94 R O G E R L A S S

quite, spite, which have French /i:t/ – though he or his typesetters unsurprisingly spell them quight, spight). Postvocalic /x/ that has not become [f] is gone by the 1660s, and the only relic is initial [h-].

As we saw in Section 2.6.2.2, ‘dropping aitches’ was already established in OE and ME; it continued to be so until the later seventeenth century, and did not become a salient social variable until the mid-eighteenth century. Before that, the situation in all varieties, including the London standard, seems to have been what we find now in most non-Scots mainland vernaculars: initial [h-] is at least relatively less common than zero. But by the 1790s both omission of orthographic <h> and hypercorrect insertion were becoming stigmatised in London, and [h-] was eventually restored, one of the most successful efforts known of institutionalised spelling-pronunciation.

Throughout the early Modern English period, both the Germanic and Romance stress patterns expand, in different ways for different speakers. Both GSR and RSR are now more ‘general models’ than ‘rules’; the formal constraints loosen while variability increases. From the sixteenth century Romance vocabulary is increasingly treated as if it were Germanic, but with a simplification: the prefix/root distinction is often not observed, and words can be initial-stressed, whether or not they contain prefixes at the left or environments at the right that would fit the Romance pattern. Below are some examples, covering a period of over a century. Note that some of these have survived as the usual forms, others have not: in accentuation more than anywhere else one gets the impression of a large-scale lottery.

(75)Peter Levins, Manipulus vocabulorum (1570): d´electable, excusable,´

suggestion,´ d´ıstribute

Christopher Cooper, The English Teacher (1687): academy,´ accessory,´ anniversary,´ n´ecessary

John Kirkby, A New English Grammar (1746): acceptable,´ accessory,´ corruptible´

Robert Nares, Elements of Orthoepy (1784): phl´egmatic, tr´averse, v´ıbrate, absolute,´ aggrandize´

On the other hand, many heavy finals which are now not stressed tended to attract stress in a ‘hyper-Romance’pattern:

(76)Levins (1570): par´ent, prec´ept, exp´ert, manif´est, stubborne´ Cooper (1687): coll´eague, advert´ıse, complais´ance

Nares (1784): alcove,´ bomb´ast, exp´ert, pret´ext, sal´ıne, recogn´ıse

Beginning in the sixteenth century, parts of the Romance lexicon become increasingly sensitive to morphology, and a new sub-pattern develops: nouns tend to attract initial stress, and their cognate verbs final stress, producing the appearance of Germanic/Romance pairs with the same root: object/obj´ect´, subject/subj´ect´,