Re: Middle English question

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Patrick Dunn wrote:
> > OE is more my field, but the general rules are:
> >
> > final e's pronounced as /@/
> > a vowel before a final e is long, unless followed by double consonants (so
> > "hadde" is a short a, but the e in speke is long
> > doubled vowels are long
> > y pronounced like /i/.
> > Most vowels have their eupropean equivelents.
>
> So, something like:
> [he: aks@d after eg@s and Te: go:d@ wif answerd@ Tat Se: cu:d@ spe:k@
> no: frenS@ and Ten at last a no:Ter sEd Tat he: wu:ld@ ha:v@ had@ ej:r@n
> Ten Te: go:d@ wif sEd Tat Se: understo:d him wel]?
Basically right, I think - although by Caxton's time (which was pretty
late in the Middle English period, late 15th cent.) many of the final
"e"s had already become silent, at least optionally.  You can tell
because there are certain words which Caxton spells sometimes with an
"e", and sometimes without, e.g. "coud" and "coude", "his" and "hise".

So "she coude speke no frensshe" might have been [Se: cu:d@ spe:k@
no frenS@] or [Se: cu:d spe:k no frenS], or something between the
two.  There was probably a good deal of variation from speaker to
speaker and dialect to dialect.

Also, one small point:  "nother" was probably [no:Der] rather than
[no:Ter].  Voicing of intervocalic fricatives like "th" goes right
back to Old English, and if it was [D] in Old English and [D] in
Modern English, I don't see why it wouldn't have been [D] in Middle
English.  (I'm less certain about "the" and "then".  These had [T]
in Old English, and [D] in Modern English, but I'm not sure when the
switch-over happened.)

And Nik is right, "ou" was pronounced /u/.

(Like Patrick, I'm no expert.  But I just finished teaching a summer
course on the history of English, so all of this is quite fresh in
my mind...)

Matt.