Chapter 5 Phonological Changes

 5.1. In learning OE it is necessary to take careful note of the sound-changes which occurred in it and which give it its characteristic differences from other Low Germanic languages. These sound-changes also underlie, of course, the sounds which developed in ME and MnE. They will be outlined in chronological order in this and following chapters, beginning here with the three earliest. The vowel changes dealt with concern only those in syllables having primary or secondary, not weak stress.

Gemination

5.2. A type of consonant lengthening, traditionally called gemination, occurred in the WGmc stage (see Diagram 2), hence it affected not only OE but all the other WGmc dialects as well.

Rule: A single consonant (except r), when preceded in Gmc1 by a short vowel and followed by j, was lengthened in WGmc2

Examples: Thus Gmc *cunja- became WGmc *cunnja- (and ultimately OE cynn).3 Similarly, Gmc *saljan ˃ WGmc *salljan (˃ OE sellan).4 But r was not lengthened, hence Gmc *harja- remained unchanged in WGmc (and ultimately became here in OE). Gmc f and g were regularly geminated in WGmc; the forms descended from them are written in OE as bb and cg respectively.5

Exercise 1. Write out the WGmc forms which would have resulted from gemination of the following Gmc forms: *cwaljan, *sōcjan, *hafjan, *lagjan, *farjan, *dōmjan, *satjan, *sandjan. (Note that it did not change all these forms.)

The Change of a to o

5.3. This change occurred in Prehistoric OE (PrehOE) but not in all dialects. Rule: Before a nasal, the vowel [a] became [ɔ], a being respelled as o in most instances in EWS. (By the time of LWS, however, the a spellings had become predominant, even where the [ɔ] pronunciation survived. 6)

Examples: EWS ond, lomb, monig, long--(MnE and, lamb, many, long) LWS and, lamb, manig, lang.

Note: When on (˂PrehOE*an) occurs before a voiceless spirant (h, f, þ, s). the nasal disappears and, in compensation, the vowel is lengthened to ō. Under the same conditions in and un become ī and ū. Thus EWS sōft (˂ *sonft ˂ *sanft), soft; ōðor (˂ *onðor ˂ * anðar ), other; gōs (˂ *gons ˂ *gans), goose; fīf (˂ *finf five; ðūhte (˂ *ðunhte thought. Compare Mn German sanft, ander, gans, fünf, dünkte, where cognate n was not lost.

The change of a to æ

5.4. Rule: in PrehOE, a (except when followed by a nasal as above) was generally fronted and raised to (or nearly to) the position of æ unless the phonetic environment was such as to counteract this fronting tendency.

Examples: 1. In monosyllables, dæg, day, bæc, back, sæd, sad, heavy; 2. In polysyllables when PrehOE e or i (front vowels) come in the syllable following the base: dæges, day's, togædere, together. But a is unchanged when followed by w or by a, o, or u (back sounds) in the next syllable: clawe, of a claw, dagas, days, nacod, naked, racu, explanation. (The a in past participles such as slagen is not exceptional but results from the fact that --en ˂ earlier --an. Thus there was a back environment counteracting the fronting tendency.)

Note: One effect of this sound-change was to make the base irregular in paradigms, as in the examples just given: NomSg dæg, GenSg dæges, but NomPl dagas; similarly, NomSg sacu, DatSg sæcce, etc. (Further changes undergone by this æ are detailed in Ch. 8.)

Exercise 2. Write out the EWS forms which result from the change of a ˃ æ in the following PrehOE forms: *acer, *sadol, *craftig, *water, *aðele, *lawerbēam.

FOOTNOTES

1"Gmc" refers to the stage of development after PrGmc changes have taken place but before the branching into NGmc, EGmc, and WGmc.

2Later, when the dialects came to be written, lengthening was indicated by doubling the consonant‐hence the term "gemination", from Lat geminatio, a doubling.

3In PrehOE the j changed the quality of some of the vowels preceding it, and ultimately it disappeared. (See Ch. 11, i‐umlaut).

4Compare, in other WGmc dialects, OFris sella, OS sellian, OHG sellen‐but EGmc (i.e. Gothic) saljan, NGmc (i.e. ON)selja, both ungeminated.

5Gmc f represents a voiced bilabial spirant [ƀ]; g represents [ɣ]. Examples: Gmc *lifjan by gemination > WGmc *libbjan (> OE libban); Gmc *bugjan > WGmc *buggjan (> OE bycgan).

6Phonetically, this change means that, under influence of the nasal, the low vowel [a] was raised and rounded in the WS area, though not in Kent or East Anglia. The change in the sound must have been distinct enough so that the EWS spelling was changed to reflect it. The growing importance of the London area may be responsible for the LWS return to the a spelling. The [ɔ] sound has survived till today in the W Midland dialect area: see Harold Orton, Survey oƒ English Dialects.

23

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 3 Speech Sounds. Vowels

  3.1.  In the OE manuscripts (MSS), long vowels and diphthongs are sometimes marked with and acute accent (´); edited modern texts, the present one included, usually indicate etymologically long vowels with a macron (¯), leaving the short unmarked. Thus  gōd , good, but  God , God;  wītan , to keep, but  witan , to know; and so on. Scholars know which to mark or leave unmarked after comparisons made with cognate forms in other Gmc languages and from observing how these vowels later developed in ME and MnE. Another valuable source of evidence is OE poetry, where vowel length is often indicated by the meter (see pp. 274-288). Classifying Vowels 3.2.  Vowels may differ from one another in  quantity  (i.e. length),  quality  or both. They are classified as regards quality chiefly by three factors taken together: the degree of openness of the oral cavity, the position of the tongue, and the shape of the lips. In fuller detail: The cavit...
Read more

Chapter 4 OE Spelling and Pronunciation

  4.1.  The growth of literacy and literary culture among the Anglo-Saxons was a consequence of their conversion to Christianity. The Latin alphabet, introduced by missionaries, displaced the Germanic  ƒuþark  (runic alphabet), which in any event had only been used for brief inscriptions of a magical, monumental, or practical nature and never for the transcription of extended texts. It was in the  scriptoria  of the early monasteries that writing was done on a large scale for the first time in Anglo-Saxon England. The monks were concerned first and foremost with the creation and transmission of Latin texts, which they had been taught to write by Irish monks. When they started writing their own vernacular language they naturally maintained the same correspondence between sound and symbol to which they were accustomed in writing Latin. As a consequence, OE spelling before Ælfred's reign, and to some extent after it, approached a phonetic rendering of the actu...
Read more