Velar Consonants in Early Old English. Growth of New Phonemes

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§ 141. In Early OE velar consonants split into two distinct sets of sounds, which eventually led to the growth of new phonemes.

The velar consonants [k, g, x, γ ] were palatalised before a front vowel, and sometimes also after a front vowel, unless followed by a back vowel. Thus in OE cild (NE child)the velar consonant [k] was softened to [k'] as it stood before the front vowel [i]: [*kild] > [k'ild]; similarly [k] became [k'] in OE sprǣ c (NE speech)after a front vowel but not in OE sprecan (NE speak)where [k] was followed by the back vowel [a]. In the absence of these phonetic conditions the consonants did not change, with the result that lingual consonants split into two sets, palatal and velar. The difference between them became phonemic when, a short time later, velar and palatal consonants began to occur in similar phonetic conditions; cf. OE cild [k'ild], ciest [k'iest] (NE child, chest)with palatal [k'] and ceald, cē pan (NE cold, keep)with hard, velar [k] — both before front vowels.

Though the difference between velar and palatal consonants was not shown in the spellings of the OE period, the two sets were undoubtedly differentiated since a very early date. In the course of time the phonetic difference between them grew and towards the end of the period the palatal consonants developed into sibilants and affricates: [k'] > [ʧ ], [g] > [dʒ ]; in ME texts they were indicated by means of special digraphs and letter sequences (see the Mod E descendants of the OE examples in Table 8)

Table 8

Palatalisation and Splitting of Velar Consonants

Change illustrated	Examp1es
Before and after front vowels	In other positions	OE	NE
k	k'		cinn, birce, tǣ can (from *tā kjan)	chin, birch, teach
		k	can, macian (from *makō jan)	can, make
g	g'		senʒ an (from *sangjan)	singe
g:	g':		ecʒ, brycʒ	edge, bridge
		g	ʒ ā n, ʒ rē tan	go, greet
X	x'		neaht, niht	night
		x, h	hors, hlā f	horse, loaf
Y	i		dæ ʒ , ʒ eard	day, yard
		γ	daʒ as	days

§ 142. The date of the palatalisation can be fixed with considerable precision in relation to other Early OE sound changes. It must have taken place after the appearance of [æ, æ: ] (referred to the 5th c.) but prior to palatal mutation (late 6th or 7th c); for [æ, æ: ] could bring about the palatalisation of consonants (recall OE sprǣ c, NE speech), while the front vowels which arose by palatal mutation could not. In OE cē pan (from *kō pjan)and OE cyninʒ (with [e: ] and [y] through palatal mutation) the consonant [k] was not softened, which is confirmed by their modern descendants, keep and king. The front vowels [y] and [e: ] in these and similar words must have appeared only when the splitting of velar consonants was well under way. Yet it is their appearance that transformed the two sets of positional allophones into phonemes, for a velar and a palatal consonant could now occur before a front vowel, that is, in identical phonetic conditions: cf. OE cyninʒ and cӯ se (NE king, cheese).

Loss of Consonants in Some Positions

§ 143. Comparison with other OG languages, especially Gothic and O Icel, has revealed certain instances of the loss of consonants in WG and Early OE.

Nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants; in the process the preceding vowel was probably nasalised and lengthened. Cf.:

Gt fimf, O Icel fim, OHG fimf —OE fif (NE five)

Gt uns, OHG uns — OE ū s (NE us)

§ 144. Fricative consonants could be dropped between vowels and before some plosive consonants; these losses were accompanied by a compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel or the fusion of the preceding and succeeding vowel into a diphthong, cf. OE sē on, which corresponds to Gt saihwan, OE slē an (NE slay), Gt slahan, G. schlagen, OE sæ ʒ de and sǣ de (NE said).

§ 145. We should also mention the loss of semi-vowels and consonants in unstressed final syllables. [j] was regularly dropped in suffixes after producing various changes in the root: palatal mutation of vowels, lengthening of consonants after short vowels. The loss of [w] is seen in some case forms of nouns: Nom, trē o, Dat. trē owe (NE tree); Norn, sǣ , Dat. sǣ we (NE sea), cf. Gt triwa, saiws.

Old English Consonant System

§ 146. Table 9 shows the system of OE consonants in the 9thand 10th c.

The system consisted of several correlated sets of consonants. All the consonants fell into noise consonants and sonorants. The noise consonants were subdivided into plosives and fricatives; plosives were further differentiated as voiced and voiceless, the difference being phonemic. The fricative consonants were also subdivided into voiced and voiceless; in this set, however, sonority was merely a phonetic difference between allophones. Cf. OE pin — bin, where the difference in sonority is phonemically relevant (NE pin, bin)and OE hlā f [f] — hlā ford [v] where the difference is positional: the consonant is voiced intervocally and voiceless finally (incidentally, voiced and voiceless fricatives were not distinguished in OE spelling). The opposition of palatal and velar lingual consonants [k] — [k'], [g] — [g'] had probably become phonemic by the time of the earliest written records (see § 141). (Some scholars include in the system one more palatal consonant: [sk], spelt as sc, e. g. OE scip (NE ship); others treat it as a sequence of two sounds [s'] and [k'] until Early ME when they fused into a single sibilant [ʃ ].) It is noteworthy that among the OE consonants there were few sibilants and no affricates.

Table 9

Old English Consonants

Place of articulation Manner of articulation	Labial, labiodental	Fore lingual (dental)	Mediolingual (palatal)	Back lingual (velar)
Noise consonants	plosive	voiceless	p p:	t t:	k' k':	k k:
voiced	b b:	d d:	g':	g g:
fricative	voiceless	f f:	θ θ: s s:	x' x':	x x: (h)
voiced	v	ð z	γ ' (j)	γ
Sonorants	m m:	n n:		(ŋ )
w	r l	i

§ 147. The most universal distinctive feature in the consonant system was the difference in length. During the entire OE period long consonants are believed to have been opposed to short ones on a phonemic level; they were mostly distinguished in intervocal position. Single and geminated (long) consonants are found in identical phonetic conditions. Cf. OE lǣ de — 1st p. sg Pres. of lǣ dan (NE lead)and lǣ dde (Past); OE sticca (NE stick) — stica (Gen. case pl of OE stice, NE stitch). In final position the quantitative opposition was irrelevant and the second letter, which would indicate length, was often lacking, e. g. OE man and eal are identical to mann, eall (NE man, all).

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

1.Did word stress in OE always fall on the first syllable? Recall some regular shifts of stress in word-building and give similar examples from present-day English.

2. Comment on the phonemic status of OE short diphthongs (give your reasons why they should be treated as phonemes or as allophones). Account for the difference between the vowels in OE pæ t, eat and monn, all going back to PG words with [a] (cf Gt pata, manna, alls).

4. Account for the interchange of vowels in OE dæ ʒ e, daʒ as (NE day — Dat. sg and Nom. pl); bæ ð, bað ian (NE bath, bathe).

5. Say which word in each pair of parallels is OE and which is Gt. Pay attention to the difference in the vowels;

raups — rē ad (NE red); hā m — haims (NE home); beald — balpei (NE bold); barms — bearm (‘chest’); dē af — daufs (NE deaf); triu — trē o (NE tree); lē of — liufs (‘dear’, rel. to NE love); qiþ an — cweð an (NE quoth ‘say’).

In the same way classify the following words into OE and O Scand: bē aʒ — baugr (‘ring’); fá r — fǣ r (NE fear); man or mon — mað r (Gt manna); daupr — dē ap (NE death); eall —allr (NE all); earm — armr (NE arm); harpa — hearpe (NE harp); fað ir — fæ der (NE father); fæ st — fastr (NE fast).

6. Account for the difference between the root-vowels in OE and in parallels from other OG languages:

Gt langiza, OE lenʒ ra (NE longer); Gt marei, OHG meri, OE mere (NE obs. mere ‘lake’); Gt sandian, OE sendan (NE send); Gt ubils, OE yfel (NE evil); Gt be-laibian, OE lǣ fan (NE leave); Gt. baugian, OE bӯ ʒ an, bieʒ an (‘bend’); Gt fulljan, OE fyllan (NE fill); Gt laisjan — OE iǣ ran ‘teach’.

7. Explain the term " mutation" and innumerate the changes referred to mutations in Late PG and in Early OE. What do they all have in common?

8. Which word in each pair could go back to an OE prototype with palatal mutation and which is more likely to have descended from the OE word retaining the original non-mutated vowel? Mind that the spelling may often point to the earlier pronunciation of the word: old — elder; strong — strength; goose — geese; man — men; full — fill; food — feed; brother — brethren; far — further.

9. Was the OE vowel system symmetrical? State your arguments in favour and against its interpretation as a completely balanced system (See also question 2).

10. Define the sound values of the letters f, ð , s and comment on the system of OE consonant phonemes:

OE heofon, faran, ʒ e-faran, hæ fde, offrung, ofer (NE heaven, fare, had, offering, over); oð ð e, oð er, Norð, ð anne (‘or’, NE other, North, then); sǣ, wisse, cē osan, cē as (NE sea, ‘knew’, choose, chose).

11. What consonant and vowel changes are illustrated by the following pairs of words?

Gt maiza — OE mā ra (NE more); Gt kunþ ian, OE cӯ ð an (‘inform’); Gt daups — OE dē ad (NE dead).Gt saljan — OE sellan (NE sell); OE pyncan — pū hte (NE think — thought); OE mæ ʒ den, mǣ den (NE maiden); Gt kinnus, OE cinn (NE chin); OHG isarn — OE iren (NE iron).

Gt hausjan — OE hieren (NE hear); O Scand skaft — OE sceaft (NE shaft).

12. Why can the voicing of fricative consonants in Early OE be regarded as a sort of continuation of Verner's Law? Describe the similarities and the differences between the two processes.

13. What peculiarities of OE consonants can account for the difference in the sound values of the italicised letters in the following modern words?

sand; rise (OE risan); house — houses (OE hū s); hose (OE hosa); horse (OE hors); think, bathe, path (OE pyncan, bā ð ian, pæ ð ).

Chapter IX
OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR (§ 148-226)

Preliminary Remarks. Form-Building.
Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories

§ 148. OE was a synthetic, or inflected type of language; it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formation.

Grammatical endings, or inflections, were certainly the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the parts of speech that could change their form; they were usually used alone but could also occur in combination with other means.

Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants.

The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.

§ 149. The parts of speech to be distinguished in OE are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral (all referred to as nominal parts of speech or nomina), the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb.

We shall assume that there were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness (see § 185). Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and the number of members within the category (categorial forms). The noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case (for the distinction of gender see § 160 below). The adjective had the maximum number of categories — five. The number of members in the same grammatical categories in different parts ofspeech did not necessarily coincide: thus the noun had four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative, whereas the adjective had five (the same four cases plus the Instrumental case)[13]. The personal pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p., unlike other parts of speech, distinguished three numbers — Singular, Plural and Dual. Cf.

sg OE ic (NE I), dual wit ‘we two’, pl wē (NE we)

OE stā n n (NE stone) — stā nas (stones).

Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood — verbal categories proper — and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence.

The distinction of categorial forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes: declensions and conjugations.

§ 150. The following survey of OE grammar deals with the main parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, and the verb. Many features of the OE syntactic structure will be self-evident from the study of morphology; therefore the description of syntax is confined to the main peculiarities which may help to trace the trends of development in later periods.

The OE grammatical system is described synchronically as appearing in the texts of the 9th and 10th c. (mainly WS); facts of earlier, prewritten, history will sometimes be mentioned toaccount for the features of written OE and to explain their origin.

THE NOUN

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