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SERIES D.
MISCELLANEOUS.
HISTOKY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS
mOM THE EARLIEST PERIOD,
INCLUDING AN
INYESTIGATION OF THE GENERAL LAWS OF SOUND CHANGE, AND FULL WORD LISTS.
BY
HENRY SWEET, ESQ.,
Member of Council of the Philological and Early English Text Socikties, Editoe of the Old English Version or Gregory's Cura Pasioralis.
{From the Transactions of the Philological Society for 1873-4)
LONDON:
PUBLISHED FOR THE ENGLISH DIALECT SOCIETY BY TRUBNER & CO., 57 and 69, LUDGATE HILL.
MDCCCLXXIV.
All Rights Reserved.
HERTFORD :
PKINTBD BT 8TBPHEN AUSTIN AUD SONS.
\\33
CONTENTS
I. k History of English Sounds from the earliest^
period, including an investigation of the ?^enaval
laws of sound change , and full word lists, by H. Sweet.
II. Specimens of Sn^lisii Dialects.
Devonshire- An Exn^oor Scoldin? and Oourtshio
ed. t>y
P. El7forthy.
lestiTioreland- k 5ran New licvk, ed. by t'i.A'. Skeat
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface, Addressed to Members of the English Dialect
Society. By the Rev. W. W. Skeat v
Introduction 1
General Laws of Sound Change 6
General Alphabetics • 19
Quantity and Quality in the Teutonic Languages ... 24
Old English Period 26
Middle English Period- Orthography 37
Vowel-levelling 38
General Laws of "Vowel Change in the Modern Teu- tonic Languages 40
Close and Open EE and 00 48
Unaccented E 52
Diphthongs 52
Consonant Influence 53
Modern Period —
Loss OF Final E ' 55
Early Modern Period 57
Quantity 61
Consonant Influence 61
Transition Period 62
Late Modern Period 66
Quantity g, . . . 67
Consonant Influence 67
Latest Modern Period 69
Diphthongization 70
Short Vowels 73
Quantity 73
Consonant Influence 74
Notes on the Consonants -75
Word Lists 82
Alphabetical Index to the Lists 139
Supplementary Lists of Irregularities 146
Notes to the Word Lists 151
On the Periods op English 157
Concluding Remarks 161
PREFACE.
Addressed to Members of the English Dialect Society.
The History of English Sounds, by Mr. Henry Sweet, was originally written for the London Philological Society, in further illustration of the great work on Early English Pro- nunciation by Mr. Alexander J. Ellis. Upon application to the Council of the Philological Society, and to the author, permission was at once obtained for making arrangements whereby additional copies of the work should be struck off for the use of members of the English Dialect Society. The im- portance of it to all who study English sounds, especially such sounds as are frequently well preserved in some of our provin- cial dialects, wUl soon become apparent to the careful reader. But as there may be some amongst our members who may not be aware of what has been lately achieved in the study of phonetics, a few words of introduction may not be out of place here.
I have more than once received letters from correspondents who boldly assert that, of some of our dialectal sounds, no representation is possible, and that it is useless to attempt it. Against such a sweeping denunciation of the study of pho- netics it would be vain to argue. It may be sufficient merely to remark that precisely the same argument of " impossi- bility " was used, not so many years ago, against the intro- duction of the use of steam locomotives upon railways. The opinions of such as are unable to imagine how things which
VI PREFACE.
they cannot do themselves may, nevertheless, be achieved by others, will not be much regarded by such as desire progress and improvement.
It may, however, be conceded that no system of symbols existed which was of sufficient scientific accuracy until the publication of Mr. Melville Bell's singular and wonderful volume entitled — " Visible Speech : the Science of Universal Alphabetics : or Self-Interpreting Physiological Letters for the Printing and Writing of all Languages in one Alphabet ; elucidated by Theoretical Explanations, Tables, Diagrams, and Examples." Now in this system none of the usual alphabetical characters appear at all, nor is the alphabet founded upon any one language. It is a wholly new collec- tion of symbols, adapted for all or most of the sounds which the human voice is capable of producing, and is founded upon the most strictly scientific principles, each symbol being so chosen as to define the disposition of the organs used in pro- ducing the sound which the symbol is intended to represent. How this wonderful result has been achieved, the reader may easily discover for himself, either by consulting that work, or another by the same author -w^hich every one interested in the study of phonetics is earnestly recommended to procure, at the cost of only one shilling. The title of this latter work, consisting of only sixteen pages in quarto, is : — English Visible Speech for the Million, etc. ; by Alex. Melville Bell. London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co.; London and New York: Triibner & Co. A fair and candid examination of this pamphlet will shew the reader, better than any detailed de- scription can do, how the study of sounds has been rendered possible. Every work on phonetics will, no doubt, always be based upon, or have reference to, Mr. Bell's system, and therefore it is the more important that, at the very least, the existence of it should be widely known.
BY THE REV. W. W. SKEAT. Vll
The work of Mr. Ellis is entitled: — On Early English Pronunciation, with especial reference to Shakspere and Chaucer, by Alexander J. Ellis, F.E.S. The first two parts were published in 1869 by three societies in combination, viz. the Philological Society, the Early English Text Society, and the Chaucer Society ; and the third part, by the same societies, in 1870. The work is not yet completed, and the fourth part, not yet published, will contain a full account of our modern English provincial dialects, shewing their distri- bution and connections. Mr. Ellis employs a system of symbols called palceotype, but, as every one of these has its exact equivalent in Mr. Bell's system, it admits of the same degree of accuracy, and has the advantage of being wholly represented by ordinary printing-types.
The next system is that invented by Mr. Ellis for the special representation of English dialectal sounds, and deno- minated Glossic} By the kindness of the author, a copy of the tract upon Glossic is in the hands of every member of our Society. The attention of readers is directed to page 11 of that tract, where the thirty-six vowels of Mr. Bell's Visible Speech have their equivalent values in Glossic properly tabulated.
In Mr. Sweet's volume, now in the reader's hands, the corresponding table of vowel-sounds is given at page 5, and one principal object of this short Preface is to shew how Mr. Sweet's symbols and the 'Glossic' symbols agree together, and how, again, each table agrees with that of Mr. Bell.
I shall refer, then, to the three tables as given at p. 5 of Mr. Sweet's book, at p. 11 of the Glossic tract, and at p. 8 of Visible Speech for the Million. See also p. 14 of Mr. Ellis's Early English Pronunciation.
1 The system called Glossotype, illustrated at p. 16 of Mr. Ellis's Early English Pronunciation, may be considered aa now cancelled, and superseded by Glossic.
Till PREFACE.
Mr. Ellis and Mr. Sweet agree with Mr. Bell in their use of the terms Sigh, Mid, and Low; in their use of the terms Back, Mixed, and Front ; and in their use of the terms Wide and Wide-round. The only difference is that Mr. Sweet uses the term Narrow instead of Primary (see page 4, note 1), and also uses the more exact term Narrow-round in place of what Mr. Ellis calls Round simply. As Mr. Sweet has numbered his sounds, it is easy to tabulate the correspondence of the systems in the following manner. I denote here Mr. Sweet's sounds by the number only, and include the Glossic symbol within square brackets, in the usual manner.
|
1. |
[uu']. |
4. |
[ea]. |
7. |
[EE]. |
10. |
[U']. |
13. |
[!•]• |
16. |
[I]. |
|
2. |
[UU]. |
5. |
[uj. |
8. |
[AI]. |
11. |
[AA]. |
14. |
[A']. |
17. |
[E]. |
|
3. |
[ua]. |
6. |
[ua']. |
9. |
[AE]. |
12. |
[AH]. |
15. |
[E']. |
18. |
[A]. |
|
19. |
[00]. |
22. |
[ui']. |
25. |
[Ui]. |
28. |
[uo]. |
31. |
[uo']. |
34. |
[UE]. |
|
20. |
[OA]. |
23. |
[oa-]. |
26. |
[EO]. |
29. |
[AO]. |
32. |
[ao']. |
35. |
[OE]. |
|
21. |
[AU]. |
24. |
[au']. |
27. |
[eo-]. |
30. |
[0]. |
33. |
[0-]. |
36. |
[oe']. |
Now it should be clearly understood that these two systems are both perfectly exact, because both refer to the same posi- tions of the organs of voice ; but, as soon as these sounds come to be described by illustrative examples, a few slight apparent discrepancies arise, solely from a difference of indi- vidual pronunciation, even in the case of common 'key- words.' I believe I am correct in saying that even Mr. Bell's * key- words ' do not represent to everybody the exact sounds intended, but are better understood by a North-country man than by a resident in London. Mr. Ellis describes this difficulty in the following words : " At the latter end of his treatise Mr. Melville Bell has given in to the practice of key- words, and assigned them to his symbols. Let the reader be careful not to take the value of his symbol from his own pronunciation of the key-words, or from any other person's. Let him first determine the value of the symbol from the
BY THE REV. W. W. SKEAT. IX
exact description and diagram of the speech-organs, — or if possible also from the living voice of some one thoroughly acquainted with the system — and then determine Mr. Bell's own pronunciation of the key-word from the known value of the symbol. This pronunciation in many instances differs from that which I am accustomed to give it, especially in foreign words."
In order to steer clear of such minor difficulties, Mr. Sweet has adopted a very simple system of notation, which only aims at representing the broader distinctions between vowels, using, for example, the same symbol [a] for the mid-back- wide and the low-back- wide sounds (nos. 11 and 12), without further distinction, and defining it only as the sound a, as most commonly heard in the y^ovdi father. E-oughly speaking, then, the symbols which Mr. Sweet employs in his vowel-table may be thus represented in Glossic.
a, as the short vowel corresponding to the first vowel in father; compare Glossic [aa], as in [faa'dhur].
ae, as a in m«n ; Glossic [a], as in [man].
e, as e in tdl; Glossic [e or ae], as in [tel] ; provincial [tael]. . e, as ai in haii; Glossic [ai], as in [bait].
8, as « in hut; Glossic [u], as in [but].
i, as in hit; Glossic [i], as in [bit].
6, as in not ; 66, as in na2«ght ; Glossic [o] in [not] ; [au] in [naut].
6, as oa in boat; Glossic [oa], as in [boat],
08, as 0 in Germ, schdn ; Glossic [oe], as in Germ, [shoen],
u, as 00 in foot ; uu as oo in cool ; Glossic [uo, oo], as in [fuot, kool].
y, as u in Germ, iibel; Glossic [ue], as in Germ, [uebu'l].
ai, a diphthong of a and i, as 2/ in my ; Glossic [ei], as in [meij.
X PREFACE.
au, a diphthong of a and u, as ou in house ; Glossic [ou], as in [hoiis],
ei, a diphthong of e and i, as a in tale ; Glossic [aiy], as in [taiyl].
ou, as 0 in no, i.e. 6 with an aftersound of u;^ Glossic [oaw], as in [noaw].
oi, as oy in bo?/ ; Glossic [oi], as in [boi].
It may be added, that ]> is used to represent the sound of th in thin, Glossic [thin] ; and ^ to represent the th in this, Glossic [dhis].
According, then, to Mr. Sweet's notation, the word father is written faa^ar ; man, msen ; tell, tel ; bait, bet, or (more commonly) belt, in Southern English, beet in Scotch ; but, bat ; bit, bit ; not, not ; boat, hot, or (more commonly) bout, in Southern English, boot in Scotch ; Germ, schon, shoen ; foot, fut ; Germ, iibel, ybol ; my, mai ; house, haus ; tale, teil ; no, nou ; boy, boi.
The long vowels are expressed by doubling the symbol employed for the shorter vowels. The following are examples, viz. father, faa^er (the short sound of which is found in the Anglo-Saxon man, in modern English changed to mwn) ; earn, worse, oon, waos ; satv, faught, s66, foot ; tvhose, huuz ; and the like. Examples of diphthongs are seen in eight, eit ; lord, hoarse, load, hoas ; smear, smiar ; bear, bear ; etc.
The easiest way of becoming familiar with this very simple notation is to observe the long list of words beginning at p. 84. By comparing the third column, which gives the modern English spelling, with the fourth, which gives the modern English pro7iimciation according to the above system, the sounds intended can be very easily ascertained, and the reader
1 More clearly heard when used as a negative, in response to a question, than ■when used as in the phrase 'no man.' Example: Do you like that ? Answer — n6u.
BY THE REV. W. W. SKEAT. XI
will be prepared to understand what is meant hj the first and second columns, which exhibit the pronunciations of the Old and Middle period respectively. The thanks of students are especially due to Mr. Sweet for these word-lists, with the alphabetical register of them appended. They can only have been compiled at the cost of much labour and diligence, and shew an intimate acquaintance with the spellings and pronunciations of all periods of English.
w. w. s.
EEEATA AND ADDITIONS.
Page 6, line 12, for wulf, read wolf. „ 16 „ 2 from bottom, dele important. *„ 52, "Diphthongs," see also p. 148. „ 69, " Consonant Influence," see also p. 151.
74, "Consonant Influence" (Latest Mod.). Note also the tendency to lower uu before r, as shown in the almost universal ydd{r) for yimr (possessive of yuu). In the vulgar pronunciation this is carried out in all words, so that the combination uur is entirely lost. Thus we have pood for puur, shoda for shuur, etc. Word Lists: dele J>ycce (No. 797).
for cleev, read cleev (1327). quean (1741) seems to come from cwene with a short vowel = Gothic kwino.
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUIfDS.
By henry sweet, Esq.
INTEODUCTION.
In studying the phonetic development of a language two methods are open to us, the historical and the comparative ; that is to say, we may either trace the sounds of one and the same language through its successive stages, or else compare the divergent forms in a group of languages which have a common origin.
Each method has its advantages. In the historical method the sequence of the phenomena is self-evident ; when we compare two forms of the same sound in several co-existing languages, it is often doubtful which is the older. The peculiar advantage of the comparative method is that it can be applied to living languages, where nothing but careful observation of facts is required, while in the case of dead languages the phonetic material is often defective, and is always preserved in an imperfect form by means of graphic symbols, whose correct interpretation is an indispensable pre- liminary to further investigation. In short, we may say that the comparative method is based, or may be based, on facts, the historical on theoretical deductions.
It need hardly be said that the first requisite for phonetic investigation of any kind is a knowledge of sounds. Yet nothing is more common in philology than to see men, who have not taken the slightest trouble to make themselves acquainted with the rudiments of vocal physiology, making the boldest and most dogmatic statements about the pro- nunciation of dead languages — asserting, for instance, that certain sounds are unnatural, or even impossible, merely be- cause they do not happen to occur in their own language. Such prejudices can only be got rid of by a wide and impar- tial training.
)i HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The second requisite is a collection of carefully recorded facts. In this respect the present state of phonology is somewhat anomalous. As far as living languages are con- cerned, the amount of reliable material that exists is still very small, although it is rapidly increasing, while if we turn to the dead languages we find an enormous body of careful, full, often exhaustive, observations of the varied phenomena of letter-change in the Teutonic languages — a dead mass, which requires the warm breath of living phono- logy to thaw it into life. Before the word-lists in such a book as Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik can be intelligently utilized, the spoken sounds they represent must be deter- mined. The first step is to determine generally the relations between sound and symbol. The ideal of a phonetic notation is, of course, a system in which every simple sound would have a simple sign, bearing some definite relation to the sound it represents. It need hardly be said that all the modifications of the Roman alphabet in which the Teutonic languages have been written down fall far short of this standard. The Roman alphabet was originally, like all naturally developed alphabets, a purely hieroglyphic system, representing not sounds but material objects : the connection of each symbol with its sound is therefore entirely arbitrary. When we consider that this inadequate system was forced on languages of the most diverse phonetic structure, we need not be surprised at the defects of the orthography of the old Teutonic languages, but rather admire the ingenuity with which such scanty resources were eked out.
The maximum of difficulty is reached when a language changes through several generations, while its written repre- sentation remains unchanged. In such a case as that of English during the last three centuries, we are compelled to disregard the written language altogether, and have recourse to other methods.
Foremost among these is the study of the contemporary evidence afforded by treatises on pronunciation with their descriptions of the various sounds and comparisons with foreign utterance. It is on this kind of evidence that the
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 6
well-known investigations of Mr. Ellis are based. The great value of Mr. Ellis's work consists in the impartial and cautious spirit in which he has carried it out, advancing step by step, and never allowing theories to overrule facts. Mr. Ellis's method forms a striking contrast to that pursued by some Early English students, who, starting from the assump- tion that whatever pronunciation is most agreeable to their own ears must be the right one, take for granted that Alfred, Chaucer, and Shakespere spoke exactly like 19th-century gentlemen, and then, instead of shaping their theories by the existing evidence, pick out those facts which they think confirm their views, and ignore all the rest. The resvilt of Mr. Ellis's investigations is to establish with certainty, within certain limits, the pronunciation of English during the last three centuries; absolute accuracy is impossible in deductions drawn from the vague statements of men who had but an imperfect knowledge of the mechanism of the sounds they uttered.
I hope, however, to show that that minute accuracy which, is unattainable by the method adopted by Mr. Ellis, can be reached through a combination of the comparative with the historical method, taking the latter in its widest sense to include both the external evidence employed by Mr. Ellis, and the internal evidence of the graphic forms. This gives us three independent kinds of evidence, which, as we shall see, corroborate each other in the strongest manner.
Before going any farther it will be necessary to say a few words on the phonetic notation I have adopted. The only analysis of vowel-sounds that is of any real use for general scientific purposes is that of Mr. Bell. His system difiers from all others in two important particulars, 1) in being based not on the acoustic effects of the sounds, but on their organic formation, and 2) in being of universal applicability : while most other systems give us only a limited number of sounds arbitrarily selected from a few languages, Mr. Bell's Visible Speech is entirely independent of any one language — it not only tells us what sounds do
4 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
exist in a given language, but also what sounds may exist in any language whatever. It is therefore of priceless value in all theoretical investigations like the present.
The following remarks will help to elucidate Mr. Bell's table of vowels with key-words, which I have given on the opposite page.
Every vowel is, as regards position, either hack (guttural), of which aa is the type, front (palatal), typified by ii, or mixed, that is, formed by the back and front of the tongue simultaneously, as in the English err. Each vowel, again, has one of three degrees of elevation — it is either high, mid or loic. Each of these nine positions may be round- ed (labialized). Each of the resulting eighteen vowels must, lastly, be either narroto^ or wide. In forming narrow vowels the pharynx or cavity behind the mouth is com- pressed, while in wide vowels it is relaxed. The distinction will be clearly felt by any one who pronounces not, naught, several times in succession, drawling them out as much as possible : it will be found that in sounding not the pharynx and back of the mouth is relaxed, while in naught there is evident tension. The vowel in both words is the low-back- round, but in not it is wide, in naught narrow.
In treating of the formation of the sounds, I have always described them in Mr. Bell's terminology, which is admirably simple and clear. If I could have made use of his types, I could have avoided a great deal of circumlocution, which, as it is, has proved unavoidable.
For the convenience of those who are not able to appre- ciate minute phonetic distinctions, I have also adopted a rough practical system of notation, in which only the broadest dis- tinctions are indicated. In this system a, e, i, o, u, y, are employed in their original Roman values, the distinction between open and close e and o being indicated by accents. To indicate that class of sounds of which the English vowels in but and err are types, I have adopted the turned e (d). The English vowel in man is written ce, and ce is used
^ I have ventured to substitute "narrow" for Mr. Bell's "primary," as being both shorter and more expressive.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
o
|
a 43 P^-: |
|||
|
■4^ |
|||
|
-s-r |
-i . g |
^1^ |
|
|
3fe) |
.2^ |
||
|
«o |
t^ |
00 |
|
|
I-H |
I-H |
I-H ^ |
|
|
u |
|||
|
n |
H |
53 |
|
|
n M |
1 |
mix ^. he iScot |
|
|
-g, |
'TIS S^ |
P 5 'a |
|
|
-.3 |
gf^ |
-2fel g |
|
|
CO |
-* |
lO |
|
|
■-I |
I-H |
f-H |
|
|
+= |
|||
|
-^ |
|||
|
gh-back. c. Engl. Engl, eye |
id-back. ngl. father |
^ § s |
|
|
■£ § |
a Sq |
.3^^ |
|
|
o |
1—4 |
(M |
|
|
I— 1 |
I-H |
I-H |
|
|
."^-^ |
<X) |
'« |
|
|
file |
g'a |
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|
43 ^ ti |
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:S i I |
^§1^ |
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|
af^=S |
^i^fq |
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t>. |
00 |
Oi |
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<D |
|||
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•a |
|||
|
^ |
|||
|
^ |
T3 a |
ni |
|
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M |
a> |
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Pi |
•a p- |
H ^ |
X JH |
|
5PS |
'a 1 |
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|
•^c§ |
a^ |
^f^ |
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•^ |
lO |
«5 |
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-» |
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r^ |
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.,^ |
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|
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i |
•^ -S u ^ |
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:2 ^ |
OS § rP '^J |
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|
,^3 |
a § |
.2 § |
|
|
r-i |
(N |
CO |
|
It |
+3 ^ P r-< ° a |
o |
|
|
45 to 1 |
4H a^ |
=§ |
|
|
&0 « |
:2l |
1 |
|
|
•^c^ |
ac) |
O |
|
|
■* |
»o |
o |
|
|
CO |
CO |
CO |
|
|
P |
|||
|
P |
TS OJ |
■TJ |
ni |
|
o |
X |
(D |
■D |
|
'a |
'a |
||
|
g |
i |
1 '13 |
^ |
|
F= |
'r3 |
■§ |
^ |
|
T— 1 |
(M |
CO |
|
|
CO |
CO |
CO |
|
|
o |
|||
|
P |
|||
|
^^ |
|||
|
U-^ |
|||
|
1 |
'i'-v^CQ |
-p.^ |
|
|
-ai^ |
:s,l^^ |
^1^ |
|
|
■^feq |
at^ § |
^f^ |
|
|
00 |
Oi |
o |
|
|
(M |
N |
CO |
|
|
Si |
|||
|
(B |
|||
|
-+J |
|||
|
-M |
|||
|
:ti |
|||
|
a |
bo |
||
|
:^ |
-4^ |
||
|
P -P m |
-*^ (11 rP P-^ S o j^ » |
||
|
43 .-H •41 i |
il s . ^ c ^ |
||
|
•^Cbq |
aqcb |
^f^ § |
|
|
lO |
CO |
l^ |
|
|
C<) |
(N |
<M |
|
|
o |
|||
|
s^ |
|||
|
q |
nd |
Id |
|
|
PS |
k! |
||
|
o |
11 |
•a |
|
|
.£PS .P«<5 |
"a |
1 o |
|
|
IM |
CO |
■* |
|
|
IM |
(M |
(N |
|
|
^ |
|||
|
^ |
|||
|
o |
|||
|
."Si |
a |
||
|
-g s«s |
.i^-g |
-^"S |
|
|
'P'< & J. ^ -S |
|||
|
:§ s |
^I> |
||
|
a^ |
.2^1 |
||
|
05 |
o |
1—1 |
|
|
I-H |
(N |
<N |
6 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
to designate the German o. Long vowels are doubled, and
diphthongs indicated by combining their elements.^
a as in father Nos. 11, 12, (3) on Bell's Scale.
86 ,, man ,, 18 „
e „ tdl „ 9,(17)
e ,, Scotch tale, French 6 ,, 8 ,,
a ,, hutyhird, Germatigahe ,, 2, (3), 5, 6, (10), 14, 15.
i ,, hit, heat „ 7, 16.
6 „ not ,... „ 21, (29), 30 on Bell's Scale.
6 „ Scotch note. Germ, sohn ,, 20 ,,
ce „ Germ, schon „ (26), 27, 35, 36 „
u „ WMlf „ 19,28.
y „ Germ, uhel „ 25, (26), 34 ,,
ai ,, my. Germ. me/n.
au ,, hoKse, Germ, hatts.
ei „ tffle.
Cu ,, no.
oi „ ho^/.
I have not made any use of Mr. Ellis's "pala3otype," as, in spite of its typographical convenience, its extreme complexity and arbitrariness make it, as I can testify from personal ex- perience, quite unfitted for popular exposition. The apparent easiness of palacotype as compared with the Visible Speech letters of Mr. Bell is purely delusive : it is certain that those who find Visible Speech too difiicult will be quite unable really to master palacotype. It must also be borne in mind that no system of notation will enable the student to dis- pense with a thorough study of the sounds themselves : there is no royal road to phonetics.
GrENERAL LaWS OF SoUND ChANGE.
They may be investigated both deductively, that is, by examining known changes in languages, and a priori, by considering the relations of sounds among themselves. I propose to combine these methods as much as possible. Although in giving examples of the various changes I have been careful to select cases which may be considered as per- fectly well established, I must in many cases ask the reader to suspend his judgment till they have been fully discussed, which, of course, cannot be done till we come to the details. The general laws I am about to state may, for the present,
^ Numbers within parentheses indicate the less distinctive vowels, which admit of being brought under different heads : 26, for instance, may be regarded either as a very open y or a close oe.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 7
be regarded simply as convenient, heads for classing the various changes under.
All the changes may be brought under three grand divi- sions, 1) organic, 2) imitative, and 3) inorganic. Organic changes are those which are the direct result of certain tendencies of the organs of speech : all the changes com- monly regarded as weakenings fall under this head. Imita- tive changes are the result of an unsuccessful attempt at imitation. Inorganic changes, lastly, are caused by purely external causes, and have nothing to do either with organic weakening or with unsuccessful imitation.
The great defect of most attempts to explain sound-changes is that they select some one of these causes, and attempt to explain everything by it, ignoring the two others. It would, for instance, be entirely misleading to explain the change of the O.E. hcer (pret. of heran) into the N.E. hove as an organic sound-change, the truth being that the form hore is the result of confusion with the participle home. Such a case as this is self-evident, but I hope to show hereafter that the very re- markable and apparently inexplicable changes which our language underwent during the transition from the Old to the Middle period, can be easily explained as inorganic de- velopments.
We may now turn to the two first classes of changes, organic and imitative. From the fact that all sounds are originally acquired by imitation of the mother and nurse we are apt to assume that all sound-change is due to imitation, but a little consideration will show that this is not the case. How, for instance, can such a change as that of a stopped to an open consonant, or of ii, uii, into «?', an, be explained by imitation? The fact that the vast majority of those who speak even the most difficult languages do make the finest distinctions perfectly well, proves clearly that the correct imitation of sounds is no insurmountable difficulty even to people of very ordinary capacity. The real explanation of such changes as those cited above is that the sounds were acquired properly by imitation, and then modified by the speaker himself, either from carelessness or indolence.
8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
Further confirmation is afforded by the fact, which any- one may observe for himself, that most people have double pronimciations, one being that which they learned by imita- tion, the other an unconscious modification. If asked to pro- nounce the sound distinctly, they will give the former sound, and will probably disown the other as a vulgarism, although they employ it themselves invariably in rapid conversation. When the habits are fixed, the difiiculty of correct imitation largely increases. To the infant one sound is generally not more difficult than another, but to the adult a strange sound is generally an impossibility, or, at any rate, a very serious difficulty. He therefore naturally identifies it with the nearest equivalent in his own language, or else analyses it, and gives the two elements successively instead of simulta- neously. We may, therefore, expect a much wider range of the imitative principle in words derived from other languages. I propose, accordingly, to class all the doubtful changes under the head of organic, treating as imitative changes only those which do not allow of any other explanation, but admitting that some of the changes considered as inorganic may under special circumstances be explained as imitative.
Organic sound-changes fall naturally into two main divi- sions, simple and complex. Simple changes are those which affect a single sound without any reference to its surroundings, while complex changes imply two sounds in juxtaposition, which modify one another in various ways.
It is generally assumed by philologists that all organic sound-changes may be explained by the principle of economy of exertion, and there can be no doubt that many of the changes must be explained in this way and in no other, as, for instance, the numerous cases of assimilation, where, instead of passing completely from one sound to another, the speaker chooses an intermediate one. Other changes, however, not only do not require this hypothesis of muscular economy, but even run quite counter to it, as when an open consonant is con- verted into a stop, a by no means uncommon phenomenon in the Teutonic languages. It is of the greatest importance that these exceptions to the general rule should not be suppressed.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 9
I shall, therefore, while giving precedence to those changes which seem to be in harmony with the general principle of economy of force, take care to state fully the exceptions. I begin with the simple changes, arranging them in classes, according to the different vocal organs concerned in their formation.
A. Simple Changes.
I. Weakening.
1) Glottal : voice to whisper and breath. In the formation of voice the glottis is momentarily closed, in that of whisper its edges are only approximated, and in breath the glottis is quite open. It is evident, therefore, that voice per se de- mands the most and breath the least muscular exertion, and that the natural tendency would be to substitute whisper and breath for voice whenever possible. The great preservative of consonantal vocality is the principle of assimilation, to which we shall return presently. When a voice consonant is flanked by vowels, as in aha, aga, etc., it is much easier to let the voice run on uninterruptedly than to cut it off at the consonant and then resume it. But at the end of a word this assimilative influence is not felt, and accordingly we find that in nearly all the Teutonic languages except English, many of the final voice consonants become either voiceless or whis- pered.
2) Pharyngal : narrow to wide. In the formation of narrow vowels the pharynx is compressed, while in that of wide vowels it is relaxed. The natural tendency would therefore be from narrow to wide. It is, however, a curious fact that in the Teutonic languages short and long vowels follow diametrically opposed laws of change as regards these pharyngal modifications, long vowels tending to narrowing, short to widening. Full details will be given hereafter ; I merely call attention to these Teutonic changes as a clear instance of inapplicability of the principle of economy of force.^
3) Changes of position. The most general feature of
' Mr. H. Nicol, however, suggests that the narrowing of long vowels maybe caused by the effort required to sustain a uniform sound — hence long vowels are either narrowed or diphthongized.
10 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
changes of position is the tendency to modify the back arti- culations, whether vowels or consonants, by shifting forwards to the front, point or lip positions. This is clearly a case of economy of exertion, as the back formations require a move- ment of the whole body of the tongue, the front and point of only a portion of it. Of the two last the front, on the same principle, evidently require more exertion than the point sounds. The lip consonants (the labial vowels must be reserved), lastly, involve the minimum of exertion.
I will now give a few examples of these various changes.
a) back to front : Sanskrit ch (front-stop) from /.•, as in vach=.vak; English mmn,fee9r, from the Old 'Ei.mann, faran.
b) back to point : E. meit from O.E. gemaca.
€) back to lip : seems doubtful, as the cases usually cited, such as Greek pente^cankan, seem to be the result of the assimilative influence of the ^i•-sound preserved in the Latin quinque.
d) front to point : the development of tsh from k through an intermediate front position, as in the E. church from cyrice ; the change of Sanskrit f , as in grii, which was originally the voiceless consonant corresponding to the English consonant y, to the present sound of sh.
e) front and point to lip ? ^
f) back and front to mixed (applies only to vowels). All unaccented vowels in most of the Teutonic languages have been levelled under one sound — the mid-mixed- narrow, as in the German enda, geehdn, from the older andi, gihan.
There are many exceptions to these general tendencies. Thus, of the two rs, the back and the point, the former seems to require less exertion than the latter, and hence is often substituted for it in the careless pronunciation of advanced communities, especially in large cities. Other cases, however, really seem to run counter to the prin- ciple of economy of force. Such are the change of th into
1 The not unfrequent change of th into / is no doubt purely imitative (Jruu for ^ruu).
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 11
kh ( = German ch) in the Scotch (Lothian dialect) khrii for thrii.
The changes of height in the vowels cannot be brought under any general laws. In the Teutonic languages, at least, short and long vowels follow quite opposite courses, long vowels tending to high, short to low positions.
4) Relaxation :
a) stopped consonants to unstopped : Latin lingua from dingua; German tnakhdn=.'Ei. meik, ivasdr =■ ivootdr ; Modern Greek dhedhoka from dedooka.
b) unstopped to diphthongal vowel : Middle English dai, km, from older dagh, laghu; English Mid hom. hiir.
c) untrilling : a common phenomenon in most of the Teutonic languages, especially English, in which the trilled r is quite lost.
There are some unmistakable exceptions to these tenden- cies. All the Teutonic languages except English seem to find the t/i and dh difficult, and convert them into the corre- sponding stopped t and d. In Swedish the gh of the oldest documents has, in like manner, become g. There seem to be cases of vowels developing into consonants, which will be treated of hereafter. Lastly, we may notice the not unfrequent development of trilled out of untrilled conson- ants, as in Dutch, where g first became opened into gh, which in many Dutch dialects has become a regular guttural r.
5) Hounding (vowel-labialization). We must distinguish between the rounded back and the rounded front vowels, for their tendencies are directly opposed to one another: back vowels tend to rounding, front to unrounding. In the case of back vowels, rounding may be regarded as an attempt to diminish the expenditure of muscular energy, by keeping the mouth half-closed, whence the change of aa into od, which, as we shall see, is almost universal in the Teutonic languages. But with the more easily-formed front vowels this economy of exertion is superfluous : we find, accordingly, that front vowels are seldom rounded, but that rounded front vowels are often unrounded, 1/ and m becoming i and e — a frequent change in the Teutonic languages.
12 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
II. Loss.
1) of vowels. The loss of unaccented final vowels is a frequent phenomenon in all languages. The dropping of final e is a characteristic feature of the Modern period of English.
2) of consonants. Here we may distinguish several classes of changes. A single consonant may fall off either before a vowel or a consonant, and it may be initial, medial, orfinal. The Teutonic languages are, as a general rule, remarkable for the extreme tenacity with which they retain their consonants, especially when final.
B. Complex Changes.
III. Influence.
1) One-sided Influence. Influence of one sound on another may be either partial (modification) or complete (assimilation) . We must further distinguish the influence of vowel on vowel, vowel on consonant,, consonant on consonant,, and consonant on vowel.
The modification of one vowel by another, commonly called umlaut, is a very important feature of Teutonic sound-change. The following are the most important Teutonic umlauts, which I have formulated as equations.
a...i=:e: 0. E. erxdiQ^ Gathic oxxdii; 0. Icelandic weeri=
waari. a...u=o: 0. Icelandic m6nnum=mannum, s66r=saaru
(pL o/saar). i...a=e: O.U. stelan=Gofhie stilan. u. . .a=:6 : O.E. 6ft= Gothic ufta. u...i=y: O.E. fyllan=fullian, myys=muusi. 6...i=oe: 0^. groeoene=gr66ni. There are also umlauts of diphthongs, such as ey in the Old Icelandic leysa^ausian.
The chaDge of ai into ei in Old Icelandic {veit=vaif), and the further change of ei into ei in Modern Icelandic, are examples of what might be called diphthongic umlaut.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 13
It is clear that in all these umlauts the new vowel is exactly intermediate between the original vowel of the root and the modifying one of the termination : if the new vowel became identical with its modifier, the result would be not an umlaut but a complete assimilation. In the Old Icelandic skbpu'Su=skapdSic the first vowel is modified, the second as- similated by the final u.
Vowel influence on consonants is not very common, but the difierent forms of Grerman ch, after back, front, and rounded vowels, as in ach, ich, audi, are instances of it.
Consonant influence on consonants is very strongly develop- ed in some languages : what is called sandhi in Sanskrit and mutation in the Celtic languages falls partly under this head. The Teutonic languages, on the other hand, are remarkable for the independence of their consonants, and the freedom with which they are combined without modifying one another. Consonant influence on vowels, lastly, is perhaps the ob- scurest of all phonetic problems : the explanation of its varied phenomena seems to require a far greater knowledge of the synthesis of speech-sounds than is at present attained by phonologists. These influences are strongly developed both in Old and Modern English, and will be treated of in their place.
The converse of the processes just considered is dissimila- tion, by which two identical sounds are made unlike, or two similar sounds are made to diverge. The development of the Teutonic preterite icista out of witta is an example of consonantal, the diphthongization of ii into ei in Early Modern English of vowel dissimilation, while the further change of ei into di and «i is a case of divergence of similar sounds. The whole phenomena of dissimilation is anomalous, and it is doubtful whether many of the instances ought not to be ascribed to purely external causes, as, for instance, the desire of greater clearness.
2) Mutual Influence. Mutual influence, in which both the sounds are modified by one another, may be either partial or complete. I do not know of any sure instance of partial convergence.
14 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The commonest type of complete convergence is such a change as that of cm into dd, in which two distinct sounds are simplified into one sound different from and yet similar to both of them. This simplification of diphthongs is, as we shall see, a very frequent phenomenon in the history of English sounds. Of consonantal simplification we have an example in the English wh in what, which was first khivat, then h-ioat, and lastly ichat, the initial h being incorporated into the w, which consequently lost its vocality.
The converse phenomenon of divergence is exemplified in the resolution of simple long vowels into diphthongs. We have seen that do is often the result of the simplification of au, but in Icelandic the process has been reversed — the Old Icelandic dd (as in ddd'^ from daar6) has become au. In the same way the Middle English yij has in the present English been resolved into iic. Whether short vowels are ever re- solved is very doubtful.
IV. Transposition.
Transposition may be of consonants, as in the familiar wx for ash, or else of vowels in difierent syllables, as in the Greek meino for menio. This latter case must be carefully distin- guished from umlaut. There seem also to be cases of trans- position in different words, or in whole classes of words, such as the confusion between 'air:=hair and hair^air, which seems to be often made in the London dialect.
The results obtained may be conveniently summed up thus :
A. Simple Changes. I. Weakening.
1) Glottal : voice to whisper and breath.
2) Pharyngal: narrow to wide.
3) Position : a) back to front.
b) back to point.
c) back to lip ?
d) front to point.
EY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
e) front and point to lip ?
f) back and front to mixed (vowels only).
g) vowel-lieiglit ?
4) Helaxation : a) stop to unstopped ; b) unstopped to vowel ; c) untrilling.
5) Vowel-rounding: rounding of back ; unrounding of front.
II. Loss.
1) Of vowels : unaccented final e.
2) Consonants : before vowel, before another consonant ; initial, medial, final.
B. Complex Changes.
III. Influence.
1) One-sided, a) convergent :
partial (modification), complete (assimilation) ; vowel on vowel (umlaut), vowel on consonant, consonant on consonant (sandhi), consonant on vowel.
b) divergent (dissimilation) : of vowels, of consonants.
2) Mutual, a) convergent :
partial (diphthongic umlaut), complete (diphthongic
simplification) ; consonantal, b) divergent : resolution of long vowels, of short (?).
IV. Transposition.
1) Of consonants.
2) Of vowels (in difierent syllables).
3) In difierent words.
Imitative Sound- Changes.
The general principle on which imitative changes depend is simply this — that the same efiect, or nearly the same, may be produced on the ear by very difierent means. Thus, starting from the mid-front-narrow vowel e, we can lower
16 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
its natural pitch either by slightly raising the back of the tongue, and thus producing the corresponding mixed 9 instead of the front vowel, or else by rounding into the mid-front-round ce, the result being that ce and 9 are so alike in sound that they are constantly confused in many languages. This similarity of sound between the mixed and round vowels was first pointed out by Mr. Bell (Visible Speech, p. 87).
There is the same similarity between the low- narrow and the mid-wide vowels, and also between the high-wide and the mid-narrow. Thus the English e in men is indifferently pronounced, either as the mid-front-wide or the low-front- narrow, and the d in hdt as the high-back-wide or the mid- back-narrow.
Whenever, then, we find a sound changing directly into another which, although very similar in acoustic effect, is formed in quite a difierent manner, we may be sure that the change is an imitative, not an organic one. Thus, when we find ce and d constantly interchanging without any interme- diate stages, it would be unreasonable to assume, as we should have to do on the assumption of organic change, three such stages as ce, e, 9, whereas the imitative hypothesis makes the direct change of ce into 9 perfectly intelligible.
Inorganic Changes.
Inorganic sound-changes, which result from purely ex- ternal causes, are of a very varied character, and are con- sequently difiicult to classify. One of the most prominent of these external influences is the striving after logical clear- ness, which comes more and more into play as the sounds of the language become less distinct. Clearness may again be attained in many ways — by discarding one of two words which have run together in form, though distinct in mean- ing, or by taking advantage of any tendency to change which may keep the two words distinct (scheideformen) . The important phenomenon of levelling, by which advanced languages get rid of superfluous distinctions, is a very im-
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 17
portant inorganic change, and is strongly developed in Transition English. A familiar aspect of inorganic sound- change is the alteration of foreign words so as to give them a homely appearance, as in sparrotv-grass for asparagus.
General Law^ of Change.
The investigation of the various laws of sound-change — important as it is — must not be allowed to divert our atten- tion from the general principle on which they all depend, namely that of incessant change — alternations of develop- ment and decay. To say that language changes looks very like a truism, but if so, it is a truism whose consequences are very generally ignored by theorizers on pronunciation. The most important lesson that it teaches us is to regard all cases of stand-still, whether of phonetic or of general linguistic development, as abnormal and exceptional. These cases of arrested development are really much rarer than is com- monly supposed, and many of them are quite delusive — the result of the retention of the written representation of an older language, from which the real living language has di- verged widely. English and Icelandic are striking examples. The written English language is for all practical purpose an accurate representation of the spoken language of the six- teenth century, which, as far as the sounds themselves are concerned, is as different from the present English as Latin is from Italian. The apparent stability of our language during the last few centuries is purely delusive.
The case of English and Icelandic also shows how it is possible for a language to retain its grammatical structure unimpaired, and at the same time to undergo the most sweep- ing changes in its phonetic system. How much more then are we bound to expect a change of pronunciation where the whole grammatical structure of a language has been sub- verted !
It is not only in its unceasing alternations of develop- ment and decay that language shows its analogy with the other manifestations of organic life, but also in another very
2
18 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
important feature, namely in that of increasing complexity of phonetic structure. The greater number of sounds in a late as opposed to an early language is at once evident on comparing two languages belonging to the same stock, but in different stages of development, such as English with German, French with Italian or Spanish. It can further be shown that even in German, in its sounds one of the most archaic of the living Teutonic languages, many of the simple vowels are of comparatively late origin.
The sounds of early languages, besides being few in num- ber, are more sharply marked off, more distinct than those of their descendants. Compare the multitude of indistinct vowel sounds in such a language as English with the clear simplicity of the Gothic and Sanskrit triad a, i, u — the three most distinct sounds that could possibly be produced. From these three vowels the complex systems of the modern lan- guages have been developed by the various changes already treated of.
There can be little doubt that the simplicity of earlier phonetic systems was partly due to want of acoustic discrimi- nation, and that primitive Man contented himself with three vowels, simply because he would have been unable to dis- tinguish between a larger number of sounds. The really marvellous fineness of ear displayed by those who speak such languages as English, Danish, or French, must be the result of the accumulated experience of innumerable generations.
From this we can easily deduce another law, namely that the changes in early languages are not gradual, but per saltum. A clear appreciation of this principle is of consider- able importance, as many philologists have assumed that in such changes as that of a back into a front consonant (Sans- krit k into ch) the tongue was shifted forwards by impercep- tible gradations. Such assumptions are quite unnecessary, besides being devoid of proof. To people accustomed pre- viously only to the broad distinction between back and point consonant, the further distinction of front must at first have appeared almost indistinguishable from its two extremes.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 19
Under such circumstances it is not easy to see liow they could have distinguished intermediate modifications of the original sound.
General Alphabetics.
Although it would be possible to carry on the present investigation on a purely comparative basis — confining our attention exclusively to the living languages — such a process would prove tedious and difficult, if pursued without any help from the historical method, many of whose deductions are perfectly well established : to ignore these would be perverse pedantry. But the historical method must be based on a study of the graphic forms in which the older languages are preserved, and especially of their relation to the sounds they represent. It is quite useless to attempt to draw deductions from the spelling of a language till we know on what principles that spelling was formed. We have only to look at living languages to see how greatly the value of the spelling of each language varies. In English and French the spelling is almost worthless as a guide to the actual lan- guage ; in German and Spanish the correspondence between sound and symbol is infinitely closer, and in some languages, such as Finnish and Hungarian, it is almost perfect — as far as the radical defects of the Homan alphabet allow.
With these facts before us, it is clearly unreasonable to assume, as many philologists have done, that the same diver- gence between orthography and pronunciation which charac- terizes Modern English prevailed also in the earlier periods, and consequently that no reliable deductions can be drawn from the graphic forms. I feel confident that every one who has patience enough to follow me to the end of the present discussion will be convinced of the very opposite. Putting aside the actual evidence altogether, it is quite clear that the wretched attempts at writing the sounds of our dialects made by educated men of the present day cannot be taken as standards from which to infer a similar result a thousand years ago.
An educated man in the nineteenth century is one who
20 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
has been taught to associate groups of type-marks with certain ideas : his conception of language is visual, not oral. The same system is applied to other languages as well as English, so that we have the curious phenomenon of people studying French and German for twenty years, and yet being unable to understand a single sentence of the spoken languages ; also of Latin verses made and measured by eye, like a piece of carpentry, by men who would be unable to comprehend the metre of a single line of their own composi- tions, if read out in the manner of the ancients. The study of Egyptian hieroglyphics affords almost as good a phonetic training as this.
Before the invention of printing the case was very differ- ent. The Roman alphabet was a purely phonetic instrument, the value of each symbol being learned by ear, and conse- quently the sounds of the scribe being also written by ear. The scarcity of books, the want of communication between literary men, and the number of literary dialects — all these causes made the adoption of a rigid, unchanging orthography a simple impossibility. It must not, of course, be imagined that there were no orthographical traditions, but it may be safely said that their influence was next to none at all. The only result of greater literary cultivation in early times was to introduce a certain roughness and carelessness in distin- guishing shades of sound : we shall see hereafter that sounds which were kept distinct in the thirteenth-century spelling were confused in the time of Chaucer, although it is quite certain that they were still distinguished in speech. But such defects, although inconvenient to the investigator, do not lead him utterly astray, like the retention of a letter long after the corresponding sound has changed or been lost, which is so often the case in orthographies fixed on a traditional basis.
Early scribes not only had the advantage of a rational phonetic tradition — not a tradition of a fixed spelling for each word, but of a small number of letters associated each with one sound ; — but, what is equally important, the mere practical application of this alphabet forced them to observe
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 2]
and analyse the sounds they wrote down : in short they were trained to habits of phonetic observation. Yet another advantage was possessed by the earliest scribes — that of a comparatively limited number of sounds to deal with. For the proofs of this position I must refer to the remarks I have made in the discussion of the Laws of Sound Change, and to the details of the investigation itself.
The Roman alphabet consisted of six simple vowel signs, a e i o u y : on these six letters the vawel notation of all the Teutonic languages was based. If, therefore, we can deter- mine the sounds attached to these letters by the Romans during the first few centuries of Christianity, we can also determine, within certain limits, the sounds of the unlettered tribes who adopted the Roman alphabet to write their own languages. Nor need our determination be absolutely accu- rate. It is certain that minute shades of difference between a Latin and, for example, an Old English sound would not have deterred the first writers of English from adopting the letter answering to the Latin sound : all that was wanted was a distinctive symbol.
Now there can be no doubt as to the general values of the six Roman vowel-signs. The sounds of the first five are still preserved in nearly all the Modern Latin languages, and that of the y, although lost in Italian and the other cognate languages, can be determined with certainty from the descriptions of the Latin grammarians, and from its being the regular transcription of the Greek upsilon. The values of the Roman vowel-letters may, then, be represented approximately thus :
a=Italian a; English father.
e „ e „ bed, bmr.
i „ i „ hit, heat.
0 „ 0 ,, odd, bore.
u „ u ,, f^dl, fool.
y=French u; Danish y. "We see that even in English the traditional values of the Roman letters have been very accurately preserved in many
22
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
cases, and it need hardly be said that the majority of the living Teutonic languages have preserved them almost as faithfully as Italian and Spanish. We thus find that th^ Romance and Teutonic traditions are in complete harmony after a lapse of more than ten centuries. The greatest number of exceptions to the general agreement occur in the two most advanced languages of each group — English and French ; but it can be shown that these divergences are of very late origin, and that in the sixteenth century the original tradition was still maintained.
We may now pass from the consideration of the single letters to that of their combinations or digraphs. The first use of digraphs, namely to express diphthongs, is self-evident, but they have a distinct and equally important function in symbolizing simple sounds which have no proper sign in the original Roman alphabet. The plan adopted was to take the symbols of two different sounds which both resembled the one in question, and write them one after the other, implying, however, that they were to be pronounced not successively but simultaneously — that an intermediate sound was to be formed. Thus, supposing there had been no y in the Roman alphabet, the sound might still have been easily represented by writing u and i (or e) together, implying an intermediate sound, which is no other than that of y. As we see, the framers of the Old English alphabet, living at a time when the Roman y still had its original sound, had no need of this expedient ; but in Germany, where the sound of y did not develope till a comparatively late period — during the twelfth century — the only course open was to resort to a digraph, so that the sound which in Danish is still expressed by the Old Roman y, is in Modern Grerman written ue.
This ue afibrds at the same time an excellent example of the way in which diacritical modifications are developed out of digraphs. The first step is to write one of the two letters above or under the other : accordingly we find the German ue in later times written u. Afterwards the e was further abbreviated into two dots, giving the familiar «. In some cases the diacritic becomes incorporated into the letter, and
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 23
there results what is practically an entirely new letter. Although most diacritics can be explained in this way, as corruptions of originally independent letters, there are still a few cases of arbitrary modification, of which the Old English ^ from d is an example. Oases of the arbitrary use of consonants as digraphic modifiers also occur. Thus h has come to be a perfectly unmeaning sign, implying any imag- inable modification of the consonant it is associated with. Oompare g and gh in Italian, I and Ih in Portuguese, etc. The doubling of consonants to express new sounds is equally arbitrary, as in the Welsh ^ as distinguished from/, and the Middle English ss=^sh.
In all the cases hitherto considered the digraph is formed consciously and with design, but it often happens that a diphthong becomes simplified, and the original digraph is still retained for the sake of distinctness. Thus, if the diph- thong iu passes into the simple sound of y?/, it is clearly the simplest and most practical course to retain the iu,_sis being a perfectly legitimate representation of a sound which, al- though simple, lies between i and u.
All diacritical letters, whatever their origin, are distin- guished in one very important respect from the older digraphs — they are perfectly unambiguous, while it is often difiicult to determine whether a given digraph is meant to represent a diphthong or a simple sound. There is, however, one in- variable criterion, although, unfortunately, it cannot always be applied, which is the reversibility of the elements of the di- graph. Thus, the sound written oe in Old English, as in hoec (later bee), might, on the evidence of this spelling alone, be taken equally well for a diphthongic combination of o and e, or for a sound intermediate to these two vowels ; but when we find boec and beoc alternating, as they do, on the same page, we see that the e was a mere modifier, whose position before or after the vowel to be modified was quite immaterial : the sound must therefore have been simple*— a conclusion which is fully confirmed by other evidence.
The Koman alphabet has been further enriched by the difierentiation of various forms of the same letter, of which
24 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
the present distinctions between u and v, i and j?', are instances. In tliese cases varieties of form which were originally purely ornamental and arbitrary have been ingeniously utilized to express distinctions in sounds.
Quantity and Quality in the Teutonic Languages.
The distinguishing feature of the early Teutonic languages is the imjDortant part played in them by quantity. This subject has been very fully investigated by Grimm and his school in Germany, and it may be regarded as proved beyond a doubt that in the Teutonic languages quantity was origin- ally quite independent of stress or quality, and that many words were distinguished solely by their quantity.
Even so late as the thirteenth century we find the German poetry regulated partly by quantitative laws. Not only are short and long vowels never rhymed together, but there is also a fine distinction made between dissyllables with short and long penultimates ; words like hite (modern bitte) being treated as metrically equivalent to a monosyllable, while rite (now reite) is regarded as a true dissyllable. Many metres which employ monosyllabic rhyme-words indifferently with words like bite do not show a single instance of a dissyllable like rite at the end of the line.
Similar instances may be adduced from the Icelandic rimur of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
All this is fully confirmed by the direct evidence of many German MSS. of the eleventh century, which employ the circumflex regularly to denote a long vowel.
It is further generally admitted that in the living Teu- tonic languages these distinctions have mostly vanished, short vowels before single consonants having been generally lengthened, and that quantitative distinctions have been re- placed by qualitative ones. The general laws, however, on which these changes depend, have not hitherto been investi- gated, and I propose hereafter to treat of them in some detail : at present we must content ourselves with an exami- nation of the more general features of the change.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. ^ 25
In the substitution of qualitative for quantitative distinc- tions we can easily observe three stages, 1) the purely quan- titative, 2) the transitional, in which, while the distinctions of quantity are still preserved, short and long vowels begin to diverge qualitatively also, and 3) the qualitative, in which long and short vowels are confounded, so that the original quanti- tative distinctions are represented, if at all, by quality only.
That the oldest English still retained the original quanti- tative system is in itself highly probable from the analogy of the other cognate languages, and also admits of decisive proof. If we take two vowels, one originally long, the other originally short, which are both long and yet qualitatively distinct In the living language, and show that they were qualitatively identical at an earlier period, we are forced to assume a purely quantitative distinction, for the later diver- gence of quality could not have developed out of nothing. Let us take the words stoun and hein^ written in Old English stan and bana. It is quite certain that the a of stan was originally long, for it is nothing but a simplification of an older ai, still preserved In the German shtain, while there is equally decisive proof of the shortness of the a of bana. Now, if there had been any difference in the quality of the two vowels, they would certainly not have been written with the same letter. The back vowel a can only be modified in two directions — in that of e or of o, that is, hj fronting or rounding, and, as we shall see hereafter, such changes were regularly indicated by a change of spelling, even when the departure from the original sound was very minute. We are, therefore, led to the conclusion that the present purely quali- tative distinction between stoun and beln was in the Old English period purely quantitative — staan and bana. Similar evidence is afforded by the other vowels.
As we have little direct evidence of the quantity of indi- vidual Old English words, recourse must be had to the com- parison of the old cognates, for the details of which I must refer to the works of Grimm and his successors in Germany. Much may also be learned from the qualitative distinctions of the modern languages.
26 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
OLD ENGLISH PEEIOD.
We may now proceed to a detailed examination of the vowel-sounds of our language in its oldest stage. The results of this investigation — which is an indisjDensable preliminary to the study of the later changes— cannot be properly appreciated till the evidence is fully set forth ; at present I only wish to remind the reader that a rigorously mathematical method is quite impracticable in such an investigation, which can only . be carried out by a process of cumulative reasoning, based on a number of independent probabilities. Nothing can be more irrational than to ignore an obvious deduction merely because it is a deduction, or to discard one that, although not absolutely certain, is extremely probable, in favour of another that is only barely possible.
The principle I have adopted in cases of uncertainty is to adopt the oldest sound that can be ascertained. It happens in many cases that although we can say with certainty that a sound underwent a certain change, we cannot point out the exact period in which the new sound arose. It must be borne in mind that the written language, even in the most illiterate and therefore untraditional times, is always some- what behind the living speech, and further that a new pro- nunciation may exist side by side with the old for a long time. In such cases it is necessary to have some definite criterion of selection, and that of always taking the oldest sound seems the most reasonable.
Short Vowels.
A (^, 0).
The short a of the cognate languages is in Old English preserved only in certain cases : 1) before a single consonant followed by a, o, or u, which have, however, in the earliest extant period of the language been in some cases weakened into e : hara, liagol, cani, care ; 2) before nasals : hana, lamb, lang. In other cases a is replaced by ce, : dceg, ceppel, crceftig. Alternations of a and ce according to these rules often occur
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
27
ill various inflexions of the same word : dmg, dcEges, dagas, dagum. a before nasals is liable to interchange with o : bona, lomh, long. This o is so frequent in the earlier period as in many words almost to supersede the a, but afterwards the a gets the upper hand, the o being preserved in only a few very frequent words, such as \onne, on, of, which last is an exceptional case of o developing before f, also occurring in the proper name Offa (^original Aha).
So far goes the evidence of the graphic forms, as it may be found in any comparative grammar, and before bringing in the living languages it will be as well to consider what de- ductions may be drawn from them. In the first place it is clear that the development of the ce is not due to any assimi- lation, but is a purely negative phenomenon, that is to say, that wherever a was not supported by a back vowel in the next syllable, it was weakened into cb without any regard to the following consonant. The change cannot therefore, as Grerman philologists have already remarked, be compared to the regular vowel-mutation or umlaut.
As to the pronunciation of this a, the spelling clearly points to a sound intermediate between a and e, while the joining together of the two letters and the frequent degrada- tion of the a into a mere diacritic, which is sometimes entirely omitted, show that it was a simple sound, not a diphthong : further than this we cannot advance till we have determined more accurately the sounds of a and e.
It is also clear that the o of long — lang must have been distinct from the regular o in gold, etc., for otherwise they would have run together and been confused. This conclusion is further confirmed by direct graphic evidence. In the riddles of that well-known collection of Old English poetry, the Exeter Book, the solution is sometimes given in Runic letters written backwards, and in bne of them occurs the word COFOAH which, read backwards, gives haofoc—hafoG (hawk). Here we have an a labialized before/, as in of^af, written ao, with the evident intention of indicating a sound intermediate between a and o, just as (b points to a sound intermediate between a and e.
28 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
We may now turn our attention to the pronunciations of the modern languages. Disregarding minute shades of sound, we may distinguish three kinds of as in the living Teutonic languages :
1) the mid-back- wide : l^nglish. father, ordinary German a.
2) the low-back- wide : Scotch short a in ma7i.
3) the low- back-narrow : I hear this sound in the South German dialects for both long and short a, and in Dutch for the short «, especially before I.
As to the relative antiquity of these sounds, there can be little doubt that the first is a later modification of the second, and it is very probable that the second is a weakened form of the third. In fact, it may safely be said that this last requires more exertion in its utterance than any other vowel — a fact which easily accounts for its rarity, and also for its preservation in the South German dialects, which, as we shall see hereafter, have preserved their short vowels more purely than any of the other languages.
Are we then to assume that the Old English a had this narrow sound ? Analogy is certainly in favour of this assumption,, but a little consideration will show that it is untenable. If a had been narrow, its weakening w, which is simply a moved on towards e, would also have been narrow, giving no other sound than the low-front-narrow ; but this, as we shall see^ wa& the sound of the open short e, from which the (e is kept quite distinct : the ce, therefore, cannot have been narrow, nor, consequently, its parent a. But if we suppose the a to have had the sound of the Scotch man — that is the low- wide — the difilculty is cleared away, and we come to the very probable conclusion that the re had the exact sound of the modern English man — the low-front- wide.
The a if labialized (or rounded), would naturally give the low-back-round-wide (English not), and as there is every reason to believe that the normal o was the mid-back-round- narrow, we see that the labialized a in monn, etc., was exactly half-way between a and o — a conclusion to which we have already been led by an examination of the graphic evidence.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 29
I.
The only debatable point about the i is whether it had the wide sound of the English and Icelandic or the narrow of the German and Swedish short L All we can say is that, although it is possible that the wide sound may have been the real one, every analogy is in favour of the narrow.
B.
We must distinguish two kinds of €& in the Teutonic lan- guages, 1) the ff-mutation of i, as in /^6/^j)f7» = Gothic hiJpan, and 2) the '^-mutation of a, as in enc/e=: Gothic and Old High German ancli. The two sounds are now confounded in the Teutonic languages, but there is clear evidence that they were formerly distinct, for in the Middle High German poetry the two es are never rhymed together, and the Ice- lander j^oroddr, in his treatise on orthography, carefully dis- tinguishes the two, stating that the e from a had a sound which was a mixture of a and e, implying, of course, that the other e was nearer to the i from which it arose.
It has been generally assumed by comparative philologists that there was no distinction between the two es in Old English, but, as I have pointed out elsewhere,^ there is un- mistakable graphic evidence to prove that there was a dis- tinction, the e from a being often written w, although this spelling was soon abandoned because of the confusion it caused with the regular ob of dceg, etc.
Putting all these facts together, remembering that the one e was nearer i, the other nearer a, and yet distinct from the m, we can hardly help assigning to the e from i the sound of the mid-front-narrow, and to the e from a that of the low- front-narrow. That the e from a was narrow need not make any difficulty, when we consider that the change took place at a much earlier period than that of the development of the (B of dceg, etc. — in short, at a period in which the a was probably narrow in all the Teutonic languages.
^ King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. Introd. p. xxiii.
30 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The unaccented e in such, words as gehideUy ende, requires to be considered separatel3% In all the living Teutonic lan- guages which possess this sound — that is to say, all except Icelandic and English — it is the mid-mixed-narrow. But in many of the South German dialects the mid-front-narrow occurs, which is clearly a more ancient sound. That this was the sound of the Old Icelandic unaccented e (now written and pronounced i) is clear from ]?6roddr's expressly adducing the second vowel of frcwier {=framir : nom. plur. masc. of framr') as an example of the close e arising from i.
It seems most reasonable to suppose that this pronuncia- tion, which is also preserved to the present day in South Germany, was also the Old English one.
TJ.
What has been said of i applies equally to u, namely that analogy is in favour of its having had the narrow German sound rather than the wide English one.
0.
It is quite clear that the sound now given to the regular short 0 in all the Teutonic languages except German — the low-back-wide-round — cannot be the old one ; for, as we have seen, this was the sound of the modified a before nasals {monn, etc.) which is kept quite distinct from the regular o in such a word as oft. This latter o is nothing else than an a-mutation of u (compare oft with Gothic ufta) : it seems, therefore, reasonable to suppose that, as the a- mutation of i differed from the latter vowel simply in being lowered one degree towards the "low" position of the a, the a was simply the u lowered from its high to the mid position, resulting in the mid-back-narrow-round. Now this is the sound still preserved all over South Germany, and until further evidence is forthcoming it seems to me that we are justified in assum- ing that the same was the Old English sound.
Y.
This letter, which was originally nothing else but a Greek T, was adopted into the Eoman alphabet to denote the sound
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
31
of the Greek u, which did not exist in Latin. The pronun- ciation of this Greek u is generally agreed to have heen that of the French u or the German ii, and it is clear, from the descriptions of the Eoman grammarians, that they attached the same value to their y, with which the Greek u is invari- ably transcribed. It is a remarkable fact that while the original sound of the Roman y has been quite lost in the Romance languages, it is still preserved in Danish and Swedish. As we know that the Scandinavian nations learned the use of the Roman alphabet from England, this Scandina- vian tradition not only confirms the generally-received pro- nunciation of the Roman y, but also affords independent proof of the sound of the letter in Old English.
In its origin y is the «-mutation of u ; its sound is there- fore, as the Icelander poroddr says, "blended together of i and M," and poroddr actually considers ?/ to be a combina- tion of these two letters. The sound which fulfils these conditions is clearly that which is still preserved in South Germany, Sweden, and, in many words, in Danish — the high-front-narrow-round. This, then, we may safely assume to have been the Old English sound also.
Long Vowels.
AA.
Long a in Old English corresponds to an ai of the older cognates, Gothic and Old High German, of which it is a simplified form. As the aa has been rounded at a later period, and is represented in the present language by the diphthong on, some theorists, who seem incapable of realizing the possibility of sounds changing during the lapse of ten centuries, have assumed that it was labial in the Old English period as well. The answer to this is, that if the sound had been at all labial, it would have been written, at least occa- sionally, 0 or oa, as was actually done at a later period, and as the Old English scribes themselves did in the case of short a before nasals : when we find the tenth century scribes writing invariably stan, and those of the twelfth century
32 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
writing as invariably stoon or ston, it seems simplest to infer that the former meant to indicate a and the latter some variety of o.
There are two long «?s in Old English. The commonest is that which corresponds to original ai, as in s^, f/«/= Gothic saiw, dail. The relation of this ^ to the a treated of above is not quite clear. In some words, such as c/««e = 01d Ger- man kleini, the m may be explained as an umlaut of a, original claini first becoming cldni and then clceni. But such words as S(B and d^l do not admit this explanation. It seems there- fore simplest to assume that ^ and a are both independent modifications of at, the former being formed by convergence, the latter by loss of the i.
- The second ce. is that which corresponds to original a, Gothic e, as in dced-=z(jioi\\\c ded, Old German fdi. It is, however, quite clear (as will be shown hereafter) from the Modern English forms that this ^ did not exist in the dialect from which literary English has arisen, but was represented by e, as in Gothic, which is the case even in the West-Saxon in some words, such as iven = Old German wan, Gothic tven, and the proper name ^(fred=^Old German Alprdt.
The only question about the sound of <^ is whether it was narrow or wide. The analogy of short ce would rather point to its being wide, that of the pronunciation of Modern German, in which the ee-umlaut of a (keez9=kaasi) is always narrow, rather to narrowness. In fact the long sound of the ce in mcen is quite unknown in the Modern Teutonic lan- guages. It must also be borne in mind that <§ is probably a much older formation than the short ce, and may very well have been developed at a time when all the vowels were still narrow. If so, long ce must have been the low-front-narrow.
EE.
Long e corresponds first to original a, although, as already stated, this e often becomes ce in the West-Saxon dialect. In many words it is a simplification of the diphthongs ed and eo,
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 33
as in ned, ec=^nedd, edc (both of whicli forms are also common), geng=gedng. The third and most common e is the /-umlaut of 0, written oe in the oldest documents, as in greiie (groene)=. original groni. The pronunciation of all these es was prob- ably the same, as they are not distinguished from one another in writing, and cannot well have been any other than the mid-front-narrow.
II, UU,
Correspond to original ii and mi, which are still preserved in the Scandinavian languages, the Old English win and hus being now pronounced in Icelandic and Danish viin, huus. There can be no doubt that the Old Eno'lish sounds were the same as those still preserved in these lans'uao'es — the hio-h- front-narrow and the high-back-narrow-round.
00
«
Corresponds to original o, as in god, modor. The sound was no doubt the same as that still preserved in Danish and Swedish, namely the mid-back-narrow-round, but without the abnormal rounding of the 66 of these languages."^
YY
Is the umlaut of u, as in mfjs = musi, plural of mus. In some words, such as fi/r (Old Grerman muivar), it is a simplifi- cation of in by diphthongal convergence. Its pronunciation cannot well have been anything else than the high-front- narrow-round.
Diphthongs.
EA.
Whenever original a comes before consonant-combina- tions beginning with /, r, or h, it is not changed into CB, but becomes ea, as in eall, ivearm, weax. There can be no doubt that this ea was a true diphthong : its elements are never reversed (p. 23), nor is it confounded with ae or cb. The only question is whether the stress was
1 See my paper on Danish Pronunciation (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1873-4, p. 101).
3
34 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
on the first or the second element. There is evidence which seems to point to the conclusion that the stress fell on the a. In Middle English ea is generally lost, but in the archaic fourteenth century Kentish of the Ayenbite, the old diph- thong is still preserved in such words as eald, healden. But this ea is very often represented by ya, sometimes by yea, so that the Old English eald appears as eaM., yald and yeald. Here we have the glide-vowel represented by the Middle English consonant y, showing clearly that the stress was on the a. As to the origin of the ea, the theory first propounded by Rapp (Physiologic der Sprache, ii. 145) seems the most probable, namely that a first became w before all consonants (except nasals), so that aid became (eld, and that this ce was then diphthongized into ea or rather cea.
EO.
Similarly, when ^ comes before r, I and ^-combinations, it is diphthongized into eo, as in eor'^e, meolc, feoh. In the Kentish and Northumbrian documents this eo is generally represented by ea, eor'^e being written ear^e. In the word eart (from M) eo never occurs in any of the dialects — the normal eort being imknown even in West-Saxon. When we consider that e in Icelandic also is changed into ia {ea in the oldest MSS.), as in hiarta^^Oldi E. heorte, there seems to be every probability that ea was the older sound, which in eart was preserved in all the dialects, on account of its excessive fre- quency. As eo is never (except in eart) confused with ea^=-a in the standard West-Saxon, we must supjDose that the series of changes, e, ea, eo, was already completed when ea^^a began to develope itself. The rounding of ea into eo is a very curious phenomenon. The frequent rounding of vowels be- fore /, of which the Modern English solt from salt is an in- stance, would lead us to suppose that the change first began before /, and then extended to the other words. The analogy of Modern Icelandic, in which the first element of the ia has developed into a consonant, and of the Middle Kentish y in yald, make it very probable that the stress was on the second element.
BT HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 35
EAA.
Besides the ea from a, there is another ea, which answers to original au, as in c?re«m= Gothic draum. As this ea is distinct in origin and in subsequent development from the other ea, it must have been distinct in sound. The only- conceivable distinctions are stress and quantity, that is, the ea^au may have been distinguished either by having the stress on the first element, or else by its accented vowel being long. The former supposition is made untenable by both the Middle Kentish ija, as in dyci^, and the Norse spelling IatvarSr{ = Jdt- varSr) for Eadweard: these examples show that ea=:au had the stress on the same vowel as ea=a. We are driven, therefore, to the hypothesis that ea:=au had its second element long — dreaam. This view is confirmed by the Modern English form of the preterite ceds (Gothic kaus) which is ehodz — an anomaly which is quite inexplicable, except on the assump- tion of an original long aa. The development of the word is clearly ce-aas, ce-ods, chdos, clwoz. This seems to be what Eask meant by his accentuating ed, which Grimm also adopted, although Grimm does not seem to have attached any idea of lengthening to the accent.
The development of eaa out of au is one of the most diffi- cult questions in Teutonic philology. All the explanations hitherto given are utterly unsatisfactory, and I will not waste time in criticising them, but rather state what I consider to be the only tenable theory, which, as far as I know, has never been made public, although I was glad to learn from Professor Kern, of Leiden, that it had suggested itself to him also. The explanation we propose is simply this, ail first became aa, as in Frisian. This aa followed the short a and became (B(b. The cece was then resolved into eaa or ceaa. We must suppose that these changes took place before ai became aa : otherwise there would have been a confusion between aa=^au and aa=ai. There are, of course, certain difficulties still remaining. The development of a diphthong with one of its elements long is anomalous, and we would expect the diphthongization of the hypothetical
36
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
(B<^ to take place, like that of short cb, only before certain consonants. It is, however, quite possible that the diph- thongization of long cem was much earlier than that of short CB, and that the two phenomena are therefore independent. If so, (e(B may at first have developed into simple ea and the lengthening of the a may have been a secondary process.
EOO
Answers to original iu, as in deop =^(joi\\{G diup. There can bono doubt that this eo=.iu was distinct from the €0-=e, and every analogy would lead us to suppose that the difierence was one of quantity. Positive confirmation is afibrded by the English chuuz, which points as clearly to an Old English ceoosan as chooz does to a ceaas. The Icelandic ioo, as in kioosa (Modern kjousa), shows the same anomalous lengthen- ing of the second element.
There is some uncertainty about the first elements of these diphthongs. Some clue is however afibrded by the inter- change of e with i in eo and eoo, which never happens with ea and eaa : we often find such forms as wr^e for eor^e, but never hiard for heard. The inference clearly is that in eo and eoo the initial vowel was closer and higher than in ea, eaa., probably through the assimilative influence of the second element. The diphthongs are then strictly eo, eoo, ea, eaa (or possibly cea, ceaa).
For the sake of comparison, I append a table giving Mr. Ellis's results (Early English Pronunciation, p. 534) together
|
LETTERS. |
ELLIS. |
SWEET. |
LETTERS. |
ELLIS. |
SWEET. |
|
a ffi |
a, a 86 0 |
a SB D |
aa 3386 |
aa EE ee |
|
|
te e |
|||||
|
6 |
ee |
||||
|
1 |
i |
1 E e |
1 |
11 00 uu |
11 00 uu |
|
6 e |
€ e |
6 |
|||
|
u |
|||||
|
u... . |
U M? |
u |
y ea |
vy, 11 |
II |
|
6 |
o |
0 |
ea, eo |
Ed {2&a ?) |
|
|
y |
y» * |
I |
eo |
eo, eo |
(0 |
|
ea |
ea, ed |
Eaa |
|||
|
eo |
eo, eo |
eoo |
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 37
with my ovm, both in palaeotype. It will be observed that Mr. Ellis (like all his predecessors) confounds the two short ^s and OS, which I have carefully distinguished. He is also not clear as to the distinction between g«, eo, and ed, eb. Otherwise our results approximate very closely.
MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD. Orthography.
Some important revolutions in orthography took place during the transition from the Old to the Middle period — most of them the result of French influence.
There are many instances of French influence on the con- sonant notation : in the vowels two cases require special notice, these are the use of u for the Old English y, and of ou for the Old English uu. The explanation of the former change must be sought in the fact that y in the Middle period lost its original value, and became confused with i, while in the beginning of words it assumed its present con- sonantal value. The result was that the old sound of y was left without a symbol, and the want was supplied, imperfectly enough, by adopting the French representation of the sound, which was u. But 'U was further employed, also in imitation of French usage, to represent the voiced sound of the Old E. /, so that u, which still retained its original pronunciation in many cases, stood for three distinct sounds. In course of time the short y-sound disappeared more and more, and at the same time a large number of long ys were introduced in words taken from the French, which were all written with u {nature, etc.). To remedy the consequent confusion between u=^yy and ti = mi, {/lus, etc.), the French ou was introduced as the representation of the latter sound, so that natyyre and huus were distinguished in writing as nature and hous. For the details of the changfe of u into ou I must refer to Mr. Ellis's Early English Pronunciation, where the subject is treated at great length.
These changes ai^e important, as showing that the Middle
38 HISTORY or ENGLISH SOUNDS.
English scribes were not at all biassed by traditions of the earlier orthography, and therefore that their testimony can be unhesitatingly accepted, as far as it goes.
"We may now turn to the actual sound-changes, beginning with the most important and characteristic of them all, which I will call
Vowel-levelling.
In the Transition period (Semi-Saxon) we are confronted by the curious and apparently inexplicable phenomenon of a language ignoring, as it were, the changes of an earlier period, and returning to the original sounds. Such is at least the case with the Old English modifications of a and e : where Old English has ce, ea or eo, Middle English has the unmodified a and e. Compare glced, heard, seofon, with the Middle English glad, hard, seven.
Such a change as that of glced into glad is doubly anom- alous, both as being a return to a pronunciation older than that of the oldest extant documents before the Conquest, and also as a change from a weak front to a strong back vowel. It is, in short, inexplicable, if considered as an ordinary organic sound-change. The explanation must be sought among the inorganic sound- changes, due to some purely external cause.
One of the most unmistakable of these inorganic sound- changes is one which may be called levelling. The whole history of English inflection is mainly one of levelling. Thus, in Old English we find the plural formed in a great variety of ways, sometimes in as, sometimes in an, sometimes with difierent vowels, and sometimes without any change at all. In Modern English we have only the first, which, originally restricted to a limited number of masculine sub- stantives, is now extended to all substantives without distinc- tion. It would evidently be absurd to attempt to explain these changes as organic, to adduce, for instance, the change of the Old English plural heortan into the Modern Jtarts as a case of n becoming s. They are clearly due to external causes, and are simply the result of that tendency to get rid
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 39
of useless complexity which characterizes the more advanced stages of language : instead of indicating plurality by a variety of terminations, some of which were of a very vague and indistinct character, the later language selected that termination which seemed the most distinctive, and discarded the rest.
We can now understand how men who were engaged every day of their lives in this levelling process, whose language was being broken up and reconstructed with unexampled rapidity — we can understand how those who spoke the Transition Eng- lish of the twelftli century came unconsciously to regard the alternation of le and a in such words as dcvg, dagas, as an un- necessary piece of discrimination, comparable to that involved in the use of a large number of plural terminations. And so the indistinct ce — so liable to be confounded with e — was discarded, and the clear sounding a was made the sole repre- sentative of the older a and ce.
When this process of levelling had once begun, it is easy to see how ea and eo also came to be regarded as superfluous modifications of a and e, and were therefore in like manner discarded. As we shall see hereafter, eaa and eoo (=original au and iu) were simplified into ee and ee respectively ; it is, therefore, probable that ea and eo themselves were first sim- plified into e and e. It is further probable that the first sound of the e=ea was identical with that of the Old English ce. heard would, therefore, become hcerd, whose (b would natur- ally follow the other ces, and become a, giving the Middle English hard. The three spellings heard, hcerd, and hard are to be found constantly interchanging in Lajamon and other writers of the period.
Whatever may be the explanation of the fact, there can be no doubt that the Old English ce, ea, eo, were lost in the Middle period, and that the mysterious connection between the Old English ce and the Modern sound in such a word as mcen (written man) imagined by some philologists, must be given up : the two ces are quite independent developments, even when they occur in the same words, as in ^cef, scef, seed, ceppel. Mr. Ellis has shown that up to the seventeenth
40 HISTORY or ENGLISH SOUNDS.
century these words were pronounced ^af, sat, sad, apl, even in the court dialect, and the sound (b is unknown up to the present day in most of our dialects.
Before investigating the sound-changes of the Middle period in detail, it will be necessary to state the general laws which govern the remarkable qualitative divergence of long and short vowels in the later Teutonic languages. If it can once be shown that all the Teutonic languages follow the same general laws, it is but reasonable to suppose that the same laws will be found valid in the case of Middle English also. We shall have still less hesitation in applying these laws to the elucidation of the Middle English sound-changes, when we consider that the English of the thirteenth century was really as much in advance of its contemporaries as Modern English is of its, and that Middle English is practically on a level with Dutch and the other living Teutonic languages. German, indeed, is in many respects much more archaic than Middle English, and may be said to stand to it in almost the same relation as Old English does.
I propose, therefore, to give an impartial classification of the principal changes that have taken place in the living Teutonic languages, beginning with the long vowels.
A. Long Vowels.
1) Back to round (p. 11). Long a, whatever its origin, has in all the Teutonic languages except German and Dutch been rounded. Even German and Dutch show the same change in many of their dialects, which give long a the sound of the low-back-narrow-round (English ./a//). This is also the Swedish and Danish sound, the only difference being that the Scandinavian vowel is pronounced with greater lip narrowing, so that its sound approximates to that of the regular close 6 (the "mid" vowel).
2) Front-round to unrounded (page 11). Exemplified in the familiar German change of ce and p into e and i, as in s/ieen and kiin for shcecen and kyyn. In Modern Ice- landic cece became first unrounded, and the resulting ee ran
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
41
II.
TEUTONIC LONG VO"WELS.i
^ In this and the following table the actual spelling (not the theoretical pro- nunciation) of the dead languages is given in italics ; the modern forms are written phonetically.
* The italics indicate the peculiar Swedish m — intermediate to u and y.
42 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
together with the regular ee, and, like it, was diphthongized into ai, so that the Old Icelandic hoecekr is now disguised under the form of haikar. The same change took place in Old English, only it was not carried so far : the hcecek (written hoec or beoc, p. 23) of the oldest period appears in the later MSS. as hec {=^beek). In Middle English we have the unrounding of y into i, cyning becoming cing.
3) Low to mid. Modern English, as will be shown here- after, affords two unmistakable instances of this change. It is also certain that the German 66 from au was originally " low," for in the Oldest High German such words as I66s [=:laus) are frequently written laos. Similar evidence can be adduced in the case of the corresponding Dutch 66. The ee from ai has in like manner passed through the low to the mid stage in German and Dutch.
4) Mid to high. Of this change, again. Modern English affords illustrations, whose consideration must be deferred. Original 66 has in nearly all the Teutonic languages been raised from the mid position it still preserves in Swedish and Danish (although even here with a slight labial modification in the direction of u) to the high one of ti.
5) High to diphthong. With the high position the ex- treme is reached, as far as position is concerned. "We find, accordingly, that the two high vowels ii and mi either remain unchanged, which is the case in the Scandinavian languages, or else undergo various modifications in the direction of ai and au. As there can be no question that Middle English agreed with the Scandinavian languages in retaining long i and u unchanged, the consideration of their diphthongization may be deferred till we come to the Modern period, to which belongs also the development of the diphthong iu out of j/t/.
6) Besides these regular modifications of the two high vowels, there are isolated diphthongizations of other vowels.
a) 66 to ou. In Icelandic gou^ for the older g66^, and Modern English stdioi for st66n.
b) ee to ei. In the Modern English tdik for teek.
c) 66 to uo. In the Old German guot for g66t, still pre- served in South German in the shape of gudt.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
43
d) od to au. In Icelandic, where original aa passed through, the stage of simple rounding (dd)^ and was then resolved into au, laata (let) becoming first loota and then lauta.
e) ee to ai. The ^'-umlaut of aa has in the same way been resolved into ai in Modern Icelandic, so that veeri (written vceri) is now vairi.
7) Back to front. Exemplified in the Dutch zyyr for zuur.
B. Short Vowels.
1) Round to unrounded. In Icelandic, English, and some German dialects y has been unrounded into i. The same is the case with short ce in German. In Modern English we have, lastly, a very anomalous case of unrounding of the back vowel u, but becoming bdt.
2) Back to front. Short u has in Icelandic and Dutch been changed into a front vowel — the high-front- wide-round in Icelandic, the low-front-narrow-round (or its imitation, the mid- mixed-narrow) in Dutch. The open o in Icelandic (the M-umlaut of a) has changed into ce (the mid -front- wide- round), monnum becoming mcennym. Short a has, lastly, been changed into the low-front-wide {ce) in a few English dialects — including the literary English.
3) Mid to low. The two mid vowels e and 6 have in all the Teutonic languages been brought down to the low posi- tion, so that the old distinction between e and e has been lost everywhere, except, perhaps, in some German dialects : compare Old English ende, heljpan, with the Modern levellings end, help.
2) High to mid. As a general rule the high vowels i and u have retained their positions, but in Dutch the short i is now represented by the mid- front- wide, and the short u by 6 (the mid-narrow), thus taking the place of original short o, which, as in the other languages, has been lowered to o (the low- wide) : compare stdk with bok { = buk). The peculiar Modern English u in but (bdi) seems also to be a case of lower- ing from high to mid.
44
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
I— I
00
O
O
o
I— I
o
H
|
c3 |
|||||||
|
1— 1 |
|||||||
|
^i |
|||||||
|
i-H |
I |
^ |
|||||
|
...5. |
--.i. 'S: |
S3 |
^ |
||||
|
.—1 |
|||||||
|
-o |
|||||||
|
'O |
|||||||
|
1—1 |
1 |
^ II |
»— t |
||||
|
»-H |
•^^ |
"-^ |
-o |
•^^ |
r3 |
||
|
>i» |
*o |
-o |
^o |
o |
|||
|
"^ |
■^ |
r-] |
f^ |
rSS ^ |
^ |
||
|
t3 |
O I— ( |
?3 |
O" |
||||
|
^ |
t^ §- |
s |
^11 |
45 -o |
|||
|
, u |
|||||||
|
u |
II =: CO |
||||||
|
s |
^ |
CS |
5» |
u |
|||
|
05 |
S |
2 |
a |
o g |
a |
||
|
s |
<>J |
E-*^ |
ss |
g II |
n> |
||
|
CO |
<« |
•ji |
o |
ca |
|||
|
o |
s |
r* |
^ |
||||
|
00 |
S |
1 |
S |
52 |
CD |
||
|
cc |
CO |
U2 |
cc |
CO |
CA |
||
|
§ |
rS |
^ |
|||||
|
-s |
^ |
-S |
S II |
^ |
|||
|
•^ |
(U |
'<D |
"ID |
||||
|
•ka |
■^j |
>o |
•*w " |
-k^ |
|||
|
50 |
=0 |
zn |
=o |
CO ^— ' |
CJO |
||
|
t^ |
fe a |
c3 |
eofon \ |
-^ ^ 11 |
Pi CD |
||
|
1— ( |
■^-5 |
'« |
r^ ^ |
•^ r^ v_^ |
rJd^ |
||
|
^ |
^ |
||||||
|
O |
!S |
8 |
c« |
||||
|
■*<. |
-t-a |
■va |
-M |
||||
|
*<s» |
|||||||
|
'1 |
?i |
>■ |
§ |
% |
|||
|
-.i |
|||||||
|
«3 |
s |
e |
c5 |
5 |
rt |
||
|
«^ |
a |
||||||
|
s |
|||||||
|
•<?* |
■^A |
||||||
|
S |
r* |
5^ |
5> |
■f |
|||
|
1 |
'0) |
||||||
|
■<tl |
Pi |
•=0 '4) |
1^ |
'a |
|||
|
1 |
|||||||
|
CO |
'« |
'5 |
-5 |
-I |
1 II |
•tS |
|
|
s |
a |
a |
|||||
|
c |
-5 |
'(U |
-3 |
^ v,,-- |
/O |
||
|
a |
|||||||
|
C^ |
o p |
8 |
2 |
s 1 |
a |
||
|
-< |
s 8 |
> |
5 |
ii |
•i-H |
||
|
i |
P |
||||||
|
►i^ |
|||||||
|
I-l |
s ^ |
11 |
1 8 |
mann heard long |
«s 8 s II |
3-'^ bo s s s |
|
|
s |
S i |
aa |
s-l^^ |
a^;2 |
|||
|
1— < |
^ |
||||||
|
o |
^ |
be |
bo |
||||
|
,—^ |
60 |
C |
el |
||||
|
o |
HH |
pq |
H |
||||
|
1 — 1 |
, |
||||||
|
o O |
2 |
o |
2 |
'd |
■73 O |
||
|
o |
s |
o |
S |
S |
|||
|
»— t |
<N |
CO |
-* |
«3 |
«) |
m Ti
o
■'3
el
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 45
The only exception to this general lowering tendency is the frequent shifting of the a from the low to the mid posi- tion, which is very common in all the languages. The low sound is still preserved in South Scotch, Dutch, and many German dialects, and may be heard in some of the London dialects, where, however, it is probably quite a modern de- velopment.
We have, lastly, to consider the important distinction of narrow and wide. Here, also, short and long vowels pursue opposite courses, the general rule being that long vowels remain or become narrow, short vowels wide. These tenden- cies are at once apparent on comparing any pairs of long and short vowels in the more advanced Teutonic languages, in fact in all of them more or less, except German.
The principle has been carried out with such strictness in the case of the long vowels that, with the single exception of aa, all originally long vowels are now narrow in the Teutonic languages. The cause of this exceptional widening of aa has already been explained (page 28) as the result of the greater energy required in the formation of the narrow sound.
The short vowels are less consistent. In the first place, some of the languages show the tendency to widening either not at all, or else only partially. In South German all the short vowels are still narrow, including even the a (p. 28). In Danish and Swedish short i is sometimes narrow, some- times wide, according to the nature of the following con- sonant.
The languages in which the principle is most strictly carried out are Icelandic and English. The only exceptions are the e, which is narrow in both languages, and the English d in bdt (mid-back-narrow). The retention of the narrow e in all the Teutonic languages is a very curious phenomenon: it is not easy to see why it did not everywhere weaken into the wide ce, which it actually has done in the Dutch kcerk for kerk and several other words, and also in the South Scotch dialect of Teviotdale, where the English distinction of nicen, men, is represented by man, mcen.
46 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The change of the low-narrow e into the mid-wide is, on the other hand, very common, and in many of the languages, as, for instance, English, the two sounds seem to be used almost indiscriminately. This change is, no doubt, a purely imitative one : the change from the low-narrow to the mid-wide must have been direct. To assume that the low- narrow was first widened, and then raised to the mid posi- tion, would be to ignore the fundamental laws of short vowel change.
We now see how complete the divergence is between long and short vowels. Long vowels contract both the pharyngal and the oral passage as much as possible, the former by " narrowing," the latter by raising the tongue and contract- ing the lips ; short vowels pursue the very opposite course ; high long vowels are never lowered, except partially by diph- thongization ; high short vowels are never diphthongized, but simply lowered.
Quantity.
The general principles on which quantitative changes in the Teutonic languages depend are these :
1) unaccented vowels are shortened, accented vowels are lengthened or shortened under certain conditions, which are:
2) before a single consonant they are lengthened.
3) before double or combined consonants they are shortened.
The result of all these changes, if carried out strictly, would be to eliminate all short accented syllables altogether, and this is actually the case in Modern Icelandic, at least in polysyllables — either the vowel itself is long, or else, if it is short, the syllable is made long by a double consonant. In the other languages, however, the double consonants have been simplified, so that a large number of short accented syllables has been formed : compare Icelandic vinna with Danish vina (written vinde) and English tcinar, wining, Ger- man gdivindn. This simplification of double consonants has
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
47
taken place In Icelandic also in the case of monosyllables such as man (written mann).
An important result of the simplification is the use of double consonants as a purely graphic expedient to denote the shortness of the preceding Yowel. The double m, for instance, in summer, is simply a way of showing that the original shortness of the u has been preserved.
In Icelandic the lengthening of short vowels has been carried out with perfect consistency, but in the other lan- guages there are many exceptions. Thus in Dutch all mono- syllables preserve their shortness : compare vat, lot, with the plurals vaatdn, lootdn. The retention of original short quantity before single consonants is also very frequent in Modern, and consequently also in Middle English.
The chief cases in which Modern English preserves the Old English short quantity are these.
In the first place the high vowels ifi/), u are not length- ened : compare ivit from witan with iit from etan, sdn from sunu and cam from cuman with ndim from nama. Exceptions, such as aivi from ifig, do occur, but they are very few.
English, like Dutch, shows a strong tendency to preserve short quantity in monosyllables, although there are many cases of lengthening. Nevertheless, it may safely be said that the great majority of Old English monosyllables pre- serve their short quantity in Modern English. Examples are: sivon {from stcan), ])cech {]>cec), bcpc (bcecj, seed (seed), lot (hlot), god (god), woz (icces). Examples of lengthening are geiv (geqf), ceim (cam), eit feet), gelt (geat), yoiic (geoc). The lengthened vowels in the adjectives teim and leit may perhaps have arisen from the definite forms tama, lata.
Dissyllables ending in a vowel, or the infinitival an, are almost always lengthened : nama, scamu, flotian, brecan, be- come neim, sheim, jlout, breic. But there are exceptions : dropa becomes drop, and hafan {=:habban) becomes hcev, con- trasting with the regular beheiv (from behabban).
But besides these isolated irregularities, there is a whole class of dissyllables which resists the lengthening tendency, namely those which end in a liquid or nasal. Examples are
48 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
Jicemdr (from hamor), be far (beterj, scedl fsadol), dvan (of en), hotdm (hotom). There are, however, several exceptions. In the first place, all the past participles in o (except trodn) lengthen their vowel : frouzon, chouzdn, clouvan, etc. There are also others, such as ikon (efen) ,6uvdr (ofer), eicar fcecer), etc.
In applying these deductions to Middle English we are confronted by a formidable difficulty. The Midland writer Orm, as is well known, indicates short vowel quantity by doubling the following consonant. If, then, we find Orm in. the thirteenth century writing always witenn, siine, not icittenn, sunne, how can we escape the conclusion that he said wiiten, sunne ? If we accept the long Towels for the thir- teenth century, we are forced to assume that the original short vowels were first lengthened and then shortened again before the diphthongizatioa of ii and im into ei and ou ; for, otherwise, we should have had ivaii and saun in Modern English. Rather than accept this very improbable hypo- thesis, it seems safer to reserve any decided conclusion till the difficult question of quantity in the Ormulum has been more fully investigated.
The Modern forms of many words point clearly to their originally long vowels having been shortened in the Middle period. Besides the frequent shortening before two con- sonants, which will be considered hereafter, there are some cases before single consonants. Long ii is, as might be expected, often shortened, as in stif dich, and in other words where it stands for various other O.E. long vowels, such as sj7i=0.E. ge^ceJlg and chil=^cele. Examples of other vowels are ten^O.^. ten, ivet:=tv^t, let^=I^tan, let. In ever^^oirer =-cefre, the shortening may be ascribed to the liquid in the following syllable.
Close and Open EE and 00 in Middle English.
We can now enter on the important question of the dis- tinction between close and open ee and oo in Middle English.
Mr. Ellis, relying on the fact that Chaucer rhymes all the eeB and oos together without distinction, comes to the conclu-
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 49
sion that there was only one sound, but lie does not explain how the modern distinctions arose, or how it is that they correspond to distinctions in Old English. If too and taa are distinct in Old English, and are separated in the form of tuu and too in Modern English also, it is not easy to see how they could have been confounded in the Middle period. This view was vaguely indicated many years ago by E.app, and has been recently revived by Dr. Weymouth, who is, however, clearly wrong in assuming that the Middle English sounds were identical with the Modern ones.
As the whole question offers considerable difficulties of detail, I propose to examine it as impartially as possible, utilizing all the evidence that is afforded by the/ graphic forms, by the general laws of change just stated, by the pronimciation of the sixteenth century, as investigated by Mr. Ellis, and by the pronunciation of the pi'esent day. I begin with the oob, as offering less difficulty than the ee^.
Beginning, then, with the oos, we find that Middle English 00 corresponds to three distinct sounds in Old English,
1) to 66: too, O.E. too {too),
2) to aa : too, O.E. taa (toe),
3) to 6 short: hool, O.E. hoi (hole).
Of these three oos the two first are kept quite distinct in the present Modern English, original 66 being now pronounced uu, while 00 from aa is now 66 or 6ii. The natural inference that the two sounds were also kept distinct in the Middle period is fully confirmed by the graphic evidence, for in the earlier writings the oo from aa is often spelt oa, as in oa^e^=. O.E. aa^e (Lajamon), noan=::naan (Procl. of H. III.), moare =^maare (Procl. and A. Piwle), ])oa = ])aa (A. Riwle). The clear inference is that the oo from aa was pronounced with a sound intermediate to oo and aa, and consequently that original oo still retained its Old English sound.
The 00 of hool, arising from original short 6, is in the present pronunciation represented by the same vowel as the 00 from aa : it is therefore highly probable that it had in Middle English the same sound as the oo from aa, namely the more open one.
4
50 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
"We may now examine the question from the comparative point of view, and see whether the results harmonize.
The first two oos need not detain us long. We have seen that original do is, as a general rule, either retained without change, or else moved up into the ?f-position. It is quite certain that this change had not taken place in the Middle period : 66 must, therefore, have been kept unchanged. Again, whenever aa has changed, it has been by rounding. It has been already proved that the Old English aa cannot well have been any other sound than the low-wide, and this, when rounded, naturally gives the low-back- wide-round.
The 0 of Iwl was almost certainly the mid-narrow sound (p. 30). The tendencies of short vowels are, as we have seen, towards lowering and widening. These modifications, applied to our vowel, give the low-back-wide-round. This vowel was then lengthened, and became identical with the dd of tdd from taa, which, as we have seen, was no other than the low-back-wide-round.
But all long vowels are liable to be narrowed (p. 30), and we find, as a matter of fact, that the 66 from aa is narrow in all the living Teutonic languages which possess it. It is, therefore, not only possible, but extremely probable that the 66 soon became narrow in Middle English also : i66 and hodl would therefore have the sound of the Modern English words which are written tatv and haul.
"We may now turn to the ees. In the present English all the ecs are levelled under ii, but Mr. Ellis's researches have proved that in the sixteenth century a distinction parallel to that of the two oos was still kept up, some of the Middle English ees being pronounced ee, some it, those words which are now written with ea (such as sea) having the ec-sound, while ee (as in see) had the zY-sound. The analogy of the oos leads us to suppose that the sixteenth century ees correspond to Middle English ees, and the iis to ees. I will now give an example of the difierent ees, with the original Old English forms, together with those of the sixteenth century and the Middle English forms indicated by them, adding the present English spelling, which is, of course, nothing but a dead
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
51
tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pro- nunciation.
TENTH CENT. FOURTEENTH CENT.
SaB
daed .. dream grene.. deop ,.
mete ..
stelan.
seS
deed
dreem green
deep
fm&te ) (meet j f stelan (steel
SIXTEENTH CENT.I NINETEENTH CENT.
see
diid
dreem
griin
diip
meet steel..
sii (sea) diid {deed) di'iim (dream) griin [green)^ diip {deep)
miit {meat) stiil {steal)
Reserving for the present the apparently anomalous ee of deed, the other changes, after what has been said on the oos, call for only a few remarks.
Old English ^ and e remain unchanged in the Middle period. Of the two diphthongs ed, when simplified, natur- ally takes the low position of its principal element (the a), and eo, as naturally, takes the mid position of its o. ^, following the usual tendencies of short vowels, is lowered, and the two short es are consequently levelled under the common form e, which is afterwards lengthened. All the vowels either remain or become narrow.
An important class of apparent exceptions is exemplified in d^d, whose ce is represented in Middle English not by ee, as would be expected, but by ee. An examination of these anomalous ^s soon reveals the fact that they correspond not to Gothic and general Teutonic a/, but to Gothic e, general Teutonic a (Gothic deds, Old High German tat). This is clearly one of the many cases in which the explanation of later English forms must be sought not in the literary West- Saxon, but rather in the Mercian dialect, in which the dis- tinction between e'e= original aa and ee^ai was still kept up. In short, the Middle English deed is descended not from d^d, but from ded. Traces of this older ee have been preserved in West-Saxon also, not only in such words as wen and cwen, but also in the red of the name Alfred, which is never written reed — the regular form of the substantive r^d, when it stands alone.
52 histoky of english sounds.
Unaccented E.
Middle English, like the majority of the living Teutonic languages, levels all the Old English unaccented vowels under e : compare Old E. caru, nama, gifan, with the Middle forms care, name, given. The sound of this e in Modern German, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch, is the mid- mixed-narrow, although, as we have seen (p. 30), there are traces of an older front sound, which we have theoretically assigned to the Old English final e. When we consider that the Middle English e in the fourteenth century was on the verge of extinction, we cannot well claim for it so archaic a sound as in Old English, and the analogy of the modern languages points clearly to some mixed vowel. Nor is graphic evidence wanting. The confusion and uncertainty of usage in the Middle English orthography shows clearly that the scribes were not satisfied with the letter e as a repre- sentative of the sound of unaccented e. In Wiclif 's Bible, for instance, we find, besides the regular ende, synnes, such spellings as mannis, mannys, fadir, opyn, icritun, locusfus, con- stantly occurring. It is not improbable that the u is intended for the French u i=y), and that this spelling is an attempt to represent the obscure sound of the mid-mi sed, which, like all the mixed vowels, has a distinctly labial effect on the ear (p. 16).
Diphthongs.
Middle English, while simplifying, as we have seen, the Old English diphthongs, developed some new ones of its own. All the Middle English diphthongs, with the excep- tion of those in words taken from Norse and French, arose from weakening of the consonants g and ic, by which g passed through gh (as in German sagen) into i or u, and lo into u. The most important of these diphthongs are ai, au, eu, and ou.
ai arises from O.E. ag {ceg), eg, eg, eg, ^g : dai (from dcEg), wai (u-ecf), sai [secgan), hai ijieg), clai {dag).
au arises from O.E. aw, ag : clau {clawu), drau {dragan).
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 53
en arises from O.E. iw, ud, cew, eaw, eow : neu {mice), speu (spiwan), lend {Ic^wed), heu {hedwan), cneu (cneoic').
ou {dote, oou) arises from O.E. dw, die : sddu (sdivan), bloou {hloican).
The development of ai from ei {sai=^sei=-secgan) is par- alleled by the Danish pronunciation of ei (as in vei=tieg) as at, and is probably the result of an attempt to bring out the diphthongic character of the combination more clearly. There are, however, traces of original ei even in the Modern period, in such words as eiht, ei^er=eahta, ceg^er.
It will be observed that ag sometimes becomes ai, some- times au. The general rule is that ag final or before a con- sonant becomes ai, while, if followed by the back vowels a or u, the diphthong au is developed. Thus, dag (dcBg), tagl {tmgl), magn {mcegen), become dai, tail, main, while dragan, sagu, become drau, sau. We have, however, san from sage.
The change of ^ into eu in the combination m, and the levelling of the quantities of iw, Iw, etc., must be noticed, although the cause is not apparent.
That the ooM-diphthongs preserved the long quantity of their first elements is clear from the accounts of the six- teenth century phoneticians ; the separation of ddu and oou is theoretical.
In the combinations ig and ug the consonant is naturally absorbed by the vowel, the result being simply a long vowel : Hi (Jicgan), uul (ugle).
Consonant Influence. /
Quantity. Short vowels are lengthened before liquids and nasals followed by a voice stop — before Id, nd, mh (often also before rd and a few other r-combinations). Thus Old English wilde, findan, climban, become wiild, fiind, cliimh, the length of whose vowels is shown by the modern forms ivaild, faind, claim. Exceptions can be explained on the same principle as the other cases of the abnormal retention of original short quantity, namely, by the presence of a liquid in the second syllable ; hence hinder, rounder, timber, not hiinder, etc.
54 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
Quality, a before Id is rounded into 6, and then, in ac- cordance with the rule just stated, lengthened, so that the Old English sealde passes through sakle into soldCy and finally becomes sodlde, whence the Modern soold.
The rounding of short a before nasals, which almost dis- appeared towards the end of the Old English period, at least in "West-Saxon, crops up again in Middle English. An ex- amination of the present forms gives the following rules for the occurrence of o=a before nasals. Most of the cases of rounding are before n^, the general rule being that while verb preterites keep a, all other words have o. Thus we have the substantive so?i^, but the preterite safi^. Excep- tions are han^ and fang, which should regularly be hong, fong. Rounding before n and m is exceptional: the only examples are on, hond,from, icoomh, cdomh.
Initial id influences the following vowel in various ways. Sometimes it assimilates i into u, which then absorbs the iv itself, as in such=^sivich^^O.'E. sivilc. Occasionally it draws up od to the dd-position, as in ticoo for tivdd, tcoomb for woomb, contrasting with the regular woo, wood (O.E. wd, wad). Hence, by the regular changes, the Modern twuu, tuu, wuum(b) , woo, u'ood.
"We may now sum up briefly the changes of the Middle period,
a is preserved, except before Id, where it is rounded, and CB and ea are levelled under it.
e and e, together with eo, are levelled under e.
y is confounded with i, which remains unchanged, except that it was probably widened.
6 becomes o, and d is kept unchanged.
u remains, although probably widened.
a, e, and 6 are often lengthened, giving aa, ee and do. It will be observed that the Old English e and d are not lengthened into ee and 66, but pass through e and d into ee and do.
Of the long vowels t§, e, I, 6, u remain unchanged.
y becomes it.
a becomes od.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 55
Of the diphthongs ed becomes ee, eo becomes ee.
New diphthongs are developed by the weakening of g and ID.
Unaccented vowels are levelled under d.
Short vowels are often lengthened before liquids followed by voice stops.
MODERN PERIOD.
Loss OF FINAL E.
The loss of final e in English is one of the many instances of how the whole grammatical structure of a language may be subverted by purely phonetic changes, for it may safely be said that the loss of final e in Modern English is almost equivalent to loss of inflexion altogether. Middle English, although much reduced, was still distinctly an inflexional language, as much so at least as Modern Danish or Swedish : its verbs had infinitive and plural endings, and its adjectives still retained some of their old inflexions, including the peculiarly Teutonic distinction of definite and indefinite. In Modern English all this is lost : not only is the distinc- tion of definite and indefinite lost, but our adjectives have become absolutely indeclinable, and the whole spirit of English is now so difierent from that of the other Teutonic languages, that their most familiar distinctions are quite strange to us, and can only be acquired with considerable difficulty.
The loss of final e marks ofi" English sharply and distinct- ly from the cognate languages, in all of which it is strictly preserved. Those who have such difficulty in admitting, even after the clearest evidence, that Chaucer may possibly have pronounced the final e, should try to realize to them- selves the fact that the loss of final e is really quite an exceptional and anomalous phenomenon : instead of being surprised at Chaucer still retaining it, they should rather be surprised at its loss at so early a period as the fifteenth century, while preserved to the present day in all the cognate languages.
56 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
An important result of the loss of final e was to prevent change in other directions : we shall find that the Middle English sounds were preserved almost unchanged long after its disappearance. Mr. Ellis's researches have shown that the most characteristic features of Middle English, as, for instance, ii and uu, were preserved some way into the six- teenth century; others, such as the old ai and au, still later.
But the tendency to change soon begins to manifest itself, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century we find many important changes either completed, or else in partial operation. During the latter half of the seventeenth century the whole phonetic structure of the language may be said to have been revolutionized. Some slight further changes took place during the first half of the eighteenth century, and by the middle of the century the language finally settled down into nearly its present state. We may, therefore, distinguish roughly five periods of Modern English.
1) the Earliest (1450-1500 or rather later), which pre- serves the sounds of the Middle period unchanged, except that it throws off the final e. I propose, therefore, for the sake of convenience, to cite the Middle English forms in this Earliest Modern English, which is really equivalent to Latest Middle English.
2) the Early (1550-1650), in which the Middle sounds were distinctly modified, ii and uu being diphthongized, and ee and 66 moved up to the high positions of ii and uu, ee and do being moved into the vacant mid positions.
3) the Transition period (1650-1700), characterized by very important and sweeping changes, such as the simplifica- tion of the Middle diphthongs ai and au, the fronting of a and aa into (e, cecB, and the development of the peculiarly English 9 from u.
4) the Late period (1700 onwards), in which the long vowels of the Transition period undergo a process of lingual narrowing, cBce passing through ee into ee, while ee itself becomes ii.
5) the Latest period, remarkable for its excessive tendency
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 57
to dipLthongization, especially in the ease of ee and 66, whicli are in the present generation almost always ei and 6u. It is probable that manj^ of tbe distinctive features of this period existed already in the previous period, either as indi- vidual peculiarities or as vulgarisms. It is certain that in the present generation many new pronunciations, which are really very widely distributed, are entirely ignored, or else denounced as vulgarisms, even by the people who employ them habitually. These unrecognized pronunciations are of two kinds, 1) those which, though ignored by every one, are in universal use, and 2) those which appear only sporadically in educated speech, although many of them are firmly estab- lished in the language of the populace. As these pronuncia- tions are of great philological importance, as showing us the changes of sound in active operation, and as they have been hitherto quite ignored by phoneticians, I propose to treat of them hereafter as fully as my imperfect observations will allow.
EAELY MODEEN PERIOD.
«, aa. Mr. Ellis's authorities seem to describe a very thin sound of the a, although the ce of the following period does not seem to have been recognized. I think it very probable that the real sound was that of the present Danish a in nicmd, mane, which is the mid-back- wide-forward, the tongue being advanced considerably, while the tip is kept down. When the tongue is in this position, a very slight raising of the middle of it towards the palate converts this forward a into (S, which it closely resembles in sound.
e, i, 0. As these vowels are retained unchanged in the present English, any discussion of their pronunciation in the Early Modern period is superfluous.
u. That ti still retained its original sound is clear from the statements of the phonetic authorities. Salesbury writes it with his Welsh u\ as in hvck = huch.
y. It is interesting to observe that there are distinct traces of the old short y in the Early Modern period. Clear evidence is afibrded by a passage of Salesbury, which I think
58 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
Mr. Ellis lias misunderstood. Salesbury says (E. E. P. pp. Ill, 164) that "Welsh, u soundeth as the vulgar English people sound it in these words of English, trust, hunj, busy, HuherdenJ' Mr. Ellis thinks that Salesbury means nothing but the wide as opposed to the narrow i. It seems im- probable that so minute a distinction should have been noticed by Salesbury — still more that, even if he had noticed it, he should have gone out of his way to describe it. Nor do I agree with Mr. Ellis in considering the distinction between the Welsh u and the wide i as being very slight. My own observations of the Welsh u^ as pronounced in North Wales, fully confirm Mr. Bell's identification of it with the high-mixed-wide vowel (although it seems to be narrow when long), which Mr. Ellis also adopts, but the sound seems to me to be as distinct from i as the unaccented German e (the mid-mixed-narrow) is from e (the mid-front), and to be much more like y than i (p. 16). I think Mr. Ellis has been led astray by Mr. Bell's identification of the unaccented e in fishes, etc., with this high-mixed vowel, which I believe to be erroneous. Mr. Bell acutely observed that the e in fishes was not identical with the preceding i, and being unable to find a place for it among his front vowels, fell back on the mixed. I find, however, that the real distinction is that the unaccented vowel is the high- front-wide lowered half-way to the mid position, a sound which Dr. Murray recognizes in Scotch, and writes (e).^
That the Welsh u sounded to Salesbury himself very like y is clear from his express statement that the French u, the German il, and the Scotch u, closely resembled his own u (E. E. P. p. 761). If, now, we examine the four English words given by Salesbury, we shall find that the history of all of them points decisively to the y-sound. Bury and busy are in Old English bebyrgan and bysig, trust is the Norse treysta, a diphthong which could not well contract into any vowel but y, and the first half of Huberden is probably the Erench Hicbert, which, of course, had the j/-sound. What
^ Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, p. 106.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 59
Salesbury's statement amounts to is, therefore, that these three words (for we may pass over the last) were in the six- teenth century pronounced by the vulgar tryst, hyn, hyzi.
Although Salesbury characterizes these pronunciations as vulgar, it is quite clear, from the retention of the French spelling u=^y in all of them up to the present day, that the old pronunciation must have been kept up some way into the Modern period. Whenever we find a word written with y in Old English, and with u in the present spelling, we may suppose it preserved the ?/-sound in the beginning, at least, of the Modern period. Such words are :
burden (b8odn)...O.E. byr'Sen M.E. bur]?en, bir>eii, berj^en
bury (beri) bebyrgau burien, birien, berien
busy (bizi) bysig busi, bisi, besi
cburch (cb88cb)...cyrice (early O.E. cirice)...churche, cbirche, cherche
inuch (mocb) myeel (early O.E. micel)...inuche(l), michel, mechel, moche
shut (sbat) scyttan schutten, scbitten, scbetten
There are besides two interesting words in which the y~ sound is expressed by the digraph ui, which are :
build (bild) O.E. byldan M.E. build, buld, bild, beld
guilt (gilt) gylt gult, gilt, gelt
The correspondence between the Old, Modern, and Middle forms, the latter (which are taken from Stratmann's Diction- ary), with their constant alternation between u and i, requires little comment. It is quite clear that the ambiguous u and i were considered unsatisfactory representations of the y- sound, and recourse was therefore had to the digraph uiy which, as we see, was employed both in the Middle and Modern periods. The forms in e point to a previous lower- ing of the y to one of the a-positions. The o of moche seems to show that there was a spoken, and not merely written form muche in the Middle period, with an anomalous change of y into u.
These words evidently caused considerable embarrassment to the phonetic writers of the Early Modern period, for they had no proper sign for short y, and were compelled to identify it with the long French yy in myyz (written muse), or else, if they wished to preserve its quantity, to confound it with short i. I will now give the sixteenth century pro-
60 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
nunciations of these words, as deduced by Mr, Ellis. I have not made any alteration in his spelling, except in the case of Salesbury's u, which I have written y, as there seems to me to be no doubt that this was the sound intended by him. I have not thought it necessary to add the authorities, except in the case of Salesbury.
burden : u.
bury: y (Sa.).
busy : y (Sa.).
church : y (Sa.), yy, i, u.
much : i, u ? y ?
shut: i.
build: yy, ii, i, ei (= Middle E. ii).
guilt : i. The long yy in chyyrch is probably a mere inaccuracy of Smith's, for Salesbury writes distinctly tsurts, not tsuivrts, as he would have done had the vowel been long. The yy of hyyid may, on the other hand, be correct, for y may very well have been lengthened before Id, as i is (2m7f/=O.E. uilde).
The MS in these words (except perhaps in much) I am in- clined to regard as mere pedantry — the attempt to conform the pronunciation to the spelling, of which we have numerous instances in that very pedantic age. Of this artificial u for y the foreign word just is a striking example. This word was certainly never pronounced with w in the Middle period, and even at the present day the legitimate descendant of the old jyst is still to be heard from all uneducated and many educated speakers in the form of jist. Yet we find the arti- ficial ^-pronunciation already insisted on in the sixteenth century.
ii, uu. Although long ii and uu were still preserved at the beginning of the Early Modern period, they soon began to be diphthongized. Salesbury writes ei and oiv, as in icein (=:tciiii), ddoio {=^uu), probably meaning ei, 6u. There seem also to be indications of a broader pronunciation, di, du, which, as we shall see, became general in the following period. It is, then, clear that ii and uu were first modified by partial lowering, i-i, u-u, becoming e-i, 6-u, and that the
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 61
resulting diphthongs were then exaggerated by divergence — a not unfrequent phenomenon.
ee, ee, do, 66. The history of these vowels in Modern English affords a striking example of the Teutonic tendency to narrow long vowels, each of them being raised a step, so that ee and 66 become ii and uu, as in (/«f/= Middle E. deed and simn^s66n^ while ee and do become ee, 66, as in drdem=- Middle E. dreem and h66n—h66n (O.E. Ian').
In one word, the Middle E. 66 has been preserved up to the present day, and, we may therefore assume, in the Early Modern period also, namely, in the adj. 5roO(^= O.E. hrad.
at, au, eu, 66u, 66ii. The Middle English diphthongs are generally preserved, although there are traces of the simpli- fication of ai and au, which was fully carried out in the following period, eii was also simplified into yy in some words, such as tryy, nyy, while in others, such as heu, sheu, it was preserved. 66io did not, as might be expected, become uu, but its first element was kept unchanged, so that bl66u (=0.E. hlowan] has remained unchanged up to the present day. 66u seems to have changed regularly into 66u, cndou (=0.E. cndwaii) becoming cn66u : the two oous were there- fore levelled.
Quantity.
Middle English ee seems to have been shortened very early in the Modern period in some words which still preserve in writing the e«= Middle E. ee. Such words are def, insted, hed, red (partic), led (subst.), ded, bred, and several others. Nearly all the cases, it will be observed, occur before d. We shall find the same tendency to shorten before a stopped con- sonant in the Late Modern period as well.
Consonant Influence.
The most important case is the development of u before I in the combinations al and 661 (= Middle E. 66), al, talk, 66ld, becoming aul, taulk, 66uld. The form aul is the origin of our present 661, t66k.
62 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The only traces of r-influence, so marked in the present period, are shown in the occasional conversion of e into a, as in hart, smart, for the older hert, smert.
TRANSITION PERIOD.
We now come to the most important and difficult period of Modern English, in which the vowels of the language may be said to have broken away entirely from the Middle Eng- lish traditions, and entered on a new life of their own. It is therefore fortunate that the phonetic authorities of this period are of a far higher stamp than those of the preceding one : many of their observations are extremely acute, and are evidently the result of careful study of the actions of the vocal organs.
Short Yowels.
e, i, 0, remain unchanged, as in the previous period. It is interesting to observe that we now, for the first time, find the qualitative distinction between short and long i and u recognized by one of Mr. Ellis's authorities. The following is Cooper's list of exact pairs of long and short vowel-sounds (E. E. P. p. 83).
1234 5678
can ken will folly full up meet foot cast cane weal fall foale — need fool which Mr. Ellis interprets thus (denoting the wide vowel by italics) :
csen ken wzl foli fwl op mit fut caesest keen weel fool fool — niid fuul It is clear that, as Mr. Ellis remarks. Cooper was dissatisfied with the usual pairing of i, ii, and ti, uu {fil, fiU), and there- fore tried to find the true short-narrow i and u in tniit and fuut, where the ii and uu were probably shortened before the voiceless t, as is still the case. Again, he lengthened the short wide i and u, and finding that the resulting long vowel was nearly identical with the mid-narrow ee and 66, naturally identified them as the true longs and shorts. It
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
63
must be observed that the ?/ of fiiut has not only been short- ened to fut in the present English, but has also had time to follow the usual tendencies of short vowels, and become wide. The shortening is, therefore, in all probability, of some antiquity. If, then, we suppose that the long uu of fuut had been shortened to u in Cooper's time, and had not yet been widened, we see that the pairing of fut and fuul may very well have been perfectly accurate, both as regards quality and quantity.
In the ^airs foil)/, fall, Mr. Ellis makes the short o oi folly to correspond exactly with the long 66, and assumes it to be narrow. This, I think, is unnecessary. It is clear that Cooper's analysis is not absolutely accurate ; it is only a con- siderable step in advance. He may very well have considered the distinction between 66 and 66 quite minute enough, and may therefore have disregarded the further refinement of distinguishing narrow and wide 6.
a. The present «-sound is clearly recognized by the seventeenth-century phoneticians, Wallis describes a (both long and short) as a palatal, as opposed to a guttural vowel — as being formed by compressing the air between the middle of the tongue and the palate with a wide opening. And the Erenchman Miege identifies the English short ce with the Erench e ouvert, which would certainly be the nearest equivalent.
u. The change of the old u into 9 was fully established in the Transition period, and it is clear from the descriptions given of the sound that it closely resembled the present one : Wallis calls it an obscure sound, and compares it with the Erench etc in serviteur, while Miege compares it with the Erench o — a common error of foreigners at the present day, and both Wallis and Wilkins identify it with one of the pro- nunciations of Welsh y, which is generally identified with our 9.
Before going any further, it will be necessary to consider the present pronunciation, or rather pronunciations, of the d more closely. There are two distinct sounds of the o — the high-back- wide and the mid-back- narrow, which, although
64 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
formed so differently, are so similar in sound that even a practised ear finds it often difficult to distinguish, them. Besides these two, a third sound may be heard in many English and Scotch dialects, which is the low-back-narrow.
Different as these three vowels are, they all agree in being unrounded back vowels, and it is clear from the seventeenth century statements that the main distinction between u and d was then, as it is now, that u was rounded, d not. Now it is quite certain that u itself was, in the seventeenth century, the high-back-wide-round (which it still is in those words, such as wiiJf, in which the u has been exceptionally retained) ; unrounded, this vowel would naturally become the high- back- wide — the very sound still in common use. The prob- ability that this was also the seventeenth-century sound is raised almost to a certainty by the statement of AVallis, that the sound is formed with the greatest of the three degrees of closeness of the lingual passage (between tongue and palate) recognized by him. Wilkins's statement that the sound is "framed by a free emission of the breath from the throat," and, again, that it is formed " without any particular motion of the tongue or lips," may be considered as evidence that some such sound as the present mid-back-narrow was also given to the a, but it is quite as probable that the whole description is inaccurate.
The general conclusion I arrive at is, that u was first un- rounded, and that the resulting high-back- wide was in some pronunciations imitated by the mid-back-narrow, which in some dialects was, in accordance with the tendencies of short vowels, brought down to the low position.
Long Yovi^ELS.
ee, 66. The close ee and do ^Middle English he and 66, are distinctlv recognized. Wallis states that " e profertur sono acuto claroque ut Gallorum e masculinum," and Cooper, as we have seen (p. 522), pairs full and foal as long and short, which he could not have done if the oa of foal still had the broad do-sound.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 65
ei, 6u. The diphtliongization of Middle English ii and uu is carried a step further than in the previous period ; all the authorities agree in either identifying, or, at least, comparing the first element of the two diphthongs with the d of bdt. wiin and ^uu appear, therefore, in the Transition period as wdin and ^dii — very nearly their present form.
ai, au. An important change of this period, although partially developed, as Mr. Ellis has shown, much earlier, is the simplification of the old diphthongs ai and au into ee- and oo-vowels. Those writers of the Early period who acknowledge the simple sounds do not give any clue to their precise nature, but the seventeenth century accounts point clearly to ee and do, which latter is the sound still preserved in such words as Jod, /iddk=iai(, Iiauk, although ee, as in dee=^dai, has been moved up to ee, probably because the Early Modern ee has become ii in the present English,
The above changes were either already in operation in the Early Modern period, or were at least prepared by previous changes : the next two are peculiar to the Middle period.
aa. Long, like short, aa was changed to the front vowel (e, naam becoming ncemm. The cece, being a long vowel, was soon narrowed into ee, as is shown by Cooper's pairing ken (=:ken) and cane (=keen) as long and short.
?/?/. Long f/i/, both in English words such as wj9/, and French such as fi/i/n, was diphthongized into ni, nijy and tyyn becoming niu and tiun. The older yy was, however, still preserved by some speakers, and we have the curious spectacle of the two contemporaries Wallis and Wilkins ignoring each other's pronunciations, "VYilkins asserting that the sound of yy is " of laborious and difficult pronun- ciation," especially "to the English," while Wallis considered this very y^-sound to be the only English pronunciation of long u.
It was probably the influence of this new m that changed the older eu into iu, heu, etc., becoming h'm, whence by con- sonantization of the first element of the diphthong the present hyuii.
66
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
IV.
HISTOEICAL VIEW OF ENGLISH SOUND-CHANGES.
|
Old English. |
Middle English. |
Modern English. |
|
1 mann |
man , sat hard naam |
maen Sffit haad neim end help seven miit stiil sii diid di'iim griin sii wit hil wain fair 6ft 6n h6ul t66 tuu S9n haus dei sei 166 |
|
sajt (=sat) heard (=hard) nama |
||
|
5 ende (=andi) helpan (=hilpan) seofon mete (=mati) stelan (=stilan) 10 SiB (=saiw) dted(=dad) dream (=di-aum) ffrene |
end help seven |
|
|
meet steel see |
||
|
deed |
||
|
dreem green see |
||
|
seo 15 witan hyll win |
||
|
wit hil wiin fiir 6ft 6n |
||
|
fyr 6ft ( = ufta) 20 6n ( = an) hoi ta t5 sunu 25 hus |
||
|
h66l too |
||
|
t66 sun huus dai : sei, sai lau |
||
|
daeg secgan lagu |
LATE MODERN PERIOD.
The further changes of the eighteenth century are com- paratively slight. The short vowels remain unchanged.
The only long vowels which undergo any modification are the ees. In the first place the ees of the preceding period are raised to ii, dreem becoming driim, the result being that the Middle English ee and ee are both confused under ii. The word ^re'e7=M.E. greet (O.E. great) is an example of excep- tional retention of the older ee.
ee from aa and ai is raised to the mid-position of ee, left
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 67
vacant by the change of ee into ii, neem from naam and see from sai becoming neem and see.
do and 66 are, on the other hand, retained unaltered. "We see, therefore, that the fully-established pronunciation of the eighteenth century differed but slightly from that now in use.
Quantity.
The Early Modern uu from 66 is often shortened before stops, almost always before k, frequently before other stops, and occasionally before other consonants. Examples are : luk (=:Middle E. I66]i), tuk (t66k), huk {h66k), stud {st66d), gud {g66d),fut {f66i), Imf ilwof), huzdm {b66zom).
Other cases of shortening are doubtful, as they probably took place in the Early period : even the changes just con- sidered may have been, at least partially, developed in the Transition period.
The lena-thening- of vowels before certain consonants will be considered in the. next section.
Consonant Influence.
Some important modifications are produced in this period by consonant influence, which has, in some cases, also had a conservative effect in preserving older sounds, which would otherwise have undergone various modifications.
The most marked influence is that exercised by the r. So strong is it, indeed, that in the present English hardly any vowel has the same sound before r as before other consonants. One important result of this is that the r itself becomes a superfluous addition, which is not required for distinguishing one word from another, and is therefore weakened into a mere vocal murmur, or else dropped altogether, although always retained before a vowel.
The following table will give a general view of these modifications. The first column gives the Middle English vowels, the second gives what would be their regular repre- sentatives in Late Modern English, the third gives the forms
68
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
they actually assume, and the last column gives examples with the Middle E. forms in parentheses :
ar . ir . er . ur . or . aar. air . eer. eer.. 66r. 66r. iir . uur.
ser
ir ....
er ....
ar ....
or....
eer
eer
iir....
iir...,
uur
66r
air
aur
|
aar ear |
liaaad (hard) })aad O'ird) swaav (swerv) taaf (turf) nooa)) (nor]?) feer (faar) feer (fair) diiar, ^.eer (deer, 'Seer) iiar, beer (eer, beer) muuar, floor (moor, floor) moor (moor) faiar (fiir) sauar (suur) |
|
aar |
|
|
aar |
|
|
66r eer eer |
|
|
iiar (eer) iiar (eer) uuar, oor |
|
|
66r |
|
|
aiar auar |
The sympathy between r and the broad (low or back) vowels, which is also shown in the older change of ster, etc., into star, is evident enough here also. In such words as feer the seventeenth-century sound of long aa has been preserved almost unchanged, while in Jlodr the r has not only prevented the regular change into uu, but has even lowered the vowel from the 66- to the oo-position.
In many cases it is doubtful whether the influence of the r has been simply conservative, or whether the change — say of hard into hard — actually took place, and that the influence of the r afterwards changed the w into a. The change of a into «? certainly seems to have been fully carried out in the Transition period before r as well as the other consonants, if we may trust the phonetic authorities ; but it is quite possible that the older aa may have remained throughout as vulgar- isms, and soon have regained their lost ground.
The levelling of ir, er, and ur, which are kept quite dis- tinct by the phoneticians of the Transition period, is a very curious phenomenon, as it has resulted in an entirely new vowel, which only occurs in these combinations. This vowel is the low-mixed-narrow. It is evidently closely allied to the regular short ^ in bat, and it seems most probable that the first change was to level ir, er, and ar under dr (mid- back-narrow), which would then, by the farther influence of the r, pass into the low-back-narrow, whence to the low-
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. , 69
mixed-narrow is but a sliort step. Then the vowel was lengthened, and the r absorbed.
The influence of I is, like that of r, in the direction of broadening. In the combinations alf and aim original short a is preserved, the I is dropped and the vowel lengthened, so that half and salm (written psalm) become haaf and saam. In the Early period some of these words developed the usual au, but the present forms cannot have arisen from au, except, perhaps, haam from halm, which is often pronounced hoom, pointing clearly to an older haulm.
Besides r and /, there are other consonants which tend to preserve the quality of short a, namely, ^, ]?, s and/, although the a is generally lengthened : faa^dr, paa]>, praas, aask, laaf, craqft. The refined Transition pronunciation pee]), cesk, is, however, still to be heard.
Before leaving this subject of consonant influence, it is necessary to observe that the rules just stated do not always apply to dissyllables, but only to monosyllables. Thus we find scelou, fcelou, not solou, fblou, ncprou not narou, and gce^ar contrasting with/aa^^r and raaJ^er.
The influence of initial w is also very characteristic of Late Modern English. It not only preserves the old u, as in icul, wulf, but also regularly rounds short a into o, what, 8wan^ becoming whot, swdn; also in dissyllables, such as stcdlou, wdlou. The Transition forms wal, icdlf, ivhcet, were probably artificial refinements, which were never accepted by the mass of the people.^
LATEST MODERN PERIOD.
"We are now, at last, able to study the sounds of our lan- guage, not through the hazy medium of vague descriptions and comparisons, but by direct observation ; we can throw away theory, and trust to facts. If our analysis of speech-
1 Mr. H. Nicol has just called my attention to the fact (which I had over- looked) that the change does not take place when the a is followed hy a back consonant : wceg, ivcex, etc.
70 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
sounds were perfectly accurate and exhaustive, and if our ears were trained to recognize with certainty every appreci- able shade of pronunciation, the task would be easy enough. As it is, its difficulties are very great, and the observations I am about to make cannot therefore make any pretensions either to complete fullness or perfect accuracy. They are mere first attempts, and will require much revision.
DiPHTHONGIZATION.
The most prominent feature of our present English is its tendency to diphthongization.
The diphthongic character of our ee and 66 has been dis- tinctly recognized by our leading phoneticians, especially Smart and Bell.
Mr. Bell analyses the two diphthongs as ^l, eu, but I find, as regards my own pronunciation, that the second elements are not fully developed ^ and u. In pronouncing du the tongue remains throughout in the mid-position, and the second element only difiers from the first in being formed with greater closure of the lips, so that it is an intermediate sound between oo and uu. In el the tongue seems to be raised to a position half way between e and i in forming the second element, not to the full high position of ^.
This indistinctness of the second elements of our ei and du explains the difficulty many have in recognizing their diph- thongic character. Mr. Ellis, in particular, insists strongly on the monophthongic character of his own ees and oos. I hear his ee and oo as distinct diphthongs, not only in his English pronunciation, but also in his pronunciation of French, Grerman, and Latin.
The observation of existing pronunciations has further revealed a very curious and hitherto unsuspected fact, namely that our ii and uu are no longer pure monophthongs in the mouths of the vast majority of speakers, whether educated or uneducated. They are consonantal diphthongs, ii termi- nating in the consonant y, uu in w—iij^ uw. The distinction
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 71
between hit and hiit (written heat) depends not on the short vowel being wide and the long narrow, but on the former being a monophthong, the latter a diphthong. The narrow- ness of u (or rather iy) is therefore unessential, and we find, accordingly, that the first element of both iy and uiv is generally made wide. These curious developments are probably the result of sympathetic imitation of ei and 6u; and the tongue being already in the highest vowel position the only means of further contraction of the lingual passage left was the formation of consonants.
The only long vowels left are aa and do. Are these genuine monophthongs? I beKeve not, although their diph- thongic character is certainly not nearly so strongly marked as in the case of the vowels already considered. Neverthe- less, these two vowels always seem to end in a slight vocal murmur, which might be expressed thus — aa9, odd. I find that aa and do, if prolonged ever so much, still have an abrupt unfinished character if this vocal murmur is omitted. The difierence between loo (written law) and 1663 {lore) is that in the former word the final a is strictly diphthongic and half evanescent, while the 9 of the second word is so clearly pro- nounced as almost to amount to a separate syllable. The distinction between the words written father and farther is purely imaginary.
In popular speech these diphthongs undergo many modifi- cations. The first elements of ei and ou often follow the general tendencies of short vowels, and are lowered to the low-front-narrow and low- back- wide-round positions respec- tively, giving ei and ou. This peculiar exaggeration of the two diphthongs, which is not uncommon even among the educated, is popularly supposed to be a substitution of ai for ei, and those who employ it are reproached with saying " high " instead of " hay." I find, however, that those who say hei for hei never confuse it with hai, which many of them pronounce very broadly, giving the a the low-back sound of the Scotch man.
The 6 of ou is often, especially in affected pronunciation, moved forward to the mid-mixed- round position, and from
72 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
there, by lowering and further shifting forwards, to the low- front-narrow-round position, so that nou, becomes noeu.
In like manner, the u of uw^uu is often weakened into the high-mixed-round (wide), which is nearly the German u. So that tuu becomes almost tijio or tuw.
The two diphthongs corresponding to Middle E. ii and im show strongly divergent tendencies in the present pronuncia- tion. The first element of our ai is, I believe, the high- back-wide (which is also the commonest sound of the d in hdf), that of au the low-mixed- wide. In vulgar speech the distinction is still more marked, the a of ai being gradually lowered to the full low position, whilst the a of au is moved forward to the low-front- wide position, giving the familiar muB for hau8. These exaggerations may be partly attributable to the desire to prevent confusion with the ei and bii arising from ee and 66.
The investigation of these peculiarities is not only of high scientific interest, but is also of great practical importance. We see that the imagined uniformity of " correct " pronun- ciation is entirely delusive — an error which only requires a little cultivation of the observing faculties to be completely dissipated.
It is also certain that the wretched way in which English people speak foreign languages — often in such a style as to be quite unintelligible to the natives — is mainly due to their persistently ignoring the phonetic peculiarities of their own language. When we once know that our supposed long vowels are all diphthongs, we are forced to acknowledge that the genuine ms and nil's, of foreign languages are really strange sounds, which require to be learnt with an efibrt, in the same way as we acquire French u or German ch. A case once came under my notice, in which the French word written eU was confidently given forth as eitei, on the strength of the grammar's assertion that the French e aigu had the sound of the English ay in hay. The result was, of course, to produce a word utterly unintelligible to a French- man.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 73
Short Yowels.
The short vowels do not seem to have changed much in the last few generations. The most noticeable fact is the loss of ce among the vulgar. It is modified by raising the tongue into the mid-front-wide, resulting in the familiar ceh for cceb. This anomalous raising of a short vowel is gradually spreading among the upper classes, and is already quite fixed in many colloquial phrases, such as nou thenc yim, in which thcenc is hardly ever pronounced with ce, as it should be theo- retically. To keep the old original e distinct from this new sound, the original e generally has the broad sound of the low-front-narrow — a pronunciation which is very marked among the lower orders in London. In the pronunciation of those who retain flg, original e often has the thinner mid-front- wide sound.
Quantity.
The laws of quantity in the Latest Modern English, which are of a very peculiar and interesting character, were, as far as I know, never stated till I gave a brief account of them in the paper on Danish Pronunciation, already mentioned.
The distinction between long and short vowel is preserved strictly only in dissyllables. In monosyllables short vowels before single consonants are very generally lengthened, especially among the uneducated. If the vowel is kept short, the consonant must be lengthened. The result is, that short accented monosyllables do not exist in English. Either the vowel or the consonant must be long. If the vowel is naturally long, the consonant is shortened; if the vowel is originally short, the consonant is lengthened ; or else the vowel is lengthened, and the consonant shortened. We thus obtain the forms Uil, tell, or teel, of which the last two are entirely optional. Although these quantitative distinctions are most clearly observable in the liquids, they apply quite as fully to the stops, as may be seen by any one who com-
74
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
pares the English hmld and luett with the Danish hat, in which the t is really short, giving a peculiarly abrupt effect to English ears.
Among the educated the form tell is more frequent, but among the vulgar the lengthened teel is very common. These popular pronunciations are very interesting, as afford- ing the only true undiphthongic long vowels which English now possesses : fiil and fill in popular speech are really^/// and fill with the same wide vowel, the only difference being that in the latter word it is perfectly homogeneous, while in the former it is consonantally diphthongized.
It also deserves notice that there are really three degrees of vowel quantity in English — short, medial, and long, the rule being that long vowels occur only before voice eon- sonants or finally, while before breath consonants they become medial. Compare luiiz with hius, paa^z with ^:»af7]?. This fact has been noticed by Dr. Murraj^, in his work on the Scotch Dialects (p. 98, note).
A similar distinction is observable in the quantity of some of the consonants themselves. Liquids and nasals are long before voice, short before breath consonants. Compare hilld with hilt, sinnz with sins. This distinction of quantity has led Mr. Bell to assume that the / in bill is voiceless, although he admits (Visible Speech, p. 67) that "there is a trace of vocality." That the I in the English bilt is not voiceless becomes at once evident on comparing it with the Icelandic If, which is really Iht, with a distinct hiss.
Consonant Influence.
Apart from the laws of quantity already discussed, there is little to say on this subject. There are, however, words whose present forms afford instructive examples of the in- fluence of /. These words are childran and milk, in both of which the i has been gutturalized and labialized into u by the /, which in the second word has further developed into the diphthong yu, giving chuldren and myulc. The diphthong in myulc is somewhat puzzling. It is not im-
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 75
possible that the older forms were chyyldrdn and myylc, which were then diphthongized into yu, which in the former word lost its y-consonant; or chyldran may have developed direct into chuldrdn.
Notes on the Consonants.^ H.
That initial h in Old English had the same sound as it has now, and not that of the German ch {hh), which it is gener- ally agreed to have had when medial and final, is clear from its frequent omission, even in the older documents of the language ; for if initial h had been really kh, there would be no more reason for its omission than for that of s or any other initial consonant.
During the Middle period the use of h to designate the sound of hh was abandoned in favour of gh, whence the present spellings night, laugh, for the O.E. niht, hleahhan. The spelling ch, as in German, also occurs, and it is, at first sight, difficult to see why it was not universally adopted instead of gh, which ought to express, not the breath sound Tih, but rather the corresponding voice (as in German sagen). The simplest explanation seems to be that the eh was dis- carded in order to prevent confusion with the ch from c in child, much, etc.
HR, HL, HW, HN.
There can be no doubt that in the oldest pronunciation of
these combinations the h was pronounced separately, and that
at a still earlier period the h was a real ch. In Modern
Icelandic, however, which is the only Teutonic language that
still preserves all these sounds, the combinations have been
simplified into rh, Ih, wh, nh, which are nothing else but the
breath sounds corresponding to r, I, w, n, respectively.
Modern English also preserves one of them in the simplified
form of wh.
1 These do not lay claim to any fullness of detail : they are merely intended to serve as a stop-gap till it is possible to treat the subject more at length.
76
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
The fact that hr, hi, and hn drop their h very early in the Transition period, seems to show that the change from the compound h-r, etc., to the simplified rh, must have already begun in the Old English period. That they did pass through the stage of simplification is clear from the spell- ings rh, etc., as in rhof (Ormulum), Iho)'cl (Ayenbite), and the wh still preserved.
The change from hi to I is not, therefore, to be explained as the result of apocope of the initial h, but rather as a levelling of the voiceless Ih under the voiced / — a change which is at the present moment being carried out with the only remaining sound of this group, the ivh.
The main difficulty here is to determine the laws which govern the distribution of the breath > and /, and the voice ^ and V. The following table gives a general view of the relations of the living languages.
JEnglish Icelandic Swedish Danish . . Dutch . . German
>ing >ing
tmg ting ding dins-
^set.. ])aa^ det.. d6 .. dat .. das ..
broker ouj)
brou^ir ei^
broodor eed
broo^or ee^
brudar eed
bruudar aid (for ait)
The German ait, which is still written eid, really stands for aid, as final stops are always voiceless or whispered in Ger- man. The same is the case in Dutch, but original voiced stops preserve their vocality, if followed by a word beginning with a vowel.
The inferences suggested by this table are clear enough.
The English final > for =6 is evidently an exceptional change, which does not appear in any of the other languages. So also is the Icelandic > in J>aa'S. The majority, then, of the living Teutonic languages agree in showing ^ me- dially and finally and > initially, except in a small group
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 77
of words in very common use, sucli as the, then, thus, than, thou.
The question now arises, what is the relation of the Dutch, and German d in ding to the Scandinavian and English ting, ]>ing ? If the initial breath forms are the original ones, the voiced ^at, etc., must be later modifications ; if the ^ of 'Sat is the older, the t and J? of ting and \>ing must be the later developments — in short, there must have been a period in which ]> did not exist at all.
If we go back to the Oldest English, we find no trace of any distinction between ]> and ^. Many of the oldest MSS. write the ^ in all cases — '^ing, ^cet, hrd^or, ccS, while others write \> with equal exclusiveness. When we consider that ^ is simply the usual d modified by a diacritic, and that the ]> itself is, in all probability (as, I believe, was first suggested by Mr. Vigfusson), a D with the stem lengthened both ways, we are led to the unavoidable conclusion that the voice sound was the only one that existed in the Early Old English period. The fact that some of the very oldest remains of our language use the digraph th cannot outweigh the over- whelming evidence the other way. It was very natural to adopt the digraph th, which already existed in Latin as the representative of the sound th, as an approximate symbol of the voiced dh, but it is clear that it was considered an inaccu- rate representation of a voiced consonant, and was therefore abandoned in favour of ]? or ^, which were at first employed indiscriminately.
Afterwards, when the breath sound developed itself, the two letters were utilized to express the difference, and Ip, whose origin was of course forgotten, came to be regarded as the exclusive representative of the breath sound. According- ly the later MSS. of the tenth and eleventh centuries alwaj'-s use both ]> and ^ together, often rather loosely, but always with the evident intention of writing ]> initially, ^ medially and finally. None of them seem to make any distinction between ]>ing and ^cet, etc. It is, however, clear that these words must have had the same voice pronunciation as they have now.
78 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
"We may therefore assume three stages in the history of the English /'/i-sounds :
Early Old English . . . ^ing ^set bro^or a^
Late Old English . . . J?ing ^ast bro^or a^
Modern English N^g ^aBt bra^ar ouj?
The mystery of the pronunciation of (he, thou, is now solved : these words are archaisms, preserved unchanged by the frequency of their occurrence.
These results apply equally to the /. There can be no doubt that the / in Early Old English was vocal like the "Welsh f, as is shown by the Old Grerman spelling tiolc, etc. (still preserved, though the sound has been devocalized, in Modern German), and the Dutch pronunciation.
In the Transition period the voiced / was represented by the French u, as in Old German, and it is clear from such spellings as vox for fox, uader for fader, that the initial vocality of the Old English / (and consequently of the ^ also) was still preserved, as it still is, in many of the Southern dialects.
Even in the present literary English we find initial vocality still preserved in the words vein (from fana), vcet and vixen. As, however, these words are not of very frequent occurrence, it is not improbable that they were taken directly from one of the dialects.
There are a few cases of the retention of final vocality also, both of / and ^, in the present English. The words are ov, twelv, and ici^, all three evidently preserved, like '^cet, etc., by their excessive frequency. The pronunciations of and wi]>, given by some of the Early Modern authorities, are made doubtful by their recognition of ov and ui'^ as popular or vulgar pronunciations : they may therefore be purely artificial.
The vocal pronunciation of initial s, which is common in our dialects, and is shown for the fourteenth century by the Kentish zay, zal, etc, cannot be original. The sound of z is unknown in Scandinavia, and even in Germany the " soft " s is clearly the result of Low^ German influence, and it is un- known in the South German dialects.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 79
It seems, therefore, that the yocalization of initial (and also medial) s in English is merely a case of levelling^ caused by the analogy of the vocal ^ and v.
G.
The use of g for the y-consonant (/) of the other lan- guages is one of the knotty points of Old English phonetics. It is commonly assumed that the p of ger {= Gothic Jer), ge (^z^jus), and the ge of geoc (=zjuk), ged {=jd), are merely orthographical expedients for indicating this ^/-consonant. But there seems no reason why the i of the other national orthographies should not have been adopted in England also. As a matter of fact, it is used in foreign names, as in Iu\ytte (in the Chronicle), luKana, etc. And not only do such words as geoc alliterate with undoubted hard ^/s in the poetry, but we even find such pairs as Juliana, god, showing clearly that even in foreign words y-consonant was liable to be changed into a sound which, if not identical with the g of god, was at least very like it.
The ge of geoc makes it very probable that the g^y-con- sonant was a palatal sound — in short, a palatal stop formed in the place of y ( = Sanskrit ^). The conversion of an open into a stopped consonant is, of course, anomalous, but pre- cisely the same change has taken place in the Romance languages.
The spelling eg for gg, as in licgan, eeg, is curious- "We can hardly suppose that the combination is to be understood literally as c followed by g. Such a change would, at least, be entirely without precedent, and it seems most probable that the combination was meant to indicate a whispered instead of a voiced gg. The peculiarity, whatever it was, does not seem to have been carried into the Middle period, whose scribes always write gg.
Final g after long vowels or consonants often becomes h in Old English, which, to judge from the spelling hogh^^hbh^i^hbg, was originally vocal {=^gk), although it was soon devocalized. In the Transition period all medial and final gs became open (gh), as in German, Danish, and Icelandic. This gh after-
80 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
wards became palatalized after front, and labialized after back vowels {ghw), and in many cases the palatal and labial gh became still further weakened into i and u, forming the second elements of diphthongs. After a consonant the labial gh was confused with iv (from which it differs only in being slightly more guttural), folgian becoming fohcen. "When the to came at the end of a word, it was weakened into M, folw becoming folu, and mcdw (O.E. meahce) becoming malu. The present 6u in folou, for which there is sixteenth century authority, as well as for fola, is anomalous. It is possible that the 6u pronunciation may be artificial — the result of the spelling /o/Zoii'.
Even initial g is often weakened before front vowels, so often, indeed, that the Old English form of the g (5) came to be used exclusively to represent this weak sound, while the French form (nearly our present g) was reserved for the original stopped g. The first change was, no doubt into gh, gifan becoming ghiven, as in the Dutch gheevdu, which soon became palatalized, till at last it became simple y-consonant, as is clearly proved by such spellings as ^/b/^O.E. geaf (Peterborough Chronicle), yelt^=gytt (Ayenbite), etc.
The g or ge, which represents original y-consonant in Old English, always undergoes this weakening, geoc, ge, becoming ydoc, yee. Even when initial ge is merely the result of the diphthongization of a into ea, it is often weakened into ya, as in yard=:.geard-=gard.
The result of all these changes was, that by the beginning of the sixteenth century gh was entirely lost, being either weaken- ed into a vowel (i or u), or converted into the corresponding breath sound kh, but only finally, as in doouh (O.E. dag), enuuh (genog). In most cases final gh (when not vowelized) was dropped entireh^, as in f don {fa(/), loou (Jdg),fu {feoh)}
In the present English hh — whether answering to O.E. g or h — has been entirely lost. It appears from Mr. Ellis's investigations that the full kh first became weakened to a
^ The u in doouh, fooufhj, etc., was probably a mere secondary formation, generated by the ghw, the stages being oogh, ooghtv, ooughw, and then oouh or simply oou.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 81
mere aspiration, which was soon dropped. In such words as niht the i was lengthened, niJit becoming nut, whence our present nait. Final kh preceded by a rounded vowel as in lauh, enuuh, was itself naturally rounded into khw, like the kh in the German audi; hence the present laaf, endf — lauhh, lahhw, laivk, laf. For fuller details the reader must be re- ferred to Mr. Ellis's great work.
CH, J.
The change of c into cJi before and after front vowels, as in chiild, teech, from cikly t^can, offers considerable difficulties, on account of the many intermediate stages there must have been between the back stop c and the present fo/^-sound. There can be no doubt that the first change was to move c to the front-stop position, but, although the further change to the point formation is simple enough, it is not easy to explain the intrusion of the sh : we would expect ciild to change simply into tiild, just as gemaca becomes maat. I believe that the change from the intermediate front-stop to tsh is a purely imitative one. If the front-stop is pronounced forciblj^ — even with a degree of force stopping far short of actual aspiration — the escape of breath after the contact is removed naturally generates a slight hiss of yh (as in hue), which is very like sh in sound — hence the substitution of the easier tsh.
The same remarks apply also to the (/s/i-sound in wej, ej\ rij, etc., from wecg, ecg, hrycg.
It is instructive to observe the analogous changes in the Scandinavian languages. In Icelandic h and g before front vowels are shifted forward a little, without, however, losing their back character, almost as in the old-fashioned London pronunciation of kaind, skai, etc. In Swedish k before front vowels has a sound which is generally identified with the English ch. If, however, my limited observations are correct, the real sound is the front stop followed by the correspond- ing open breath {yh). The sound is certainly not the English ch, which the Swedes consider an unfamiliar sound. In
6
82
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
Norwegian the stopped element is dropped entirely, and nothing remains but a forward yh, so that henna is pro- nounced yhenna. Both in Norwegian and Swedish g before front vowels has the simple sound of the consonant y.
SH.
The change of Old English sc into sA is not exactly parallel with that of c into ch, as it takes place after back as well as front vowels — not only in such words as ^hip {:=scip), but also in s/iun {dacunicm), etc. It is therefore possible that sc may have passed through the stage of skh, as in Dutch, a change which seems to be the result of the influence of the s, the hh instead of k being, like s, a sibilant unstopped con- sonant. The Old English spellings sceacan, sceoc, etc., for scacan, scoc, however, seem to point rather to a palatalization of the c at an early period. Whatever the development may have been, it is certain that the sound soon became simple, for we find it often written ss in the Early Middle period.
In Swedish the sound of sk is fully developed, but only before front vowels. In Norwegian sk before front vowels changes its k into yh (voiceless y-consonant), which, as we have already seen, is the regular change, giving the combina- tion s-y/i, which is generally confounded with simple sh by foreigners. These facts tend strongly to confirm the view that the change of sk into sk in English also is due to pala- talization of the k, although we cannot determine with certainty what the intermediate stages were.
WORD LISTS.
The following lists are intended to include the majority of the words of Teutonic — that is to say English or Scandinavian — origin still in common use, with the corresponding Old and Middle forms. The first column gives the Old English forms ; the second the Middle English (but without the final e, p. 56) as deduced from the Old English forms and the present tra- ditional spelling, which is given in the third column ; the
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ. 83
fourth, lastl)'', gives the present sounds. I have, of course, carefully compared the valuable pronouncing vocabulary of Early Modern English given by Mr. Ellis in his Third Part, especially in all cases of irregular change or anomalous spell- ing. These exceptions will be considered hereafter.
The words are arranged primarily according to their vowels in the following order : — a (ae, ea, ei), n, i, I, y, y, e (eo), e, e, ^ = ee, £e=ee, ea, eo, u, ii, o, o. Then according to the consonant that follows the vowel in this order : h, r, 1, ^, s, w, f, ng, n, ra, g, c, d, t, b, p ; and lastly according to the initial consonant in the same order. The principle I have followed is to begin with the vowels, as being the most independent elements of speech, and to put the stops at the extreme end as being most opposed to the vowels. The semivowels or open consonants naturally come after the vowels, and the nasals next to the stops. As regards posi- tion, back consonants come first, then front, then point, and then lip. Yoice consonants, of course, come before breath. It will easily be seen that the same general principles have been followed in the arrangement of the vowels. The order of position is back, mixed, front ; high comes before mid, and mid before low, and round last of all.
To facilitate reference, I have often given the same word under as many different heads as possible, especially in cases of irregular development.
Old English forms which do not actually occur, but are postulated by later ones, are marked with an asterisk.
The Middle English forms in parentheses are those which, although not deducible from the spelling, are supported by other evidence.
Norse words are denoted by N., and the conventional Icelandic spellings are occasionally added in parentheses.
Many of the inorganic preterites (such as bore=bfer) have been included in the present lists : they a/r@ all marked with a dagger.
84
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
|
a. |
ae, < |
ea, o. |
||
|
OLD. |
MIDDLE. |
MODEEN. |
||
|
hleahhan |
lauh |
laugh |
laaf |
|
|
geseah |
sau |
saw |
BOO |
|
|
eahta |
eiht (ai) |
eigld |
eit |
|
|
hleahtor |
laubte'r |
4 |
laughter |
laaftar |
|
sleaht |
slaubter |
slaughter |
si bb tar |
|
|
feaht |
faubt |
fought |
fbbt |
|
|
t^ehte |
tauht |
taught |
tbbt |
|
|
aron |
ar |
8 |
are |
aar |
|
bar a |
baar |
hare |
bear |
|
|
scearu |
sbaar |
share |
sbear |
|
|
starian |
staar |
stare |
stear |
|
|
sparian |
spaar |
12 |
spare |
spear |
|
waer |
waar |
ware (wary J |
wear |
|
|
faran |
faar |
fare |
fear |
|
|
nearu (nearw-) |
naru |
narrow |
naerou |
|
|
caru |
caar |
16 |
care |
cear |
|
dear |
daar |
dare |
dear |
|
|
taer |
ftbbr |
tore |
tbar |
|
|
baer {adj.) |
baar |
hare |
bear |
|
|
baer {pret.) \ |
baar ■bbbr |
20 |
hare lore |
bear bbar |
ears
ars
arse
ass
ar(e)we spearwa gearwa
bserfest
aru
sparu
geer
harvest
arrow 24 sparrow gear
harvest
serou
spaerou
giar
baavest
(ge)earnian weurnian fearn. gearn
eern warn fern yarn
earn 28 warn fern yarn
83n
wban
faan
yaan
earm bearm wearm Bwearm
arm harm warm swarm
arm 32 harm warm swarm
aam baam wbam swbam
earc serce-
arc
areh-
arh aac
36 arch{hishop) aacb-
a(0e ea ei), i, e(eo), e, e, se, ea, eb, u, o.
BY HENRY SMTSET, ESQ.
85
OLD.
a, ae, ea, 4» (continued).
MIDDLE. MODERN.
|
lawerce |
larc |
lark |
laac |
|
|
stearc |
stare |
stark |
staac |
|
|
spearca |
spare |
spark |
spaac |
|
|
mearc |
marc |
40 |
mark |
maac |
|
bare, N. (borkr) |
bare |
hark |
baac |
|
|
pearruc |
pare |
park |
paae |
|
|
heard |
hard |
hard |
haad |
|
|
weard |
ward |
44 |
tvard |
woad |
|
geard |
yard |
yard |
yaad |
|
|
beard |
beerd |
beard |
biad |
|
|
(^u) eart |
art |
art |
aat |
|
|
sweart |
swart |
48 |
swarthy |
swba]?! |
|
erset |
cart |
cart |
caat |
|
|
teart |
tart |
tart |
taat |
|
|
hearpe |
harp |
harp |
haap |
|
|
scearp |
sharp |
52 |
sharp |
shaap |
|
alor [under Id) |
||||
|
ealu |
aal |
ale |
eil |
|
|
eall |
al |
all |
661 |
|
|
heaU |
hal |
hall |
h661 |
|
|
salu (sealw-) |
salu |
56 |
sallow |
sselou |
|
smsel |
smal |
small |
smool |
|
|
sceal |
shal |
shall |
shael |
|
|
scealu |
scaal, shaal |
scale, shale |
sceil, shell |
|
|
steall |
stal |
60 |
stall |
stool |
|
weall |
wal |
wall |
w661 |
|
|
hwsel |
whaal |
whale |
wheil |
|
|
falu (fealw-) |
falu |
fallow |
faelou |
|
|
feallan |
fal |
64 |
fall |
f661 |
|
nihtegale |
nihtingaal |
nightingale |
naitinggeil |
|
|
gealle |
gal |
gall |
g661 |
|
|
calu (cealw-) |
calu |
callow |
cobIou |
|
|
ceallian (N. ?) |
eal |
68 |
call |
c661 |
|
dffil |
daal |
dale |
deil |
|
|
talu |
taal |
tale |
teil |
|
|
bealu |
baal |
hale |
beil |
|
|
swealwe |
swalu |
72 |
swallow |
swolou |
|
wealwian |
walu |
wallow |
wolou |
|
|
mealwe |
malu |
mallow |
maelou |
h; r, hr, 1, hi; ^, s, w, hw, f; ng, n, m ; g, c, d, t, b, p.
86
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
OLD.
a, se, ea, b {continued).
MIDDLE. MODERN.
|
^If |
elf |
elf |
elf |
|
|
healf |
half |
.76 |
half |
haaf |
|
sealfian |
salv |
salve |
sselv |
|
|
cealf |
calf |
calf |
caaf |
|
|
selmesse |
alms |
alms |
aamz |
|
|
healm |
halm |
80 |
halm |
hbbm |
|
sealm |
salm |
psalm |
saam |
|
|
halgian |
halu |
hallow |
haelou |
|
|
gealga |
galuz |
gallows |
gaelouz |
|
|
taelg |
talu |
84 |
tallow |
taelou |
|
stealciau |
stale |
■stalli |
stbbo |
|
|
wealcan |
wale |
walk |
wbbc |
|
|
bealca |
bale |
balk |
bbbc |
|
|
bealcettan |
belch |
88 |
helch |
belch |
|
alor |
alder |
alder |
bbldar |
|
|
eald |
bold |
old |
^uld |
|
|
eaidormann |
alderman |
alderman |
bbldamaa |
|
|
healdaa |
hbbld |
92 |
hold |
hould |
|
sealde |
sbbld |
sold |
sould |
|
|
fealdan |
fbbld |
fold |
fould |
|
|
ceald |
cbbld |
void |
could |
|
|
tealde |
tbbld |
96 |
told |
tould |
|
beald |
bbbld |
laid |
bould |
|
|
healt |
halt |
halt |
holt |
|
|
sealt |
salt |
salt |
solt |
|
|
mealt |
malt |
100 |
malt |
molt |
|
ha3(f)^ |
ha> |
hath |
hae]? |
|
|
hra^or |
ra%er |
rather |
raa^ar |
|
|
hwae^er |
whe^er |
whether |
whe^ar |
|
|
bse^ |
ba> |
104 |
hath |
baaj? |
|
banian |
baa^ |
bathe |
bei^ |
|
|
p£e^ |
pa> |
path |
paa]; |
|
|
fae^m |
fa^om |
fathom |
fae^am |
|
|
ea(l)swa |
az |
108 |
as |
aez |
|
assa |
as |
ass |
aas |
|
|
*h£e(f)s |
haz |
has |
haez |
a(8e ea ei), i, e(eo), e, e, se, ea, eo, u, o.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
87
OLD.
a, SB, ea, 6 {continued).
MIDDLE. MODERN.
|
laessa |
les |
less |
les |
|
|
^y Ises ^e |
lest |
112 |
lest |
lest |
|
waes |
waz |
was |
woz |
|
|
nges |
nes |
ness |
nes |
|
|
graes |
gras |
grass |
graas |
|
|
gloes |
glas |
116 |
glass |
glaas |
|
braes |
bras |
brass |
braas |
|
|
fesc |
ash |
ash |
aesh |
|
|
ascian |
asc |
ask |
aasc |
|
|
ascan |
ashez |
120 |
ashes |
aeshez |
|
rase N. |
rash |
rash |
raesh |
|
|
wascan |
wash |
wash |
wosh |
|
|
flasce |
flasc |
flask |
flaasc |
|
|
ba^a sic N. |
base |
124 |
bash |
baasc |
|
la(to)st |
last |
last |
laast |
|
|
laest {superl.) |
leest |
least |
Hist |
|
|
l^stan |
last |
last |
laast |
|
|
faest |
fast |
128 |
fast |
faast |
|
maest |
mast |
mast |
maast |
|
|
gsest |
gest |
guest |
gest |
|
|
casta N. |
cast |
cast |
caast |
|
|
castel |
castl |
132 |
castle |
caasl |
|
blSst |
blast |
blast |
blaast |
|
|
aesp |
aspen |
aspen |
sespen |
|
|
awel |
aul |
awl |
^ ^ 1 ool |
|
|
clawu |
clau |
136 |
claw |
clob |
|
hafa (imper.) |
hav |
have |
haev |
|
|
behafa |
behaav |
behave |
beheiv |
|
|
haefen |
haaven |
haven |
heivan |
|
|
bafoc |
hauc |
140 |
hawk |
hooc |
|
staef |
staf |
staff |
staaf |
|
|
stafas |
staavz |
staves |
steivz |
|
|
scafaa |
shaav |
shave |
sheiv |
|
|
nafu |
naav |
144 |
nave |
neiv |
|
geaf |
gaav |
gave |
geiv |
|
|
graef ) |
^ ' |
|||
|
grafan j |
graav |
grave |
greiv |
|
|
ceaf |
chaf |
chaff |
chaaf |
|
|
ceafor |
chaafer |
148 |
{cock)chafer |
cheifar |
h; r, hr, 1, hi; ^, s, w, hw, f; ng, n, m; g, c, d, t, b, p.
88
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
OLD.
crafian claefer
a, se, ea, O {continued).
MIDDLE.
craav cloover
crave clover
MODERN.
cr^iv cluuvar
liaef^ {under ^) hrsefn
raaven
raven
reivan
haefde
|
hl^efdige j ^"'" |
i/ei uj |
|||
|
sefter |
after |
152 |
after |
aaftar |
|
sceaft |
shaft |
shaft |
sbaaft |
|
|
crseft |
craft |
craft |
craaft |
|
|
angel (hook) |
angl |
to angle |
sengl |
|
|
hangan |
hang |
156 |
hang |
hteng |
|
hrang |
rang |
rang |
rseng |
|
|
lang |
long |
long |
long |
|
|
>rang |
>rong |
throng |
)rong |
|
|
]>wang |
>ong |
160 |
thong |
>ong |
|
sang [pret.) |
sang |
sang |
sseng |
|
|
sang {siibst.) |
song |
song |
song |
|
|
Strang |
strong |
strong |
strong |
|
|
sprang |
sprang |
164 |
sprang |
sprseng |
|
"wrang {pret.) |
wrang |
wrang |
rseng |
|
|
wrang {adj.) |
wrong |
wrong |
rong |
|
|
fang |
fang |
167 |
fang |
fseng |
|
mangere |
? monger |
(u) |
monger |
mangar |
|
on gemang |
? among |
(») |
among |
among |
|
gang |
gang |
gang |
gaeng |
|
|
tange |
tongs |
tongs |
tongz |
|
|
banga N. |
bang |
172 |
lang |
bseng |
|
ancleow |
and |
ankle |
send |
|
|
ranc |
ranc |
rank |
raenc |
|
|
hlanc |
lane |
lank |
Isenc |
|
|
)ancian |
jianc |
176 |
thank |
}i£enc |
|
sane |
sane |
sank |
ssenc |
|
|
scranc |
shranc |
shrank |
sbrsenc |
|
|
stanc |
stanc |
stank |
staenc |
|
|
dranc |
dranc |
180 |
drank |
drsenc |
|
Snig |
aani (a) |
any |
eni |
|
|
hanep |
hemp |
hemp |
hemp |
a(8e ea ei), i, e(eo), e, e, ^, ea, eo, u, o.
BY HENRY SWEET, ESQ.
a, SB, ea, O {continued).
89
|
OLD. |
MIDDLE. |
MODEKN. |
||
|
rann |
ran |
ran |
rsen |
|
|
rannsaca If. |
ransac |
184 |
ransack |
rsensaec |
|
lane |
laan |
lane |
lein |
|
|
^anne | |
^an ^en |
than then |
^en |
|
|
swan |
swan |
188 |
swan |
swon |
|
gespann |
span |
span |
spsen |
|
|
wann {pret.) |
f wun |
won |
wan |
|
|
wann {adj.) |
wan |
wan |
won |
|
|
wanian |
waan |
192 |
wane |
wein |
|
liwanne |
when |
when |
when |
|
|
fana |
vaan |
vane |
vein |
|
|
mann |
man |
man |
msen |
|
|
mane |
maan |
196 |
mane |
mein |
|
manig |
maani (a) |
many |
meni |
|
|
begann |
began |
hegan |
begsen |
|
|
ganot |
ganet |
ganet |
goenet |
|
|
cann |
can |
200 |
can |
csen |
|
crana |
craan |
crane |
crein |
|
|
bana |
baan |
bane |
bein |
|
|
gebann |
ban |
ban |
bsen |
|
|
panne |
pan |
204 |
pan |
paen |
|
an(d)swarian |
answer |
answer |
aansar |
|
|
anfilt |
anvil |
anvil |
aenvil |
|
|
and |
and |
and |
send |
|
|
hand |
hand |
208 |
hand |
hsend |
|
land |
land |
land |
laend |
|
|
sand |
sand |
sand |
ssend |
|
|
standan |
stand |
stand |
staend |
|
|
strand |
strand |
212 |
strand |
strsend |
|
wand N. (vondr) |
wand |
ivand |
wond |
|
|
wand {pret.) |
f wuund |
tvound |
waund |
|
|
wandrian |
wander |
wander |
wonder |
|
|
candel |
candl |
216 |
candle |
csendl |
|
band {pret.) |
f buund |
botmd |
baund |
|
|
band {subst.) |
band bond |
band bond |
bsend bond |
|
|
brand |
brand |
220 |
brand |
brsend |
|
wanta, N. |
want |
want |
wont |
|
|
plantian |
plant |
plant |
plaant |
h; r, hr, 1, hi; ^, s, w, hw, f; ng, n, m; g, c, d, t, b, p.
90
HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS.
OLD.
a, 88, ea, O {continued).
MIDDLE. MODERN.
|
ic earn |
am |
am |
aem |
|
|
^mette |
emet |
224 |
emmet, ant |
emet, aant |
|
|