52 R O G E R L A S S

objective or oblique: I/me, he/him, she/her, they/them. Even this vestige is lacking in the second person (invariant you), and the neuter third person (it: though this was unmarked even in Old English).

(b)Number. Number is coded on most nouns and all pronouns except you. (Though many dialects have reinvented a second-person plural, usually of the type /ju z/, i.e. you + plural -s.) Most plural marking on native nouns is regular: there is a ‘sibilant suffix’ (the same as in the genitive) appearing as /-s/ after voiceless non-sibilants, /-z/ after voiced non-sibilants, and /-Vz/ after sibilants (cats vs dogs vs kisses: /V-/ stands for whatever weak vowel occurs in a given lect). Of the older native plural types, only a few umlaut plurals (mouse/mice, foot/feet, etc.), and some zero plurals (sheep) remain. Most others have been replaced by the s-plural, which is now the only productive form: foreign plurals are generally restricted to the loanwords they came with (stratum/strata, kibbutz/kibbutzim). There is a fragmentary number (and person) concord between verb and subject: a suffix -s (with the same allomorphy as the plural) appears on non-modal present verbs with third-person subjects.

(c)Gender. There is no grammatical gender; pronouns agree with the ‘natural’ or semantic gender of their antecedents, except in the few cases where non-human or inanimate nouns can be referred to by pronouns other than it (ships as she and the like). These are metaphorical, not grammatical.

(d)Tense and aspect. The only morphological markings are for past tense, the past (perfective) participle, and the present participle. Most verbs in the past take a ‘regular’ -ed ending, whose allomorphy is in principle the same as that of the plural and third-person suffix: /-t/ after voiceless segments except /t/ (kick-ed), /-d/ after voiced (lagg-ed), and /-Vd/ after /t, d/ (fitt-ed, hoard-ed). There are however a good number of irregular past and participial formations, mostly relics of older, once regular alternations. Some reflect an ancient IE type that survived in a modified form into Old English (the ‘strong’ verbs, e.g. ride/rode/ridden); others have old length alternations which have become qualitative because of changes in long vowels that did not affect short ones (keep/kept: see Section 5.2.1). Still others are irregular in other ways, e.g. buy/bought, seek/sought.

2.4Old English

The Old English record is fragmentary and discontinuous (see Chapter 1). The supposed ‘language’ Old English is actually a somewhat scrappy and often uncertainly provenanced collection of manuscript remains – much less unified than textbook introductions would suggest. A unitary Old English of course did not exist any more than a unitary Modern English; but since the remains are so scanty, what we really have is a collection of diverse scribal idiolects or ‘text languages’, and no very clear lines of descent. The apparently linear histories that

the handbooks give us, and that I will be presenting here in modified form, are historians’ constructs; but as long as the problems remain at least as background discomforts, this is relatively harmless.

Many details of the Old English dialect picture are unresolved. The exemplary inventories here are the most likely input to the Middle English varieties that grew into the most widely distributed forms of Modern English. The vowel system was highly symmetrical, with all monophthongs in qualitatively identical long/short pairs. There were at least two pairs of diphthongs, also contrasting in length; these appear not to have been of the modern /ai, au, iə/ types, but had two elements agreeing in height. There is no evidence for central vowels, but only front and back, and three contrasting heights, as opposed to the ModE and ME four.

Diphthongs: long: e o, æɑ; short æɑ, eo

(12)Keywords

S H O R T V OW E L S : /i/ hit ‘it’, cild ‘child’; /y/ fyllan ‘fill’; /e/ bedd ‘bed’, mete ‘meat’; /æ/ rætt ‘rat’, bæþ ‘bath’; /u/ full ‘full’, lufu ‘love’, wund ‘wound’; /o/ god ‘god’, nosu ‘nose’; /ɑ/ catte ‘cat’, nama ‘name’

L O N G V OW E L S : /i / b¯ıtan ‘bite’; /y / hydan¯ ‘hide’; /e / metan¯ ‘meet’; /æ /

lædan¯ ‘lead’; /u / hus¯ ‘house’, su¯þerne ‘southern’; /o / fod¯ ‘food’, god¯ ‘good’, flod¯ ‘flood’; /ɑ / ban¯ ‘bone’

S H O R T D I P H T H O N G S : /æɑ/ earm ‘arm’; eall ‘all’; /eo/ heorte ‘heart’, heofon ‘heaven’

L O N G D I P H T H O N G S : /e o/ beon¯ ‘be’; breost¯ ‘breast’; /æɑ/ leaf¯ ‘leaf’

The notation for the diphthongs is conventional but misleading: the ‘short’ diphthongs were non-steady-state short vowels, and the ‘long’ ones were the same length as long vowels. Some readers may note the absence here of the two diphthongs spelled <ie> in the standard grammars and dictionaries (e.g. h¯ıeran ‘to hear’, ieldra ‘older’). These were largely restricted to early West Saxon (tenth century), and play no independent part in the development of any later dialect; they had merged with /i( )/ or /y( )/ well before earliest Middle English.

Note that there is no / /. ModE words with this vowel descend either from /u/ (full), or shortening of /o / (flood < flod¯ ). The diphthong in words like joy, poison appears later, in French and other loanwords. The standard view is that there was also a /ə/ in unstressed syllables, but I think it safer to assume that all vowels have their ordinary qualities in all positions until at least the transition to Middle English.