prominence (though historical evidence argues that the left- most was primary). Kenrick (1784: 19) distinguishes ‘two accents’ per word in similar cases (appertain, architect, manuscript ), where the ‘principal’ accent is on the first syllable, and the ‘other’ on the final. And Walker (1791: 67) talks explicitly of a ‘secondary accent’ in such cases. These words have two feet, the first stronger than the second, as in a compound: délectàble, ácadèmy, etc. Since the initial syllables are mostly light, the GSR still determines the prosodic head of the whole word; the RSR would predict stressing for these two words by subrule C: the main stress must be no further back than the antepenult, regardless of weight, so deléctable, acádemy, as indeed is the case now, where the stress is purely ‘Romance’. This tendency toward initial stress, while strong through the eighteenth century, was beginning to recede in the 1780s. The accentuations in the list above are given by most writers without comment, though Kirkby (1746: 30) remarks that even though in noun/verb pairs like ábstract/abstráct verbs ‘take the accent upon the latter syllable’, it nonetheless ‘appears to be the peculiar of modern English in general, to throw the Accent as near the first Syllable as possible’. Less than forty years later, while still retaining some of these left-strong patterns, Nares (1784: 185) has quite a different view: It has generally been said and believed that it is conformable to the genius of English pronunciation, to throw back the accent as far as possible from the end of a polysyllable. This . . . has, at times, corrupted our speech with many barbarous and unpleasing sounds, which are in reality repugnant to analogy . . . ácademy, réfractory, . . . &c., which no ear can hear without being offended. Phonology and morphology 129 [...]... under the accent, the prince and the lowest of the people pronounce them in the same manner; but the unaccented vowels in the mouth of the former have a distinct, open, and specific sound, while the latter often sink them, or change them, into some other sound Those, therefore, who wish to pronounce elegantly must be particularly attentive to the unaccented vowels; as a neat pronunciation of these... it was; in the modern system, with two forms, only the 3 sing is positively marked; all other forms are defaults, marked (by virtue of the zero ending) merely as ‘not 3 sing.’ 3. 8 Morphology 2: the major word-classes 3. 8.1 The noun In the corresponding chapter in the Cambridge History of the English Language II, I treated the noun phrase as a whole: noun, article, adjective and pronoun together This... case-confusion as well, though rather less; thee as a nominative occurs in both Shakespeare and Marlowe: ‘thinkst thee’ (Hamlet V.ii.64), ‘what hast thee done’ (The Jew of Malta 1056) The generalisation of oblique thee to all positions of course became a feature of Quaker speech, and is still attested in the 1950s in rural West Country dialects (Lass 1987: 119 31 ) Structurally, the loss of the you/thou distinction... (187), the analogy of English accents every word of more than two syllables on the antepenultima’ Regardless of the details (there are hordes of exceptions to both models), the shift in grammarians’ typological intuitions from the 1740s to the 1780s is notable English begins to feel more like a language with a Latinate accentual system than one with a Germanic type (I take this kind of intuition... under the form of the historical dative (e.g him < OE masc./neut dat sing him, with loss of masc acc sg hine) By the midfifteenth century the London system had these forms: (69) 1 nom I gen my/mine obl me 146  2 3 masc thou he thy/thine his thee him 3 neut (h)it his (h)it/him 3 fem she her(s) her Phonology and morphology  1 2 3 nom we ye/you they gen our(s) your(s) their(s) obl us you them... less ‘structural’ than pragmatic (3. 8.2 .3) 3. 8.2.2 The third person neuter But first the (relatively) simple story of it(s) There have been two changes, one phonological and the other morphological First, initial /h/ drops; this begins as early as the twelfth century, though /h/ is still common in the sixteenth, but has vanished by the end of the century in formal written English (Though /ht/ remains in... time, then, the modern pronunciation of iron was regarded as non-standard (though not earlier); of this set of pronunciations that for Nares are ‘observed rather that they may be avoided than imitated’, only iron has survived as standard The nonmetathesised type /ar n/ survives in the North of England and Scotland 3. 7 Morphology 1: domain and perspectives 3. 7.1 Definitions ‘Morphology’ in these volumes... dictionary (All of these 130 Phonology and morphology of course are now the normal – or with finance one of the normal – accentuations.) Stressings of the diláte, reséarch type have remained standard in Britain, though these words now have GSR contours in the US (This may be connected with a revival of the tendency toward initial stress noted by Kirkby: many US dialects have carried this further, with ídea,... ‘redundant’ morphological devices like concords disappear Indeed, the only relics of the once rich concordial systems in English now are the number distinctions in demonstratives (this/these, that/those), the case/number/gender system in the pronouns, and the pres 3 sing ending of the verb But even this has been largely evacuated of specific meaning: in the OE paradigm, with its four endings (three singular persons... thou users are mothers-in-law (a paradigm case of an ‘outside’ figure!), business, social superiors and unreal conditions (verbs of guessing, conjecture, etc.) Usage of this kind, though common, was not universal even among members of the same social class at the same time; the pronoun contrast, while part of the language , was an option By the end of the seventeenth century non-users outnumber users, . large they were not so kept. Indeed, Walker (1791: 23) writes: Phonology and morphology 133 When vowels are under the accent, the prince and the lowest of the people . . . pronounce them in the. (187), the analogy of . . . English . . . accents every word of more than two syllables on the antepenultima’. Regardless of the details (there are hordes of exceptions to both models), the shift. manner; but the unaccented vowels in the mouth of the former have a distinct, open, and specific sound, while the latter often sink them, or change them, into some other sound. Those, therefore,