104 R O G E R L A S S

The NPTR was never fully generalised in the southern standards, but it was extremely common for a while, and quite characteristic, if in a slightly looser form, in the language of Queen Elizabeth, Beaumont & Fletcher and Shakespeare, to name three well-known users (examples from Schendl):

(93)Queen Elizabeth: for wicked men giue-s this good turn to dignitie, that they

spot them with their own infection

Beaumont & Fletcher: Poets, when they rage, Turn-s gods to men

Shakespeare: The people knowe-s it, And have now receiv’d his accusations

2.8Plus ca¸ change . . . The persistence of disorder

As we approach the present our ability to construct good narrative history declines. There are two reasons for this. First, it happens contingently that very little of large-scale structural import seems to be going on in the areas this chapter is concerned with. Second, and equally important, we have too much data, too wide a spread of well-attested and well-studied varieties, to make the kind of generalisations that were fairly simple, if a bit dodgy, for Old and Middle English.

It only becomes apparent after a long engagement with the history of the language that the quality and quantity of our data-base shifts massively over time. And the less we know, the clearer the picture.

2.8.2.1The evolution of Lengthening I

Lengthening of ME /a, o/ in pass, off, etc. (Section 2.7.4.8) was first noted in the 1680s simply as a fact about southern English; for nearly a century is was apparently just that. But by the 1790s it was subject to prescriptive judgement – i.e. it had become a sociolinguistic variable. Both this normativism and the phonological and lexical variation that prompted it persist into the next century and well beyond.

The first good nineteenth-century discussion is by A. J. Ellis (1874: 1148). He cites among other sources a dictionary of the 1840s, which gives prescriptions for ME /a/ exactly like Walker’s [a ] only before <r, rC, lC>: bar, calm, half, but [æ] in the other Lengthening I environments, e.g. before voiceless fricatives and some nasal clusters (chaff, pass, dance). Ellis’ own pronunciation (he was born in 1814) however seems much more modern, as does that of many other ‘educated speakers’. The norm appears to be [a ] in all Lengthening I words; but there are variants, including unlengthened [æ], even before /r/, and sometimes lengthened but unshifted [æ ].

Avoidance of lengthened and lowered [æ] is tied up with the earlier lengthening and quality-shift before /r/; Ellis remarks that some speakers (especially

female) avoid [a ] through ‘fear . . . that if they said (aask), (laaf), they would be accused of the vulgarity of inserting an r’(in the nineteenth century phonetic transcriptions were customarily put in round brackets; doubling indicates length). But in summary (or acknowledgement of the mess), Ellis says:

the words vary so much from mouth to mouth that any pronunciation would do; and short (a) would probably hit a mean to which no one would object. In a performance of King John, I heard Mrs Charles Kean speak of ‘(kææf) skin’, with great emphasis, and Mr Alfred Wigan immediately repeated it as ‘(kaaf) skin’, with equal distinctness.

He also gives anecdotal but interesting observations of individual speakers, whose social position indicates the sort of accents one might expect them to have: an Oxbridge professor has [a ] in class, [æ ] [a ] in classes, and [æ] [a ] in dance; an army officer has [æ] [a ] in staff, and the whole range [æ] [a] [a ] in class.

Ellis says explicitly that he is attempting to describe a ‘received’ standard; but he does not have a ‘reducing’ agenda; he finds his received variety so variable that only a ‘generic’ pronunciation can be specified. There is so much variation that we have to be ‘content with a rather indefinite degree of approximation’. He sees, unlike many grammarians before, contemporary with and after him, no principled conflict between variability and ‘standardness’. This stance makes him a particularly valuable witness: he is under no pressure to under-report variation.

Ellis has little to say about lengthened ME /o/; most forms that ‘ought’ to have it do, and it is not as variable as ME /a/. But at roughly the same time, Henry Sweet (1877) has a short vowel in cloth, cross, soft, though it may lengthen before th, s, f to the vowel of broad, more: a perfect illustration of Ellis’ general point. He also allows for shortening in glass, aunt. Thus for Sweet’s corner of RPshire, lengthening of /o/ already appears somewhat recessive, though no social judgements attach to the two values.

It is only as we approach the 1930s that something like the modern picture appears: Ida Ward (1929) describes more or less the current pattern of ME /a/ reflexes, but lengthened ME /o/ (except before historical /r/) shows a more complex picture. In cross, off, soft, a short vowel ‘probably . . . is used by the majority’, though ‘many educated speakers’ have a long vowel. She thinks that the long vowel ‘is dying out gradually’; ‘educated speakers who use [ɔ ] at the present day are mainly middle-aged, or conservative’. She also observes an element of lexical specificity associated with sociolinguistic judgements: moss, boss, scoff rarely have a long vowel, and in toff it is ‘considered Cockney’. Some speakers, she notes, have a long vowel in cross but a short one in toss. The two lengthenings have clearly parted company by the 1920s, with the short variants of ME /o/ largely re-generalized from some other lineage; the long ones remain in older speakers and as lexical fossils.

At the present time, the southern standard situation is more or less as follows. Both ME /a/ and /o/ are uniformly long before historical /r/. For ME /a/ length

regional and extraterritorial dialects (which ought to suggest a pre-nineteenth- century origin); nearly the same lexical and grammatical irregularities – all of them failures of lengthening where it would be expected – occur in dialects of widely differing regional provenance. In some the exceptions are marginal; in others they are extensive enough to generate a new contrast. The internal shapes of and differences among systems showing Lengthening II provide an object lesson in the complexities of linguistic innovation, and the correlation I have been stressing between diversity in time and space. Here are some selected examples from three speakers: modern RP (b. 1950s), New York City standard (b. 1930s) and Cape Town standard (b. 1970s). In this display expected long [æ ] are unmarked, and unexpected short [æ] (‘failures’ of lengthening) have a following*:

The first thing to note is that the RP distribution is rather different from the other two: while New York and Cape Town have categorical failure of lengthening in auxiliary or potentially auxiliary verbs (can, have), RP treats them like (nearly) any other lexical items. The syllable rhyme in can, whatever its part of speech, is what triggers the change. In this sense RP is simpler than the two others. This lack of grammatical conditioning also suggests that the change is older there: it is typical for sound changes to be morphosyntactically and lexically conditioned in their early stages, and to generalise later.

We can also observe an unsurprising but not fully realised further conditioning: the likelihood of lengthening failing increases with syllable number (short vowels in Pamela, rabbit). This appears to reflect a well-known general English ‘preference’ for isochrony at word level: there seems to be a kind of ‘ideal’ length for a word, so that the more syllables there are the shorter each is likely to be. But this is only a tendency: lengthening fails in monosyllables as well, both across all varieties (cadge) and only in certain ones (ham).

This is just a single example of the kind of living historicity that characterises human languages, whether ‘standardised’ or not. Languages – regardless