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A closer look at some key sound changes in the history of English

Raymond Hickey English Linguistics, Essen

7th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Summer School, Lesvos, Greece, 2-10

August 2013

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Voiced and voiceless fricatives in early English

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For this section I wish to deal with an issue which has been dealt with by many scholars previously, the phonemicisation of voiced fricatives in words like very, receive; zenith, seize; breath, breathe. I will focus on three issues in this complex and hopefully shed some light on how this phonemicisation may have proceeded.

1) The reanalysis of the status of voiced fricatives during first language acquisition (an internal factor).

2) The manner in which words were borrowed from French (there are various options here).

3) The differential phonemicisation of [3], [v], [z] (these segments appear to behave differently with regard to voicing).

Structure of section

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There is a large body of literature on this topic which I am well aware of. In an oral presenation such as the present one it is not possible to deal with this. Suffice it to say thatscholars such as Roger Lass, John Anderson, Jacek Fisiak, Klaus Dietz, Otto Jespersen, Alfred Bammesberger, Robert Fulk and Angelika Lutz have all dealt with the issues to be discussed here. But most recently these matters have been the object of critical consideraton by Donka Minkova in a 2011 article in English Language and Linguistics.

Previous literature

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Basically, there are three standpoints on the phonemicisation of voiced fricatives in early English.

1) Phonemicisation took place in Old English for language internal reasons, e.g. due to the simplification of geminates (Hans Kurath).

2) Phonemicisation took place in Old English under the influence of Celtic (Stephen Laker).

3) Phonemicisation took place during Middle English under the influence of French (many scholars).

Combinations of these standpoints can also be found.

General standpoints

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Some further assumptions should be noted:

French influence affected the phonemicisation of [v] and [z] but [3] was phonemicised via internal development as this sound was not represented in French loans during Middle English.

As Minkova states (2011: 37) there is no ‘unambiguous evidence of irreducible lexical contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives’ for Old English.

So the main question is: how did this lexical contrast cometo be by the late Middle English period?

General standpoints

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It is difficult to reconstruct varieties of Old English with anysignificant degree of phonetic accuracy. However, for northern varieties in the later Old English period, voiced sibilants would have been rare given the influence of Old Norse which had an absolute prohibition on voiced sibilants.

Furthermore, at the end of the Old English period there are one or two cases of initial <u>, as in uif ‘five’, suggesting initial fricative voicing in southern forms, a known dialectal feature of the south of England (probably arising from sandhi with preceding vowel-final words). The view that this had set in very early is supported by Roger Lass.

Varieties of Old English

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The situation in late Old English

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What children heard What they assumed was happening

wi:f ~ wivas intervocalic voicing

wi:f ~ wivqs

wi:f ~ wivz morphonological alternation {F} ~ {V}

The last stage shows an unpredictable alternation of [f] and [v] which means the language learners interpreted the distinction as systemic.

Reinterpretation of the phonetic stream by children over several generations in late Old English

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sengan /sendgan/ ‘singe’

brycg /bryddg/ ‘bridge’

drencan /drent$/ ‘drench’

cinn /t$in/ ‘chin’

Variable voice realisations in post-sonorant position also weakened the categorical allophonic rule of word-internal voicing, e.g. clænsian ‘cleanse’ with [-nz-] butcursian with [-rs-].

Unpredictable distributions and reanalysis: Affricates and fricatives

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The process of suffixal reduction and later attrition could have helped to establish voiced fricatives in final position. However, on its own this would not have been enough (consider present-day languages like German where final position always triggers devoicing of obstruents).

dri:van suffixal reductiondri:vqn

dri:vq suffixal attrition

dri:v (or [dri:f] with final devoicing?)

Additional developments

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How are words borrowed?

French influence in early Middle English

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Languages do not borrow sounds with words. Adults pronounce foreign words using their own inventory of sounds.

Examples:

/æ/ in English loanwords is rendered as [e], German, Russian, etc., e.g. laptop, businessman.

English voiced obstruents are devoiced in final position, e.g. live [laif] (German), e.g. die Sendung war live ‘it was a live broadcast’.

Default assumption

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L1 community

English

L1 adult group using new words

Scenario 1: adult L1 speakers spread the wordResult: no phonological adaptation

Source: (i) contact with Franch speakers (Anglo-Norman) or (ii) through the written medium (for later Central French loans)

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adult group of second language English speakers (Anglo-Normans) using words from their backgroud language (French)

Scenario 2: Adult second language users impose words from their background language on the majority

Result: words come in with source language phonology; uncertain whether this continues

L1 community

English

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L1 children acquire new words through contact with source language community (Anglo-Normans)

Scenario 3: Children pick up words in bilingual environmentResult: words come in with source language phonology and

this is maintained

L1 community

English

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Conclusion:

only scenarios 2 (imposition) and 3 (children in bilingual

environment) can lead to sounds being borrowed with loanwords

French influence in early Middle English

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New words with new sounds will only spread to the entire

community if speakers of this larger group already have

experience of these sounds, e.g. by their allophonic presence in the majority language, here English.

How do words spread to the whole society?

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Differentiating types of fricatives

French influence in early Middle English

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I agree with Bermudez-Otero (2007), quoted approvingly by Minkova (2011: 44), that the implemention of phonological change can be staggered. This stands to reason: the reanalysis of intervocalic voicing as embodying an underlying systemic contrast will not have taken place simulataneously for all speakers in all areas so there will naturally be a stretch across time. However, the reanalysis did eventually take place for all forms of English and there are no varieties anywhere without a systemic distinction in voice for fricatives.

Differential phonemicisation

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Furthermore, the reinterpretation of voiceless fricatives as systemic appears not to have taken place for all segments simultaneously. As Minkova (2011) points out, /v-/ appears in French loans much more often than does /z-/. This may be due to lexical incidence. French words with /z-/, like zest(e), were not as common as ones with /v-/ and many words with initial /z-/ in modern English are of Greek origin, e.g. zeal, zoo.

But there are examples in Old English like zefferus‘zephyr’ which were most likely pronounced with initial /s-/ which much later shifted to /z-/.

Differential phonemicisation

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So if it is true that initial /v-/ appears before /z-/ in the textual record then, despite issues such as lexical incidence, written styles, formal registers, etc., we might posit that [v] phonemicised before [z].

The key question is:

Are there any independent grounds for that?

Consider the following.

Differential phonemicisation

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An increase in friction masks voicing acoustically and thus inhibits it in language change.

Bear in mind that, going on the sound inventories compiled by Ian Maddieson and Peter Ladefoged, there is no language which just has voiced sibilants. On the contrary, languages which only have voiceless sibilants are actually quite common (several of them in Europe alone: North Germanic languages, Finnish, Insular Celtic; Castillian Spanish).

Differential phonemicisation

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Some languages have an absolute prohibition on certain voiced sibilants.

Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Irish, Welsh do not have any voiced sibilants, so *all* loanwords with such sounds have these devoiced.Examples: journal [$-], etage [-$], magasin [-s-] (Swedish)

Absolute prohibitions

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Why is this the case?

Consider the acoustics of fricatives for a moment.

Absolute prohibitions

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Spectrogram of /a2a/, /afa/, /asa/

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Spectrogram of /a3a/, /ava/, /aza/

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A typological view of fricatives

Late Old English to late Middle English

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Dental fricatives

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The two main sources for dental fricatives

1) Lenition in syllable codas (Spanish, Danish, historically Irish), e.g. Danish mad ‘food’ /mad/ > [ma3]. This is also found intervocalically in Iberian forms of Romance: Spanish nada /na3a/ ‘nothing’ and those forms of Spanish which have distinción, i.e. which distinguish la casa ‘house’ and la caza ‘hunt’ or which have the rarer ceceowhere /2/ occurs in both cases). /2/ also occurs in Latium Italian, e.g. silenzio /silensio/ > [silen2io] ‘silence’.

2) Reinterpretation of strongly aspirated /th/ by language learners. Here children interpret the strong aspiration of /th/ as the major component of the articulation and the stop as the minor component. The place of articulation is retained and the result is a dentalfricative. An example would be thin [2in] from a much earlier [thin] (cf. Latin tenuis ‘thin’) which became [t2in] then [t2in] and finally [2in] as part of the Germanic Sound Shift. A similar change took place in early Greek, cf. theta /theta/ > /2eta/.

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The essential difference between (1) and (2) is that the former – (1) – occurs in syllable codas, i.e. in sites of low sonority and (2) occurs in onsets, i.e. in sites of high sonority.

Both (1) and (2) are attested processes in many languages, i.e. reinterpretation by early language learners and articulatoryweakening in syllable codas (lenition). On a systemic level they produce opposite results: greater sonority in syllable onsets - (2) - and greater sonority in syllable rhymes - (1).

Now over time, dental fricatives which have arisen due to (2) tend to disappear in Germanic (German, Dutch, Swedish, etc.). But initial dental fricatives have been retained in Icelandic and English.

1) Lenition in syllable codas2) Reinterpretation of strongly aspirated /th/

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Icelandic has dental fricatives because the language has changed so little over such a long period of time. So here retention is the major force.

English, however, has indeed changed its phonological system over the centuries, e.g. it has lost consonantal length, lost moraic predicatibility in syllable rhymes, has acquired phonemic voiced fricatives and has developed contrastive word stress under the influence of Romance.

So why has a language which has undergone more phonological change than any of the other Germanic languages retained dental fricatives?

1) Lenition in syllable codas2) Reinterpretation of strongly aspirated /th/

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Why are dental fricatives so rare typologically? There is certainly an acoustic reason: /2/ has low frequency formants and so the acoustic prominence of the friction is much lower than with /s/ which has a clear hissing character. The prominence of /s/ would account for the general preference of this sound as a morphological marker in the history of English, e.g. for third person singular and for noun plurals.

Note that voiced dental fricatives do not occur in major lexical word classes in word-initial position. In English it is only grammatical forms, like this, that (and thou, thine if a variety has these) which show word-initial, i.e. syllable-initial, /3-/.

1) Lenition in syllable codas2) Reinterpretation of strongly aspirated /th/

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Spectrogram of /a2a/, /afa/, /asa/

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Spectrogram of /a3a/, /ava/, /aza/

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A typological view of fricatives

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Old English Middle English

/x/ [h,x] /g/ [g,J] [x], [J] > Ø

/s/ [s,z] /s/, /z/

/$/ [$] /$/ [$]

/f/ [f,v] /f/, /v//2/ [2, 3] /2/, /3/

Fricatives in the Old and Middle English periods

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If analogical regularity is an operating force in first language acquisition then the late Middle English distribution of systemic fricatives would have promoted the elision of /zj/ to /g/ thus providing a voiced equivalent to the broad-grooved /$/ which had arisen from a very early sequence */sk/, e.g. in Old English sceorta.

Reanalysis and later change

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The reanalysis of voice with fricatives as systemic led to a new phonological matrix for fricatives.

/2/ /3/

/f/ /v/

/s/ /z//$/ /g/ < /zj/ as in vision

Reanalysis and later change

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Feature loss and gain from OE to ME

Features lost Features gainedfront rounded vowels the díphthong /oi/velar fricatives ———long consonants ———syllable-coda length ———distribution——— phonemic pairs of fricatives——— functional stress shift

To summarise, the main phonological differences could be put in a table as follows.

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Old English Middle English

/x/ [h,x] /g/ [g,J] [x], [J] > Ø

/s/ [s,z] /s/, /z/

/$/ [$] /$/ [$]

/f/ [f,v] /f/, /v//2/ [2, 3] /2/, /3/

Fricatives in the Old and Middle English periods

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If analogical regularity is an operating force in first language acquisition then the late Middle English distribution of systemic fricatives would have promoted the elision of /zj/ to /g/ thus providing a voiced equivalent to the broad-grooved /$/ which had arisen from a very early sequence */sk/, e.g. in Old English sceorta.

Reanalysis and later change

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The reanalysis of voice with fricatives as systemic led to a new phonological matrix for fricatives.

/2/ /3/

/f/ /v/

/s/ /z//$/ /g/ < /zj/ as in vision

Reanalysis and later change

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Feature loss and gain from OE to ME

Features lost Features gainedfront rounded vowels the díphthong /oi/velar fricatives ———long consonants ———syllable-coda length ———distribution——— phonemic pairs of fricatives——— functional stress shift

To summarise, the main phonological differences could be put in a table as follows.

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1) Phonemicisation may have arisen in late Old English due to reanalysis of intervocalic voicing as a morphonological alteration of voiced and voiceless segments.

2) French loans with voiced fricatives may have entered the language through imposition or first language acquisition in a bilingual environment. This would have meant that a distinction like cease and seize came in with these French words.

3) It may be that the voiced sibilants were phonemicisedlast because voice is masked by their high friction (typologically supported).

By way of conclusion

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Thankyou for your attention.

Any questions?

Raymond HickeyEnglish LinguisticsUniversity of Duisburg and Essen

Email: raymond.hickey@uni-due.de