13. Describe the me spelling innovations. Give examples.

Spelling was created in ME under the influence of French. It preserves its principal features in modern times.

ME SPELLING

• 1. The runic letters were lost.

• 2. New letters: K, Q, W, V, J

• 3. New spelling devices:

• digraphs (ou, gh, th, ch, sh, dg, qu, wh)

• doubling of the letters to show the length of the root syllable: stoon

• final e (for the same purpose): stone

 The mass of the new generation tried to write English, they had no orthographical traditions to guide them, and had to spell the words phonetically according to French rules. They used ch instead of the old c, when it was pronounced as in cirice church, OE cild -> ME child. The sound of the Old English sc in sceamu shame, which did not exist at that time in French, was rendered byss, ssh, sch, or sh. The French qu took the place of cp. 

Word Stress in ME and Early NE

• Word stress acquired greater positional freedom in word derivation but not in form-building.

• Changes in word stress are mostly connected with the phonetic assimilation of thousands of loan-words adopted during the ME period.

Task:Account for the sound values of the letter c in the following words: [s] in NE mercy, centre; [k] in copper, class; [ʃ] in special, sufficient?

• When ‘c‘ comes directly before the letters ‘e‘, ‘i‘ or ‘y‘ we use the /s/ sound.

• in other cases we use a /k/ sound.

C can also be pronounced as sh sometimes, but this is rare. It is most often found in adjectives ending in -cious, such as conscious, precious, ferocious, etc, and also in adjectives ending in -cial, such as special, artificial, crucial, social, etc. One major exception where c is pronounced as sh is the word ocean.

[s] in NE mercy, centre – voiceless, forelingual alveolar, constrictive, oral

[k] in copper, class- voiceless, backlingual, occlusive, oral

[ʃ] in special, sufficient – voiceless, forelingual, alveolar, constrictive, oral, noise

14. Why does the London dialect become the basis of the Literary Standard, both in written and spoken forms?

The dialect division which evolved in Early ME was on the whole preserved in later periods. In the 14^th and 15^th c. we find the same grouping of local dialects: the Southern group, including Kentish and the South-Western dialects (the South-Western group was a continuation of the OE Saxon dialects), the Midland or Central (corresponding to the OE Mercian dialect – is divided into West Midland and East Midland as two main areas) and the Northern group (had developed from OE Northumbrian). And yet the relations between them were changing. The most important event in the changing linguistic situation was the rise of the London dialect as the prevalent written form of language. The history of the London dialect reveals the sources of the literary language in Late ME and also the main source and basis of the Literary Standard, both in its written and spoken forms. The Early ME written records made in London – beginning with the PROCLAMATION of 1258 – show that the dialect of London was fundamentally East Saxon. Later records indicate that the speech of London was becoming more fixed, with East Midland features gradually prevailing over the Southern features.

London was the chief city of a steadily unifying country. With the changing language of the city, its gradual loss of Southern, or Saxon, forms and its gradual acquirement of Northern, or Anglian, forms, the language of literature kept closely in touch. By the early sixteenth century, though details are shifting, the outlines of Modern English are fairly clear. Then came a period of great expansion. The language was carried, farther than the Roman legionaries carried theirs, into the remotest parts of the world; it came to be spoken by more people than ever before in the history of the world could hold comfortable converse together.

The dialect of London, the commercial, intellectual, and political center of power, was becoming the prestige dialect. By the fifteenth century, London English was firmly established as the dialect spoken by the denizens of power. The literary language that Chaucer fashioned become the standard written language of elegant writers and the language of London became the written standard for all formal English.

Task: Prove by instances of phonetic changes, that ME was divided into a number of dialects.

• The direction of qualitative vowel changes was different in different Early ME dialects:

OE ME NE

fyllan Kentish fellen fill

West Midland fullen

East Midland fillen

Most NE forms descend from the East Midland dialect.

However, some modern words have traces of other dialects:

NE bury (OE byrian)

• the letter u is a trace of the Western form

• the sound [e] is traced to the South-East (Kent)