Liebl Christian
The A and O of a medieval English sound-change
To the best of my knowledge, no detailed comprehensive investigation of the origins
and geographical diffusion of ā > ǭ (as in stān > stǭn), one of the most important
phonological changes in the history of the English language, has so far been
undertaken. The accounts in the standard handbooks usually look back to the classic
treatments in Luick ([1964]) or Jordan (1974) and are rarely based on any new
empirical research. The present paper will first briefly discuss some problems
concerning the sources and phonetic quality of OE ā (touching on Homorganic and
Open Syllable Lengthening inter alia), vowel length in compounds, the actuation of
the change and certain instances of o erroneously interpreted as ǭ. This will be
followed by a critical evaluation of the (partly unpublished) evidence provided by
onomastic material – chiefly culled from the county surveys of the English PlaceName Society – as well as literary texts, glosses and documents, ranging from late
Old English to early Middle English. The numerous examples of early o-spellings now
confirm the intuitions of those scholars who advocated an eleventh-century date for ā
> ǭ. In the North and North Midlands, however, the change seems to have taken
place not as late as hitherto assumed (cf. e.g. Dietz 1989), even though matters are
somewhat obscured by the development of ou > au (more widespread than generally
believed). Finally, summary statistics (based on place-name data) permit some
unexpected, albeit tentative, conclusions about the frequency and geographical
spread of o-spellings throughout England prior to 1290-1350, the period studied by
Kristensson (1967, 1987, 1995).
References
Dietz, Klaus. 1989. "Die historische Schichtung phonologischer Isoglossen in den englischen
Dialekten: II. Mittelenglische Isoglossen." In Andreas Fischer, ed. The History and the
Dialects of English: Festschrift for Eduard Kolb. (Anglistische Forschungen, 203) Heidelberg:
Winter, 133-175.
Jordan, Richard (trans. and rev. by Eugene Joseph Crook). 1974. Handbook of Middle
English Grammar: Phonology. (Janua Linguarum, Series Practica, 218) The Hague & Paris:
Mouton.
Kristensson, Gillis. 1967. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290-1350: The Six Northern
Counties and Lincolnshire. (Lund Studies in English, 35) Lund: Gleerup.
Kristensson, Gillis. 1987. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290-1350: The West Midland
Counties. (Publications of the New Society of Letters at Lund, 78) Lund: Lund University
Press.
Kristensson, Gillis. 1995. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290-1350: The East Midland
Counties. (Publications of the New Society of Letters at Lund, 88) Lund: Lund University
Press.
Luick, Karl. 1914-1940 [1964]. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. 2 vols.
Stuttgart: Tauchnitz; Oxford: Blackwell.