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Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings
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Abstract:
The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, and , among others) eventually settled on one digraph, , for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. vs and vs ) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by and /θ/ by (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.
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URL: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/218501/
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/218501/8/218501.pdf
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Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots
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In: EISSN: 2416-5999 ; Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02153662 ; Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, Episciences.org, 2020, Special Issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, Special issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, pp.1-11 (2020)
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Multilingualism in Greater Poland court records (1386-1448): tagging discourse boundaries and code-switching
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The language of medieval legal record as a complex multilingual code
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Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: understanding the interchange of <ch(t)> and in Older Scots
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Unstable content, remediated layout: urban laws in Scotland through manuscript and print
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The migration of Old English to Scotland: place-name evidence for early Northumbrian settlement in Berwickshire
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Hough, Carole. - : Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, 2020
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Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots
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Early spelling evidence for Scots L-vocalisation: A corpus-based approach
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Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots: Database design and technical solutions
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Applications of Pattern-Driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
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Present applications and future directions in pattern-driven approaches to corpus linguistics
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