Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster12-14 August 2015

Introducing FITSRhona Alcorn

Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical LinguisticsUniversity of Edinburgh

with Vasilis Karaiskos, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los, Warren Maguire, Benjamin Molineaux & Daisy Smith

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From Inglis to Scots (FITS): Mapping sounds to spellings

• £1M AHRC-funded project at AMC• RQ: How did the highly distinctive form of

speech that evolved in Scotland in the Middle Ages develop?

• 5 researchers, 1 programmer, 1 PhD student + advisory panel of experts

• Apr 2014 – Mar 20182

From Inglis to Scots:

‘Inglis’ ‘Scots’

C12-C15

C16 onwards

Mapping sounds to spellings

• Inglis & Early Scots pre-date the era of recorded sound, so we rely on their written language for evidence

• No national standard of spelling until very much later so ESc spellings are highly variable

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See further: Aitken 1971, Macafee & Aitken 2002, McClure 1995, Jones 1997

‘earl’in 15th-century Scots

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‘both’in 15th-century Scots

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‘law’in 15th-century Scots

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Spelling as a window on MidEng Phonology

•No national written standard in MidEng •So ME spellings are highly variable too•Clues to features of spoken language, e.g. – [h] dropping: (h)ard ‘hard’, (h)euene ‘heaven’– fricative loss: ni(h)t ‘night’, ri(ch)te ‘right’– Nth. stan, ban, ham ~ Sth. ston, bon, hom

‘stone, bone, home’

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Spelling as a window on spoken language

Spelling as a window on ESc phonology

• Some progress, e.g. Johnston (1997), Aitken (2002)

• But the focus has tended towards: – major developments, i.e. those with

reflexes in ModSc– distinctive developments, i.e. those that

distinguish Scots from English

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• Like Aitken (2002) we will trace the history of individual speech sounds rather than individual words

• Unlike Aitken we focus on:– the period to 1500– the language of documents– words of Germanic origin– all types of speech sounds– rare as well as common spelling variants– regional as well as temporal developments

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FITS: methodology

ESc spellings: our data source

• A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots corpus: – 1,400+ diplomatically-transcribed, local texts– All dated before 1500• when Scots was flourishing as a national language• before anglicisation effects took off

– All dated after 1380• no older texts of this type survive

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1380-1500 spellings

1380-1500 sound systems

FITS: methodology

sound-spelling mappings

Spelling complexities: Mod St. English

• A letter may have > 1 sound– <c>: electric [k], electricity [s]– <ea>: beard [i], break [e], heard [ɛ], heart [a]

• A sound may have > 1 representations– [ʤ]: jump, germ, ledger– [i]: feet, beat, grieve, deceive

• Our analysis will capture phonotactic data

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1380-1500 spellings

1380-1500 sound systems

Sources of the 1380-1500 sound systems

FITS: methodology

diachronic correspondences (= the CC)

sound-spelling mappings

• Designed and built– Primary data extractor tool– Data analysis tool– FITS database– CC database– FITS website (amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/fits/)

• Lots of level 1 analyses (Esc Spellings :: ESc Sounds)

• First set of data ready for level 2 (diachronic) analysis

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Progress so far

• A freely-available, fully-searchable, online database to answer user-defined Qs like:– what does Inglis <ui> represent?– when and where did [v]-deletion begin? – which aspects of Scots are not of OE origin?

• Digital maps to display answers temporo-spatially

• Workshops to introduce FITS tools• A transferrable methodology

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Expected outputs

Aitken, A.J. 1971. Variation and variety in Middle Scots. In A.J. Aitken et al. (eds.) Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots, 177-209. London: Longman.

Aitken, A.J. 2002. The Older Scottish Vowels. Ed. C. Macafee. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.

CoNE: Lass, R., M. Laing, R. Alcorn & K. Williamson (eds.). 2013. A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Primitive OE to Early ME. www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/CoNE.html

Johnston, P. 1997. Older Scots phonology. In Jones (ed.).Jones, C. (ed.) 1997. The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language.

Edinburgh: EUP.LAOS: A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots 1380-1500, ed. K. Williamson. 2008.

www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.htmlMacafee, C. & A.J. Aitken. 2002. A History of Scots to 1700.

www.dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/history-of-scots/McClure, J.D. 1995. Scots and its Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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References

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