Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
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pronounced as long or short /a/ (as in name or cat), and an i only long or short /i/ (as in time or bit), today’s novice spellers have to face a choice in every case, so that a, for example, can be /æ/ in apple, /eI/ in name, or /A:/ in father, and i can be /I/ in ill, bit or /aI/ in time, Wne. Long and short values for the same vowel graph, in other words, no longer match in terms of vowel quality.
Furthermore, the GVS and the various lengthening and shortening changes which preceded or followed it have also contributed to the development of complex morphophonological patterns in modern English, as illustrated below.
various variety comedy comedian study studious harmony harmonious
divine divinity serene serenity sane sanity (fool folly)
(profound profundity)
Some of these alternations are more productive than others in the current system, with those in brackets arguably being fossilized. Nevertheless, interactions between morphology and phonology of this kind are particularly challenging for phonological theories, and these Vowel Shift alternations have been the focus of a great deal of phonological attention since they played a central part in Chomsky and Halle’s ground-breaking The Sound Pattern of English of 1968. Alternations between diVerent vowels in divine and divinity, for instance, can help us understand more about what native speakers know about their language, which many linguists would see as the real goal of linguistics. If speakers know that divine and divinity are related, and see them as forms of the same word, they may store only a single form in their mental dictionary, and apply a rule to produce the diVerent pronunciations we Wnd in surface representations of the language. On the other hand, if speakers do not perceive a real and generalizable relationship between the stem vowels in divine and divinity, their mental dictionaries might contain both forms, and they may simply perceive that the two independent items are similar in meaning. For a phonologist working on modern English, Wnding out whether the Vowel Shift patterns are real and meaningful to speakers today is therefore a fundamental part of understanding how abstract our mental representations of words might be, as well as in formulating the more abstract phonological systems which underlie diVerent dialects.
Returning to the historical picture, the attraction of diagrams like those given in Figures 6.2 and 6.3 is that they provide an apparently elegant, symmetrical picture of a series of shifts which seem to aVect the whole early modern English system in a regular, parallel, and step-wise way. Chain shifts, or circular developments of this kind, are also particularly fascinating for phonologists, partly because such
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far-reaching changes are challenging to explain. Given their dramatic eVects on the English spelling system, and their part in the development of new, complex synchronic morphophonological alternations like those illustrated above, it is perhaps natural, as so many histories of the language have done, to see these changes as large-scale, orderly, momentous shifts. Sometimes this might make us prone to neatening up the overall pattern by deciding what we call part of the Great Vowel Shift, and what we might conversely choose to factor out into other, independent developments. So, the monophthongization of /ai/ and /au/ in day and law, and the lowering of the new diphthongs—which Fennell in Figure 6.3 gives as /@I/ and /@U/—to eventual /aI/ and /au/ (as in time and loud), are often portrayed as part of the GVS (as in Fig. 6.2 above). Typically, however, the secondstep raisings for some front vowels are excluded, so both diagrams show Middle English /e:/ shifting only one step to /e:/, although we know that historically the raising continued for most words, so that sea, speak, clean now have /i:/, and only the leftover cases great, break, steak retain /eI/ (or /e:/ for Scots speakers). Similarly, the diagrammatic representations of the GVS depicted in both Figures 6.2 and 6.3 show /ai/ (as in day) raising by the regulation single step to /a:/, although it in fact continued to the /eI/ or /e:/ that we now Wnd in day, plain.
These textbook diagrams, then, bring together what Roger Lass in 1976 called ‘THE GVS proper’, with some later changes. Other later changes are, however, commonly excluded because they do not Wt the pattern. The neat diagrams of Renaissance English phonology might be justiWed on the grounds that they are excellent teaching aids; but in this sense, therefore, they do not reXect direct historical fact. It is clear, for example, that not all the individual changes in the orderly, composite diagrams happened at the same time, or even took place particularly close together in chronological terms: the whole lot may well have taken upwards of three hundred years, beginning perhaps between 1400 and 1450. Furthermore, some of the changes that are included in some versions of the GVS (like those monophthongizations of /ai/ and /au/ in day, law), seem to have been contemporaneous with others that are usually excluded (like the second-step raising of Middle English /e:/ from /e:/ to eventual /i:/ in sea).
As a result, neat diagrams of the kind given in Figures 6.2 and 6.3 cannot validly be sold as a composite picture of changes in the long vowel system over a particular time period either. This raises an important question for our understanding of the GVS and the phonology of early modern English. Are we therefore including or excluding certain changes purely because the overall outline then looks more uniform and easier to handle than the sum of its more realistic parts? As historians of the language, we might also be guilty of setting up a highly idealized ‘change’ which never really happened, simply because the
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idealized version resembles a circular chain shift, a phenomenon which is suYciently mysterious and challenging to make phonological theorists and historical linguists sit up and take notice.
Considering this question might therefore make us wonder whether there really was a Great Vowel Shift in Renaissance English, and if so, which of these elements really counted as part of it. It may then come as no surprise to Wnd that there is indeed a diversity of views in the technical literature about the validity of the ‘GVS’ concept, and its reality as a single historical phenomenon. We turn in the next section to an outline of the alternative views put forward by the bestknown current defender of the GVS, Roger Lass, and the opposing views of the linguists Robert P. Stockwell and Donka Minkova: a range of relevant references is included in the Further Reading at the end of this chapter. Finally, we shall return to the thoroughly problematic question of whether phonologists create diagrams like those in Figures 6.2 and 6.3 because we are particularly easily seduced by patterns, seeing them where they do not really exist; or whether such overarching changes are indeed in any sense ‘real’ for the period under discussion.
‘what, if anything, was the great vowel shift?’
The subheading above is the title of an article which Lass published in 1992, and it recurs as a section header in 1999, within Lass’s chapter on phonology and morphology in the third volume of the Cambridge History of the English Language. It neatly expresses a diVerence of opinion which has been fought out over almost thirty years between Lass on the one hand, and Stockwell and Minkova on the other. There has been a certain degree of rapprochement between their positions, as we shall see later, but a central diVerence remains, summed up aptly in the quotations below which derive respectively from Lass, and from Stockwell and Minkova:
whatever else has been and still is going on in the history of English vowels—there was one particular set of late mediaeval shiftings that was more coherent and more potent in eVect on the system as a whole than others.3
the traditional summary of the putative structure of the vowels at some earlier date, abstracted from a range of manuscripts which were certainly not representatives of a type
3 R. Lass, ‘Vowel Shifts, Great and Otherwise: Remarks on Stockwell and Minkova’, in D. Kastovsky and G. Bauer (eds), Luick Revisited (Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), 407.
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of speech from which Modern English is derived, followed by a summary of Modern English vowel contrasts in a single normalized ‘standard’ dialect, . . . creates an appearance of neat regularity that is misleading in a very serious way. It also creates a set of pseudo-problems for structuralism to ‘solve’ with neatly symmetrical charts and theories that seem to us to have very little to do with what was actually taking place.4
In other words, Lass argues that seeing the GVS as a real, single, and unitary phenomenon is both justiWed and helpful in interpreting the history of English: it is, as he argues in 1999, also the norm, since ‘Most recent historians, whether through unaided intuition or brain-washing by teachers and tradition, have been convinced of the reality and unity of the GVS’.5 Conversely, Stockwell and Minkova consider it counter-productive to reify a series of independent changes as a single object, since this focuses the minds of linguists on accounting for an idealized change which, they contend, never really happened.
The core of the disagreement, then, is partly what we might see as a metatheoretical one: can a series of changes which took place over a considerable period of time, and which might have individual (and therefore arguably independent) motivations, meaningfully be grouped together into a superordinate or over-arching change like the putative GVS of Renaissance English? Furthermore, if that can be done, should it? There are also diVerent interpretations of the individual changes, though Lass, and Stockwell and Minkova, generally agree that these developments did take place: nobody is arguing that the individual elements of the GVS are phantasms, though in some interpretations the diagrammatic representations connecting them might well be.
To Wnd the source of these views, and take any steps towards evaluating them, we must Wrst identify the similarities and diVerences between the Lass and Stockwell–Minkova accounts of the development of long vowels during early modern English.
Stockwell and Minkova raise the following Wve unresolved questions or problems,6 tracing these back to the work of the philologist Karl Luick (1865–1935):
1 The inception problem: what, if anything, started the whole change oV?
2The merger problem: is it feasible to think of a chain shift of this kind at all, where a shift of one vowel causes another to move too, to prevent merger and loss of distinctiveness?
4 R. P. Stockwell and D. Minkova (1988a), ‘The English Vowel Shift: Problems of Coherence and Explanation’, in D. Kastovsky and G. Bauer (eds), Luick Revisited (Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag,
1988), 379. |
|
5 Lass (1999), 74. |
6 See Stockwell and Minkova (1988a), 355–6. |
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3The order problem: did the shift happen in stages, and if so, what was the chronology for each stage?
4The dialect problem: how can we account for the fact that the supposedly coherent vowel shift seems to have happened diVerently in diVerent dialects?
5The structural coherence problem: did the GVS really happen as a unitary change, or do linguists want to believe in it because we are attracted to neat patterns?
I shall focus below on problems 1 (inception), 2 (merger), and 5 (structural coherence). I assume that problem 3 (order) is more apparent than real, reXecting as it does a somewhat outmoded view that a particular subshift must be over and done with (or alternatively, in synchronic terms, that a particular phonological rule applies and stops) before the next begins its work. Stockwell and Minkova were absolutely right in 1988 to stress the need for historical linguistics to learn from sociolinguistics, but it can perhaps be regarded as accepted now. As for problem 4 (dialects), many of the issues arising from dialect variation also relate to the inception and structural coherence problems, and will therefore be discussed in connection with those. Otherwise, I set this apparent problem aside in what follows, since it seems axiomatic that we should be able to recognize that ‘the same’ process, or phonological unit or phenomenon, occurs with relatively minor diVerences cross-dialectally. For example, it seems reasonable to see Scots [e:] and Standard Southern British English [eI], phonetically diVerent though they undoubtedly are, as Wlling the same notionally high-mid front slot in the respective vowel inventories of these dialects. Indeed, recognizing and using such dialect diVerences is vital, as we shall see in the next section, to our understanding of sound change.
the inception problem
The inception problem remains one of the most deeply entrenched diVerences of opinion on the GVS and the phonology of early modern English. Lass, and Stockwell and Minkova base elements of their arguments and ideas on earlier historical scholarship, referring crucially to the work of the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in the Wrst volume of his Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909) and to Luick’s two-volume Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (1920–40). Both Jespersen and Luick saw the GVS as involving largely step-wise lengthening, with diphthongization of the long high vowels. However,
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they made diVerent suggestions about the Wrst step in the overall change, with Jespersen arguing for high-vowel diphthongization, while Luick instead favours mid-vowel raising.
Jespersen, then, suggests that the high vowels /i:/ (as in time) and /u:/ (as in loud) moved Wrst, towards some intermediate diphthongal value (Lass in 1999 suggests /ei/: Stockwell in 1961 put forward an alternative suggestion, discussed below). This would have left the high positions vacant, and Jespersen proposes what is now known as a ‘drag chain’, following terminology later introduced by the French linguist Andre´ Martinet. This assumes that linguistic systems follow principles, wherever possible, of economy, symmetry, and good margins of safety between units, so that the shift of the high vowels would have left a gap into which the next highest vowels would have been ‘dragged’, to preserve the shape of the overall system. This would have had a knock-on eVect on the next highest vowels; and as the new diphthongs lowered, they would in turn put pressure on pre-existing /ai au/ (as in Middle English day and law), which would have risen in early modern English into the vacant low or low-mid monophthong slots, hence avoiding merger (see below). Today, we might support these arguments with the additional typological point (i.e. one based on the structural similarities we can perceive between languages, regardless of their histories) that it is most unusual for a language to lack high vowels, so that the initial diphthongization of the originally long vowels in time and loud would also have produced an unbalanced system.
Luick, on the other hand, proposes what we would now call a ‘push chain’. Here, the vowels that begin the overall process are assumed to be the high-mid ones, /e:/ and /o:/ (as in green and boot), which start to shift upwards towards the high monophthongs /i:/ and /u:/. If we cast this in functional terms, and think of the vowel system as a set of slots, each occupied by a single vowel unit, one priority for speakers might be to ensure that not too many contrasts fall together or merge, lest lexical items become indistinguishable en masse. If the raising vowels had simply collapsed with the vowels one step higher, we should Wnd mergers, for example, rather than a chain shift; hence feel would have become identical in pronunciation with Wle, and boot with bout. Since the facts indicate that wholesale mergers of this kind did not take place, we must hypothesize instead that a gradual change in the articulation of the lower vowels caused them to encroach gradually on the higher ones, which responded by diphthongizing— there would have been little option, since lowering would simply speed the apparently undesirable merger, and high vowels cannot, by deWnition, raise any further. This might all sound rather anthropomorphic: we can recast it in more sociolinguistically informed, speaker-centred terms by suggesting that a raising
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[e:] need not become [i:] directly, but could take up any number of slightly raised realizations in between. Any of these might create a greater likelihood of miscommunication, as speakers increasingly produced slightly higher vowels which were in danger of being interpreted as categorically high rather than high-mid. We are not, then, proposing mergers and then problematic resplittings, but a gradual raising to which speakers might respond by producing a more exaggerated, diphthongal pronunciation of the high vowels, thereby setting a chain shift in motion.
As we shall see, Lass agrees with Luick (at least, broadly speaking) that the Wrst step in the GVS involved mid-vowel raising. However, Stockwell and Minkova instead favour Jespersen’s (1909) hypothesis that the Wrst step was high vowel diphthongization, and argue that this in turn was motivated by the vocalization of certain Old English consonants—speciWcally the palatal glide [j] or fricative
[˚] in front vowel environments in words like stig (‘sty’), and the velar fricative
$
[x] after back vowels in words such as bugan (‘bow’); and the development of front or back glides before [-c¸] in niht (‘night’) and [-x] in drugte (‘drought’).7 The usual assumption has been that the outputs or results of these changes merged with the pre-existing long high monophthongs /i:/ and /u:/, but this need not mean they were necessarily pronounced as monophthongs. Stockwell and Minkova suggest instead that Old English /i:/ and /u:/ might have had alternative diphthongal realizations [Ii] and [Uu], and indeed that these diphthongal realizations would have become more common until ‘by Chaucer’s time, it is likely that all instances of putative long high vowels were already diphthongal’.8
These would not, however, be what we might term ‘ideal’ diphthongs, since their two elements are arguably too close together perceptually. Stockwell and Minkova in 1988 therefore suggest that ‘healthier’ diphthongs would have developed, probably by lowering or centralizing the Wrst element. As these new diphthongs progressively lowered towards /ai/ and /au/, the now-vacant high monophthong slots would necessarily have been reWlled because of a universal restriction which, as already discussed, disallows systems without true high vowels. Alternatively, they suggest that the Middle English high-mid long vowels were also phonetically ingliding diphthongs, perhaps [e@] or [e@] in words such as green and [o@] or [O@] in words like boot. If so, the Wrst elements of these might also have raised quite naturally as part of a process developing ‘better’ diphthongs, which had greater distance between their composite elements.
7 See also Colman (1983). |
8 See Stockwell and Minkova (1988a), 376, 386. |
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However, these arguments are not uncontroversial, and Lass takes issue with both the centralization of the new diphthongs (or the lowering diphthongs, if we adopt Stockwell and Minkova’s argument that these were already largely diphthongal by Chaucer), and the drag-chain hypothesis which assumes that the high slots in the long vowel system were vacated Wrst. On the Wrst point, Lass in 1999 objects that claims for centralization are motivated by theoretical assumptions about the nature of systems and changes, whereas he himself prefers to rely on evidence from the orthoepists who, as we have seen, provide the earliest detailed descriptions of English phonetics. In particular, he observes that ‘Crucially, no orthoepist before Hodges (1644) reports anything interpretable as a central vowel in the relevant positions; most report something quite diVerent’.9 As in Figure 6.1, Hodges’ transcriptions in his English Primrose show eie as his preferred name for the vowel sound in words such as time (even though, in accordance with orthoepical tradition at this time, he continues to describe this as a long vowel). It is possible, of course, that the orthoepists simply had no available orthographic symbol to mark centralized vowels like schwa, but even Robert Robinson (1617), who had invented a new alphabet for just this sort of reason, uses symbols which more plausibly signal [ei, Ou]. Turning to the question of whether high vowel diphthongization or mid vowel raising came Wrst, Lass, in both 1976 and 1999, noted that there is very little contemporaneous evidence for the order of these subshifts, since they are too early for orthoepical sources to be of much assistance: John Hart in his Orthographie of 1569 nevertheless suggests that both changes were already established. However, it is in fact dialectal evidence which proves of greatest utility in identifying the Wrst step in the GVS.
Lass in 1976 observed that there is a very clear diVerence between the pronunciation of modern standard Southern British English, and the patterns which are found in varieties from the North of England and Scotland, as can be seen below.
Diphthongisation patterns for Middle English /i: u:/ (partly after Lass 1976).
Middle English |
SSBE |
Lowick |
Chirnside |
Buchan |
|
i: |
ai |
eI |
@i `e |
@i A.e bite |
|
u: |
au |
u: |
u(:) |
u(:) |
house |
o: |
u: |
i: |
e¨(:) |
i(:) |
boot |
There is, as Lass notes, an exceptionless correlation between two facts. Although the northern varieties (Lowick is in Northumberland, and Chirnside and Buchan are southern and northern Scots) all show the expected GVS diphthongization of Middle English /i:/ in bite, none of them have diphthongs for Middle English /u:/
9 Lass (1999), 81.
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in house. Moreover, all of them have front rather than back vowels for Middle English /o:/ in boot. Lass argues that these facts are not unrelated: the former follows from the latter.
Paul Johnston has observed that, by a sound change known as Northern /o:/- Fronting in the late thirteenth century, /o:/ (as in boot) was fronted to /ø:/. It was this development, he argues, which ‘soon became a deWning characteristic of the whole northern English and Scots groups’.10 This fronting, depicted below, sets the reXex of Middle English /o:/ as an atypical front rounded vowel in northern English, which lay outside both the back and front monophthong systems.
/o:/-Fronting |
|
|
|
|
i: |
time |
|
u: |
loud |
e: |
green |
ø: |
(o:) |
boot |
e: |
break |
|
O: |
boat |
a:name
As the bracket indicates, by the onset of the GVS, the northern varieties had developed a gap in the system which was still Wlled in the southern ones. All varieties did have the high front and back long monophthongs /i:/ and /u:/ (as in time, loud). As a result, if Jespersen, and Stockwell and Minkova are right in their assumption that the Wrst step in the GVS was indeed high vowel diphthongization, there is no reason why those high vowels should not have been aVected in exactly the same way in the north and the south. But this is not what we Wnd. Instead, although the high front vowel diphthongizes in all varieties in bite, the northern varieties instead maintain hoose, with undiphthongized /u/ (which will be long in the Northern English varieties, and positionally long or short in Scottish ones, following what is known as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule. This therefore suggests that the initial step in the GVS (and the subsequent restructuring of Renaissance phonology) was in fact the raising of lower vowels— although probably not the high-mid /e: o:/, as Luick suggested (given that, as we have seen, /o:/ in the north is absent and yet the rest of the Shift proceeds as normal). A more likely scenario therefore was that it was the low-mid /e:/ and /O:/ which were initially involved. As the low-mid front /e:/ raised, it would therefore begin to displace /e:/ on a push-chain model, which in turn would enforce diphthongization of /i:/. However, the gap left by the departing /e:/ might have attracted low /a:/, suggesting that the ‘bottom half’ of the Shift was perhaps a
10 P. Johnston, ‘Older Scots phonology and its regional variation’, in C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 69.
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drag chain, while the ‘top half’ must have been a push chain. In the south, matters would proceed in parallel in the back vowel subsystem, with /O:/ raising and in turn encouraging /o:/ to move up, and then /u:/ to diphthongize. In the north, as Johnston suggests, /O:/ alone would have raised, while /u:/ ‘apparently stays put because there is no /o:/ to move it, after /o:/-Fronting has occurred’.11
In short, if we adopt the view that diphthongization of high vowels (or, to reXect Stockwell and Minkova’s view more accurately, the lowering and centralization of pre-existing diphthongs) came Wrst, we lose this very persuasive connection between /o:/-Fronting in the north, and the absence of diphthongization of /u:/ in the same areas. Stockwell and Minkova in their 1988 chapter on ‘The English Vowel Shift’ suggest that there may be dialects where Middle English /e:/ did not raise, but where /i:/ nonetheless diphthongized; and also that raising Middle English /o:/ in some dialects merged with /u:/ rather than provoking diphthongization. However, they also accept that these dialect data are not robust. The most plausible conclusion, therefore, is that the fronting of /o:/ in the north is connected with the failure of /u:/ to diphthongize in the same areas, hence arguing for long mid-vowel raising as the Wrst step in the GVS.
This comparison and evaluation of the Luick/ Lass and Jespersen/ Stockwell and Minkova views on the starting point for the GVS illustrates very clearly the relevance and, indeed, the necessity of working with detailed present-day dialect data in assessing the shape and chronology of historical sound changes. It may also, therefore, go some way towards answering Stockwell and Minkova’s justiWable criticisms that proposing over-idealized, monolithic Middle English and modern English vowel systems can create a wholly misleading picture of the regularity of the shift which supposedly converted one into the other. On the contrary, as the evidence considered so far conWrms, we are Wnding that no responsible consideration of the GVS (or any other change) can aVord to ignore variation either then or now. However, Stockwell and Minkova are not only concerned about the evidence used to argue for the GVS. They also dispute other aspects of the allegedly uniWed change, and we will turn now to the second of these. The next section, however, is particularly detailed in its treatment of phonological issues and problems, and readers of a nervous disposition may be better advised to skip it and move on to the structural coherence problem instead.
11 See Johnston (1997), 69.