V Development of the Consonants

Development of the Consonants.

The finer details of the development of consonants - those surrounding the slight backing of /s/ or the slight affrication of /k/, for instance - are often inaccessible to philologists, and I will discuss this point further at the end of this chapter. We can, however, discuss broader trends through spelling evidence. The biggest difference between northern and southern consonants has historically been in palatalisation. I explained this briefly towards the beginning of the book, but palatalisation is a change that causes a consonant to be articulated closer to the palate than it was before the change. Before the various groups constituting the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain, a few of their dialects were affected by varying degrees of palatalisation in the velar plosives /k/ and /g/. This made its way into most of the Old English dialects, as well as the Frisian languages to a lesser extent, and was governed by a number of rules. Proto Germanic /ɣ/ (which became /g/ in most other Germanic languages) and /k/ would become /j/ and /tʃ/ respectively when followed by a front vowel. /ɣ/ was also affected after front vowels, unless it was followed by a back vowel. /k/ was only affected after /i/ and /iː/, unless it was followed by a back vowel. /sk/ clusters became /ʃ/ at the start of a word and after a front vowel - again, unless a back vowel followed. Finally, Proto-Germanic /ggj/ clusters became /dʒ/. This resulted in such modern words as church, cheese, sheep, ship, bridge and ridge in standard English. In Cumbrian, there are numerous forms unaffected by palatalisation scattered throughout older texts and place names. Some examples are kirk (‘church’) /kʊrk/, Keswick (place name, equivalent of ‘cheese-wick’) /ˈkezɪk/, brigg (‘bridge’) /brɪg/ and rigg (‘ridge’) /rɪg/, among numerous others. All of these appear to be regular developments from the Old English forms cirice, cēse, scēap, brycg and rycg. There are also forms cognate with English words that have been loaned in from Old Norse and thus do not show palatalisation, such as kowp (‘to exchange’), garn (‘yarn’) and garth (‘yard;

enclosure’). It’s important not to jump on the idea of Scandinavian influence accounting for the lack of palatalisation in the affected native words. There is good reason to suspect that most West Germanic dialects immediately prior to the migration period did not show palatalisation, and the idea of one of those making its way to Britain and retaining its velar consonants is a more convincing explanation than that Scandniavian influence in the north caused already palatalised forms to re-velarise. Many of these velar forms survived well into the 19th and 20th centuries, only to be overtaken by palatalised loan words from standard English. Middle English texts, including Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, have the velar form ik as the first-person singular pronoun in the north at that time (the form corresponding to the English word I). Note that the presence of unpalatalised forms in later Cumbrian does not preclude the existence of palatalised forms in parts of Cumbria during the Anglo-Saxon period, but place name evidence suggests velar forms were widespread. A curious but less-remarked-upon feature is the fronting of /ʃ/ to /s/. This is found throughout Middle English indentures from Cumbria in spellings such as sal (‘shall’) and sud (‘should’), and some forms are recorded in the Orton survey, such as /ˈsʊgər/ for sugar and /ɐs/ for ash. However, the people giving these forms often commented that they were ‘old’ or likely to be used by one of their grandparents, meaning they were probably largely obsolete by, say, 1920. It is difficult to know whether these represent the elision of a velar /k/, or a fronting of an alreadypalatalised /ʃ/. Place name forms such as skip in Skipton suggest that /sk/ forms persisted in some places. Old English /w/ has been retained as normal in most circumstances, so that w in later Cumbrian corresponds closely with /w/ in RP English. However, Old English hw- seems to have followed a different path. Those who have read a lot of northern Middle English texts will know that qu- is often used to spell words in the what, when, where lexical set, so that they are rendered quat, quen, quere. This is sometimes put down to a quirk of orthographic convention, and that the sound was /ʍ/ (a

voiceless /w/) as it had been in Old English and continued to be in standard English until relatively recently. This sound has a range of exotic realisations in Scots dialects, including /f-/ and /kw-/. It could be argued (and I would argue) that a number of later Cumbrian forms point to a Middle English realisation of /kw-/ in parts of the north-west. Wiet (‘quiet’) /ˈwɐɪ ˌ ət/, wick (‘alive’) /wɪk/, wishen (‘cushion’) /ˈwɪʃən/. In wheen-cat (‘female cat’) in the Glossarium Brigantinum, the wheen appears to be cognate with standard English queen. I suspect that the quick consonant merged with the what consonant during the Middle English period, explaining qu- spellings, and that this process had finished by the time the Glossarium was compiled in the 1670s. In an analogous change, word-initial /θw-/ clusters reduced to /ʍ-/. Old English /l/ has been retained everywhere, apart from in the conditions described in the section on long vowels. As already discussed, it’s likely that during the 1600s, prior to the /ɐl/ > /ɐː/ > /ɔː/ change, there was a distinction between Cumbrian varieties that had velarised /ɫ/ between /ɐ/ and an alveolar plosive, and Cumbrian varieties who had 'clear' /l/ in all positions. The nature of /r/ in Old English, particularly Northumbrian Old English, is debated. Roger Lass presents a good case that it was a uvular sound in some areas, such as [ʁ]. A similar sound survived well into the 20th century in the ‘Northumbrian burr.’ Later Cumbrian /r/ was realised as a tap [ɾ] or trill [r], and given its prevalence in world languages and in the rural dialects of Germanic languages, I tend to favour a system of free variation between these two for Cumbrian. I may re-think this view in a future publication, though. The shift to non-rhoticity was in its early throes in 1913 when Brilioth was writing; /r/ was lost only between a stressed vowel and an alveolar plosive in coda position. As the 20th century progressed, this increased in scope. My grandfather, born in the mid 1930s, speaks almost entirely non-rhotically, only realising /r/ before a vowel most of the time. This is with the exception of what is called intrusive ‘r’, a feature of a lot of non-rhotic British English dialects.

The intrusive ‘r’, for those unfamiliar, is the appearance of a rhotic between two words, where one word ends with a non-high vowel and the next starts with one. For example, in rapid speech, I would realise the phrase ‘stamina up’ as [ˈstamɪnəɹ ˈʌʔp], with an [ɹ] between the two words, even though neither word has historically contained a rhotic. Occasionally, particularly when speaking to other Cumbrians, he will realise /r/ as an alveolar tap at the end of a word. Most young Cumbrians today have fully non-rhotic accents, pronouncing /r/ only before a vowel. The Old English nasals /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/ appear to have been realised in the same way throughout the last millennium. However, when a nasal in the coda of a stressed syllable was followed by a voiced plosive in Old English, that voiced plosive has disappeared by later Cumbrian. Some resulting words are shown below:

RP Cumbrian Spindle /spɪndəl/ Spinnel /spɪnəl/ Finger /ˈfɪŋgə/ Finger /ˈfɪŋər/ Ember /ˈembə/ Emmer /ˈemər/ Bramble /ˈbɹæmbəl/ Brimmel /ˈbrɪməl/ Mumble /ˈmʌmbəl/ Mummel /ˈmʊməl/ Thimble /ˈθɪmbəl/ Thimmel /ˈθɪməl/ Longer /ˈlɒŋgə/ Langer /ˈlɐŋər/

This kind of change, and subsequent loaning into standard English, is likely to be the origin of words like simmer. This change is tricky to date; spinnel is found in Relph’s poetry, putting the change before 1747. Brimmel-kites (‘bramble berries’) appears in the 1677 Glossarium. It is difficult to narrow down the date range in which the change may have happened any more than that. Possibly alongside this change, we see loss of word-final /b/ after /m/, and loss of word-final /g/ after /ŋ/, in words like lamb [lɐm], climb [klɪm] or [tlɪm], lang [lɐŋ].

In Old English -Vfen clusters (where V represents any vowel), the /n/ has assimilated to the /f/ (realised as a [v] in Old English between two voiced sounds), and the unstressed vowel has disappeared. In later Cumbrian, these are found as [-Vbm̩] clusters, as in ebm (‘even’) [ˈebm̩], sebm (‘seven’) [ˈsebm̩], yubm (‘oven’) [ˈjʊbm̩]. Phonologically, it is probably simplest to represent /[- bm̩] as /-bən/ or /-bəm/. /d/ in certain word-final environments can become /t/. Brilioth was unable to pinpoint the exact conditions that lead to this devoicing. I had a little poke around for an article for University of Melbourne linguistics society journal. The devoicing tends to happen in past simple forms - see prentit (‘printed’), weddit (‘wedded’), gaddert (‘gathered’), but sound changes cannot have grammatical conditions, so there must be a deeper phonological explanation than this. Word-final /d/ devoicing can be seen throughout north-western literature. Indentures made in Cumbria in the late Middle English period have -t as the standard ending for past simple forms extremely regularly. Brilioth remarks that where Old English word-final /d/ is in an unstressed syllable, or where it is in a consonant cluster, it usually becomes /t/, but that beyond that, the sound change 'follows no definite laws.' Examination of regional Middle English literature sheds some light on this; 15thcentury indentures gathered from the University of Stavanger's Middle English Grammar Corpus (see further reading) show an extremely consistent change from original /-d/ to /-t/ when wordfinal and in an unstressed syllable. The reason it applies so commonly to preterites is because they often ended in * -Vd in north-western Middle English, giving forms such as payitt ('paid'), claymet ('claimed'), callet ('called'). The fact that authors of the period seem to switch between <i> and <e> to spell this unstressed vowel, and the fact that many English dialects have a tendency to centralise unstressed vowels, points to a vowel quality something like [ɪ], so that a word like payitt would be pronounced /ˈpɐjɪt/. It's possible that this change caused people to view /-ɪt/ as the standard preterite ending, and to eventually over-apply it to preterites that would not have been affected by

the sound change. Old English intervocalic /d/ is retained in Cumbrian in some situations where it becomes a fricative in standard English:

RP Cumbrian Father /ˈfɑːðə/ Fadder /ˈfɐdər/ Leather /ˈleðə/ Ledder /ˈledər/ Feather /ˈfeðə/ Fedder /ˈfedər/ Bother /ˈbɒðə/ Bodder /ˈbɒdər/ Slither /ˈslɪðə/ Sledder /ˈsledər/ Nether /ˈneðə/ Nedder /ˈnedər/

By the late 19th century, and certainly by Brilioth’s time, wordinitial /kl-/ and /gl-/ clusters had become /tl-/ and /dl-/ in some variants of the dialect. The widespreadness of this is unclear, but it is not attested by Brilioth or by the Orton survey, suggesting disappearance or obselesence by about 1900. In Old English, there seems to have been a complementary distribution between the phones [ç] and [x], both of which were allophones of the phoneme /h/. The phone [ç] was used in words like siht (‘sight’), niht (‘night’) where the phoneme came after a front vowel. The phone [x] was used in words like genōh (‘enough’) and rūh (‘rough’) where the phoneme came after a back vowel. A very similar distribution exists in standard German today. In Cumbrian, as previously discussed, [ç] disappeared in words like night and sight between 1600 and 1800, and the vowel was lengthened to compensate. [x] has either disappeared altogether or become /f/, as in slaghter (‘slaughter’) [ˈslɐftər]. Because words in this lexical set were spelled with <gh> even after taking the found /f/, it is difficult to place when the change happened; it may have been in line with the disappearance of [ç], it may have been earlier. The fact that it is not remarked upon in 19th-century dialect literature (even by Dickinson, who comments on the disappearance of [ç]) suggests it was not later. In instances where [x] disappeared altogether, it may first have become labialised [xʷ], and then [ʍ], before finally voicing in words like thought, nought, producing the later

forms thowt and nowt. Below is what I think is the most direct explanation of the development of nought in Cumbrian:

[nɒxt] > [nɒxʷt] > [nɒʍt] > [nɒʊt]

Aside from the cases given, all of the consonants seem to have followed broadly similar paths of development to their standard English counterparts. The situation of the word whol (‘hole’) is unique. In later Cumbrian, and to this day in the speech of some Cumbrians, it is /wɔːl/. However, its spelling (often beginning with <wh>) suggests that it must have been [ʍɔːl] until some point in the 19th century, and this is in line with its expected phonological development from Middle English. The late Middle English pronunciation was /hɔːl/. The fact that this, subject to the /ɔː > wɔː/ change, became [ʍɔːl], suggests that [ʍ] in Cumbrian is the realisation of a phonological /hw/ cluster. This harks back to the difference between phones and phonemes that I explained in the introduction to linguistics; the phoneme is the underlying concept of a sound within the mind of the speaker, and the phone is the way that this concept is realised when the speaker talks7. In this case, what the speaker considers to be a /hw-/ cluster (resulting in the change from /hɔːl/ to /hwɔl/ and eventually to /hwɔːl/) is actually realised as [ʍ] (the voiceless equivalent of [w]). Of course, this is the same sound as we find at the beginning of more conservative pronunciations of what and when (and, in Cumbrian, wheen and whick) - the word whol falls into that same lexical set. When the [ʍ] in these words was voiced - or, to put it another way, when phonological /h/ was lost before /w/ - the word became /wɔːl/.

7 For any biologists reading, this is similar to the relationship between a genotype (the underlying genetic situation) and a phenotype (the realisation of those genes, which may differ from situation to situation and from organism to organism).

The development of the words yam (‘home’) and yal (‘whole’) can be visualised in a similar way. The late Middle English form of yam was /hɛːm/, which eventually became /hjɐm/, with the initial /hj-/ cluster probably being realised as [ç-] or [çj-]. Exactly when this cluster was reduced depends on which way we parse the phonology. If you remember, [ç] also existed in words like neet (‘night’) and seet (‘sight’) until relatively late-on, so the loss of phonetic [ç] at the beginning of /hjɐm/ might have been part of this change. Alternatively, it could be viewed as a loss of phonological /h/ before /j/. Initial kn- clusters found in Old English seem to have been preserved in certain varieties of Cumbrian into the early 1800s as /tn-/, such as in tnop ('knob') and tnit ('knit'), as found in the poetry of Robert Anderson. As promised, we now return to the finer details of consonant articulation. In later Cumbrian - at least, Cumbrian as recorded in the Orton survey - /t/ and /d/ are realised dentally when they occur before /ɾ/. Dental realisations of these plosives are by no means unheard-of in earlier English - John Hart, an advocate for spelling reform writing in the 1550s, describes what can only be dental /t/ and /d/ sounds in all positions. It may be that this was commonplace across English dialects before a certain point in time, or it may be that this is a development distinct from later Cumbrian dental realisations. Affrication of certain plosives occurs in other north-western English varieties, notably that of Liverpool, and this has been attributed to Irish influence. The influx of Irish migrants to 19thcentury Cumbria may therefore be taken as an explanation for this, and one which places a clear date before which the affrication cannot have happened - but it is equally possible that it is a Cumbrian innovation independent of external influence.