The cambridge history of the english language volume 2 part 4

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The cambridge history of the english language volume 2 part 4

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James Milroy spoken dialects and of medieval written dialects If, at the present day, a person has lived for long periods in different parts of the country, his/her speech is normally affected by this experience: hence, we may be able to detect (for example) Scottish, northern English and southern English features in his/her speech The traditional regional-dialect researcher, who is normally interested in examples of 'pure' regional speech, will not want such a person as an informant and will reject him/her in favour of true natives of the areas concerned In traditional Middle English studies, the focus on precisely locatable written texts is exactly parallel to this Texts that appear to show mixed dialects, or which seem to have been copied by different scribes, and which are difficult to localise for these and other reasons, have traditionally been undervalued and neglected as materials for dialect description However, the Middle English scholar is in a very unhappy position here, because the vast majority of surviving documents are of this problematic kind We cannot afford to be purists, and so we must devise methods for exploring the materials that have survived and account systematically for all the data This, essentially, is what the LALME programme has tried to do, and it is easiest to clarify this by referring to some publications by the researchers themselves Mclntosh has consistently emphasised the importance of this work for linguistic theory, and has pointed out the failures of the past in the respects I have mentioned There is such a wealth of surviving material that 'linguists fall regrettably far short of exploiting anything like all there is or even of making optimum selective use' of what is available (Mclntosh (1975) 1989: 32) The researchers have set out to correct this, and the task has involved not only an enormous commitment of time and energy, but also a wide range of sophisticated analytic skills It is important to remember that many of the relevant documents have never been published: thus, an essential task has been to track down and analyse unpublished manuscripts in addition to those that have been published, and to prepare (amongst other things) what the researchers call scribal profiles for the documents (Mclntosh 1975) Most of the surviving literary texts are copies, and these are often at more than one remove from the original Some copies are in the hand of a single scribe, but others are by two or more scribes Mclntosh and Wakelin (1982) discuss the case of Mirk's Festial, which is in the hands of five different scribes - but one of these scribes seems to have copied material in no less than fourteen different dialects Although this may be an extreme case, the example does make it clear how important it is to 188 Middle English dialectology explore the scribal and linguistic make-up of the texts, and Mclntosh et al have therefore suggested a classification of text types in terms of the history of copying and of the different patterns of textual mixing that may arise In some cases, a single scribe seems to have translated from an original into his own dialect, but he may have done this inconsistently to a greater or lesser extent Sometimes, for example, the translation is ' progressive': the scribe starts by copying more or less faithfully from his exemplar, but as he begins to work more quickly, he resorts more and more to the forms of his own 'dialect' (or scribal practice) Other texts, however, are composite: two or more different copyists have been at work on the text that has come down to us, or a single scribe has faithfully copied an exemplar which is itself the work of two scribes The Cotton MS of The Owl and the Nightingale is a well-known example of the latter, and in this case the place where one scribe finished and the other began can be accurately determined: the scribe of the final version seems to have made few changes In extreme cases of mixed origin, we encounter Mischsprachen, in which (according to Mclntosh et al 1986) the variation encountered is random and unpredictable However, it is a measure of the great progress that these scholars have made that Laing (1988) has been able to illuminate the textual histories of two manuscripts of Richard Rolle's English Psalter, which are effectively Mischsprachen She demonstrates, using quantitative methods (amongst others), that even in these extreme cases, the layers of copying may be separable As many Middle English literary texts survive in only one copy, methods of 'internal reconstruction', in addition to comparative methods, are essential What we can know about the original depends on interpretations of internal variation in the text, which lead to hypotheses about the provenance of the original, and to some extent these interpretations have traditionally depended on rather purist notions about relatively uniform dialects Mclntosh et al (1986) have given attention to the possibility of personal and social variation affecting the language of the texts They note the possibility that a writer of mixed upbringing may betray in his usage the influence of two or more different dialects, and that a text may be affected by mixing of what they call a sociolinguistic kind, especially through influence from the spread of standard English, which becomes noticeable in later Middle English Mclntosh et al also note that it is possible to find, especially in the fifteenth century, an extremely wide range of spelling variation in 189 James Milroy the work of a single writer Thus, we should be able to acknowledge that when a text contains variation, this may not all be due to the activities of copyists from different regions: the copyist of the extant version, or his speech community, may have tolerated a good deal of variability in usage Indeed, one thing is obvious: the copyists evidently thought that the mixed and variable usage of their copies was acceptable in some way,'and Mclntosh, Samuels and their colleagues have given much more weight to this aspect of variation than have previous scholars 3.2.9 Some applications I pointed out in section 3.1 that the goal of a dialect survey is primarily linguistic and is specifically to describe and account for variation in language But it is clear that such an extensive exploration of manuscript sources can have applications to other kinds of research The most immediately obvious applications are literary, editorial and textual The case of Havelok the Dane (MS Bodley Laud Misc 108 (A) plus some other fragments) is important linguistically, but it is also of interest for literary history To demonstrate the LALME method, I shall now briefly review some of Mclntosh's arguments about the localisation of Laud Misc 108 Mclntosh (1976) argues that this text may be from Norfolk, southwest of King's Lynn, a long distance south of the town that is preeminently associated with it - Grimsby, in north Lincolnshire The -es verbal ending that we have noted above (p 169) makes it quite possible that the original was composed in north Lincolnshire, but we not know how many copies intervene between the putative original and the manuscript we have to hand It has long been clear that Havelok has much mixing of forms that are not characteristically northeast midland (e.g a fairly high incidence of < o > for OE /a:/, on which see map 3.1), and, despite the attribution to north Lincolnshire by Dickins & Wilson (1956: 34) and others, the surviving manuscript has never seemed to be from as far north as Grimsby Mclntosh uses the 'fit' technique to suggest a more precise location for the text than has been suggested before - an area in west Norfolk south-west of King's Lynn Various comparisons are used here, but an important one is the comparison with the work of scribe D of BM Cotton Cleopatra C vi Mclntosh shows that this is probably from west Norfolk rather than Lincolnshire, and it displays many similarities to Havelok The majority 190 Middle English dialectology of the key forms in Have/ok that Mclntosh uses to refine the ' fit' turn out to have a distribution to the south of west Norfolk (e.g in material located in Ely, near Cambridge) more often than to the north of it Indeed, when some variants (e.g togidere 'together') have a distribution north of Norfolk, they are usually also found to the south The incidence of these more southerly variants is greater in Havelok than in Cleopatra C vi; therefore, Havelok may be from somewhere to the south of Cleopatra C vi Another theme running through this research programme is the application of its findings to questions of importance in the history of English In a very influential paper, Samuels (1963) has considered changes in the London dialect of the fifteenth century and the varieties that may be said to have been competing at that time for pre-eminence as the basis of modern literary standard English These varieties are classified into four types, of which the Chancery standard is the ancestor of the modern literary standard Samuels also argues tha the main regional influence on London English and the early standard language is not the whole east midland area, or areas to the east of it, but the central midlands Again, the relative precision here is made possible by work on the atlas project I have noted above that the Ls4LME researchers have taken more account than previous scholars of sociolinguistic factors Unlike traditional scholars, they have pointed out that some of the variation encountered may be inherent in the written language of one particular scribe, and they have mentioned the acceptability of variant forms to the copyists It is appropriate, therefore, to go on to consider in section 3.3 another perspective on variation in Middle English documents, which is not primarily about geographical provenance and not primarily devoted to reconstructing textual histories, but which may be seen as complementary to these This perspective is informed mainly by the results of variation studies on present-day dialects: it depends on the perception that variation may itself be structured and is not necessarily the result of errors or carelessness Therefore, it can be studied in itself as a matter of linguistic interest and as a contribution to historical linguistic theory 191 James Milroy 3.3 3.3.1 Variation theory and Middle English dialectology Introduction Present-day dialectology has developed an additional dimension of interest which focuses on variation in the speech of individual speakers and speech communities rather than on broader geographical patterns, and it is the purpose of this section to consider how far this perspective can contribute to the analysis and interpretation of variation in Middle English The primary interest of social dialectology is in tracing the origins and diffusion of linguistic changes, and these patterns are typically discovered in language variation within communities in the different speech styles of individuals and of social groups From an analysis of these patterns, changes in progress can be located, and their path through the community can be described The most important principle is that languages (or dialects) are never 'pure' or uniform states of language, and further that variation in speech is itself structured and functional; e.g it may be shown to serve social purposes As Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968) have pointed out, structuredness should not be equated with uniformity; for a language state to be structured it does not have to be uniform As Middle English language states are very far from being uniform, they should in principle be suited to this kind of analysis The claim that variation is structured in communities has been tested by numerous studies (Labov 1966; Trudgill 1974a; Milroy & Milroy 1978-to name a few), which have demonstrated regular patterns of variation according to speech style, social context and social group, and the basic perception has been formalised in the idea of variable rules (Labov 1972a; Sankoff 1978, etc.) Rules of this kind specify the constraints on the variation that has been discovered by empirical observation In a present-day community, these appear as constraints on variation in speech: in Middle English we must locate these constraints initially through the writing system The consequence of this is that, in general, variable texts can become more valuable for our researches than relatively uniform ones Let me clarify this by comparing a modern case with a medieval case Suppose we show that in a present-day vernacular, there is structured variation in verb forms of the type he doesI he (see Cheshire 1982 for a relevant study), with one form perhaps being preferred in formal styles and the other in casual styles; we may also - by comparing the speech of different social groups and age-groups - additionally show that one 192 Middle English dialectology form is progressing at the expense of the other As it happens, Middle English texts also frequently exhibit variation in verbal inflections Suppose, for example, a text (such as the Bestiary, discussed in section 3.2.2) exhibits third-person singular verb-form variation in -es, -eth and syncopated forms (e.g stant for standes, standeth): it may be possible in many cases to show that the text is composite and expose the ' layers' of copying (see Laing 1988) On the other hand, it may also be the case that all three forms (or perhaps two of them) were current in the underlying dialect of the scribe (or of the author), or - more properly - of the speech community to which he belonged Indeed, as the writing system was not standardised, it is likely that structured variation of this kind would enter more readily into the texts than it would today Clearly, in this approach, the exact geographical provenance of texts is no longer the primary, or exclusive, interest (important as it is to establish this as far as possible) The method can be seen as complementary to geographical dialectology: the goal is to contribute to theories of change, and within this to our understanding of the history of English, which is of course a multidimensional history focusing on variation of all kinds One possible result may be to show that variation attested in later periods of English can be traced back to these early sources 3.3.2 The neglect of structured variation in Middle English studies Variability in Middle English has sometimes been perceived as an obstacle rather than a resource, partly because of the broadly literary emphasis on which we have commented above In editorial and descriptive commentary, it is very easy to find comments about chaotic or 'lawless' spelling (e.g Sisam 1915: xxxvii) and even editorial judgements to the effect that a given scribe could not have been a native English speaker — so variable is his orthography This last judgement (although it is commonly made) is speculative, of course, as the scribe is normally anonymous However, judgements of this kind can effectively block further investigation of variable constraints in the texts in question: they can be dismissed as ' corrupt' or' unreliable' specimens of language One way in which variation of this kind is discounted is to claim that the scribe was Anglo-Norman, or that the spellings are Anglo-Norman and therefore not valid evidence for the history of English The Anglo-Norman argument goes back to Skeat (1897), who '93 James Milroy specified particular features of spelling as Anglo-Norman These are discussed by Milroy (1983), and it is noticeable that many of these features, such as < w > for wh, have reflexes in later English As a result of Skeat's claims, the very fact of variable spelling in an Early Middle English document became in itself a reason for concluding that the scribe was Anglo-Norman and that his spelling could be corrected by editors and ignored by historical commentators The work of scribes writing centuries after the Conquest has even been dismissed in this way, seemingly mainly because it is variable, and not because we can (usually) know whether the scribe was a first-language speaker of Anglo-Norman, or whether it would have been relevant if he had been Leaving aside this argument, we must also recognise that scholars have sometimes been more generally influenced by the notion that written language should be uniform, even in a period in which it plainly was not uniform, and they sometimes appear to chide the scribes for spelling variably Scragg (1974: 26), for example, comments that 'The existence of regional orthographies, and their confusion in the copying of texts resulted in a very lax attitude to spelling in most scribes.' In the context, this 'very lax attitude' seems to be measured against circumstances (such as Late Old English or the present day) in which there is a uniform standard of spelling: thus, all this really means is that in Early Middle English there was no uniform standard Scragg adds that these scribes had ' no conception of a spelling standard' and then -much more dubiously - that they used 'variant forms at will' However, if the scribes really had used variants 'at will', we would actually be unable to read the texts, as there would be no system in the spelling; but there must always be some order in any spelling system that we can read, even if it is a variable system Therefore, the scribes did not spell 'at will', but according to variable (and historically mixed) conventions It is our task to attempt to specify the constraints on spelling under which they were working, always admitting that even after we have done this, there may well be residues of apparent randomness that we cannot explain 3.3.3 Orderly variation in spelling The existence of variable orthographies is an advantage to the Middle English dialectologist in exactly the same way that the existence of spoken variation is an advantage in present-day research Although the scribes no doubt made 'errors', it should be possible to investigate 194 Middle English dialectology variable texts in extenso to determine the extent to which the variation in spelling (or indeed in other linguistic dimensions) is in fact orderly, and whether this variation can help us to work out what might have been happening in spoken English at the time As an example, let us briefly consider some aspects of spelling in Have/ok the Dane The Have/ok text is one of those sources that has been traditionally thought to be the work of an Anglo-Norman scribe (Sisam 1915) on the grounds that the spelling is highly variable in the respects specified by Skeat However, although it doubtless contains some forms that are simply 'errors', it also exhibits the kind of orderly variation that could be captured within a variable-rule framework, but in spelling variation rather than phonology The scribe does not have a free hand with spelling variation: there are constraints on the variants he uses OE postvocalic /ht xt/, for example, can be represented in the spelling of Have/ok by < s t > , < h t > , < t h > , < c h t > , < c t h > (in words of the type riht, niht), but not by, e.g < gt > , < ght > or by random and unpredictable forms such as tc or m The variation is constrained in much the same way as present-day phonological variation in speech communities is observed to be constrained Therefore, just as present-day phonological variation can be used as a clue to change in progress, so it may be possible here to use orthographic variation in the same way The spelling variants for OE (ht)9 overlap with spelling variants for other forms (from different sources in Old English), just as phonological variants in present-day studies are found to overlap (see Milroy & Harris 1980; Milroy 1981) Thus, if we take the realisation th, we find that this can be used word-finally, not only for (ht), but also for (t) and (th) The result of this is that a spelling like with can realise three separate classes: OE iviht (' wight, person'), OE wip (' with') and OE hwit ('white'), and this of course applies to other items of these types To formalise this — the following (Old English) classes can appear with final th: Final (postvocalic) dental fricatives: /)? 6/ e.g with (OE wip, PDE with) Final (postvocalic) dental stop: / t / e.g with (OE whit, PDE white) Final /ht xt/: e.g with (OE wiht, PDE wight) The potential realisations of these three classes are, however, different: (ht) items can also appear with < st > , < cht > , etc (e.g wicht): the other two classes cannot; (th) items can also appear with final , James Milroy < > (e.g wip): the other two classes cannot; (t) items can appear with final single / (e.g wit, whit): the other two classes cannot Thus, ' with, wight' cannot appear as wit, whereas 'white' can To this extent, therefore, the variation is constrained, and not random Applying the principle that change in progress is manifested in variation, let us consider its possible implications for spoken variation in Middle English The study of (ht) in Have/ok is of course relevant to the date at which the velar fricative [x] before [t] (in right, might, etc.) was lost in English The prima facie conclusion to be drawn is that in the variable phonology of the 'underlying' (east midland/East Anglian) speech community, loss of the fricative and merger of wight, white or close approximation and overlap, had already taken place It is also possible that in this variable phonology there was some tendency to merge final /]>/ with / t / If developments of this kind were not in some sense in progress, then there would have been less likelihood of the scribe observing precisely this pattern of orderly spelling variation, because, given the variable state of the orthographic conventions known to him, he could have chosen to vary in other ways Of course, it is quite another matter to go on to argue from this very limited piece of evidence that loss of the fricative in /xt/ was generally accepted as a completed sound change in the English language as a whole at this early date Yet, if we take this together with the fact that many other forms characteristic of Modern English spread in these centuries from the east midlands and the north (see the discussion of morphological dialect indicators in section 3.2.5), we can advance the hypothesis that this change was in progress in the east midlands around 1300 and look for further evidence to support or refute this If, however, we insist that many Middle English scribes were simply careless or poorly acquainted with English, we shall be inclined to reject the evidence and date this sound change much later — at a time when it was actually completed in ' standard' English This, of course, will not bring us anywhere near the origin of the change Loss of the velar fricative is a change that was finally adopted in standard English and formal styles Middle English sources, however, also contain variation that may be relevant to non-standard varieties and casual styles of speech; hence, there may be considerable time-depth to these variables also In section 3.3.4, therefore we consider how far studies of variable spelling in Middle English are capable of throwing light on this 196 Middle English dialectology 3.3.4 The time-depth of non-standard variants A number of present-day non-standard and casual speech forms appear to be indicated by some features of variable Middle English spelling Some of these are recognised as regional and have been studied as such (e.g in Wakelin & Barry 1968 the study of the voicing of initial fricatives in southwest England); others are more widespread in English One of these is 'final-stop deletion' (loss of /t, d/, and sometimes other stops, infinalclusters in words such as mist, mend) This is today very common in many varieties of English (Guy 1980; Romaine 1984), but not common in careful styles of Received Pronunciation (hence its exclusion from many accounts which claim to be accounts of 'English') The LALME maps show a distribution of final-consonant loss also in medieval written English, and I have noted a number of examples in Have/ok and other texts Thus, the phenomenon may have been part of variability in English for many centuries - more common, perhaps, in some dialects than in others, receding at some periods and progressing at others Yet it plays little part in standard accounts of the history of English before about 1600, and Middle English stopdeleted forms (such as bes, Ian 'best', 'land') are amongst the forms that are typically corrected by editors as errors There are other features that may have much earlier origins than is generally believed These include: (a) the (casual style) -in' ending on present participles; (b) certain widespread socially or regionally marked alternations in Modern English, such as 'stopping' of dental fricatives in, e.g thick, that, and [h]-dropping One of the most important points arising is that studies of these variables contribute to the history of the language as a multidimensional phenomenon They accept as a principle that, just as English is variable today, so it has constantly incorporated variation through the centuries Indeed, as some of this 'stable' variation may have been very long-lasting, we may have to reconsider what it means to say that some categorical change was completed at some specific date in history Bearing in mind also the points made above on the structured nature of variation, I now consider as an example the case of [h]-dropping in English, i.e variable loss of [h] in stressed syllables initially before vowels Although scholars have noticed instability in initial < h > spellings in Middle English, the traditional view (e.g Wyld 1936: 296) is that there is little reliable evidence for '[h]-dropping* in English much before the end of the eighteenth century, and earlier instability in 197 ... ''hold''): 9 24 ; atted (''is called'' < OE baton): 813; e ('' he, they''): 23 41 , 27 08, 40 94; egest (''highest''): 143 , 122 4; eld (''held''): 29 99; elles ( ''of hell''): 41 57; ere ( ''of them'' < OE heora): 28 55,... grief): 48 6, 20 44 , 20 82; halle ('' all''): 23 40 ; ham (''am''): 926 ; helde (i.e elde ''age''): 45 7, 1 527 ; her (''before''): 801; her/ (i.e erf ''cattle''): 29 91; herde (i.e erde ''land''): 806; hie ( T ) : 34, 27 83;... variation, the appropriate chapters of the following are recommended: Baugh & Cable (1978), A History of the English Language, 3rd edn; Bourcier (1981), An Introduction to the History of the English Language

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