Table Of ContentJANUA LINGUARUM
STUDIA MEMORIAE
NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA
edenda curai
C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD
Indiana University
Series Practica, 218
HANDBOOK OF
MIDDLE ENGLISH GRAMMAR:
PHONOLOGY
by
RICHARD JORDAN
translated and revised by
EUGENE JOSEPH CROOK
Florida State University
1974
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands.
Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 74-76776
Printed in The Netherlands
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
Richard Jordan's Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik completed in 1925,
revised in 1934 by H. Ch. Matthes, is in its third German edition with an updated
bibliography by Klaus Dietz (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1968). This
translation, then, rests upon the contributions of all three men.
Using symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, I have tried to provide
where necessary phonemic and graphemic statements which conform to more
modern practices. My revisions constitute an intercollation of the scholarly works
on Middle English phonology and dialectology from 1934 to the present. These
additions to the original text are enclosed in square brackets to set them off from the
work of Jordan and Matthes. I have preserved the paragraph and remark numbering
of the original to facilitate the use of the English translation in instances where
previous and later citations refer to the German text alone.
I have completed each citation in the body of the work according to currently
acceptable bibliographic form and have collected these references and my own
additions in a bibliographical list alphabetically arranged under author or editor at
the end of the text. This fact allows the shortest possible citation in the text which
can then be completed by reference to the bibliographical list. The method used is
the one made acceptable by the journal Language and followed by many monographs
on linguistics. In addition I have compiled an appendix of the primary sources cited,
giving their edition, manuscript and shire localization where possible, which can
then be compared with §§ 4-6, 15, 303 for further references. Each citation of a literary
source will be abbreviated in the text in accordance with the table of abbreviations
following the list of maps.
References to geographical and linguistic areas are not always as precise as we
would like and have come to expect. For Jordan, Mercian refers strictly to the OE
dialect spoken in the West Midland. East Anglian generally means only the South-
east Midland. Anglian alone may mean Northumbria and the entire Midland. He
divides Saxon into East Saxon (Essex and London) and West Saxon (the rest of the
South except Kent).
VI TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
PHONOLOGY
The phoneme is the logical starting point for our overview of historical phonology
and dialectology. Prominent in the history of the phoneme is Henry Sweet (see
Jakobson 1966). Sweet acknowledges in his preface to A Handbook of Phonetics
(1877) that 'it is to Germany that we owe the first attempt to construct a general
system of sounds on a physiological basis'. He goes on to cite Eduard Sievers'
Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie (Leipzig 1876) as the most comprehensive statement
of German investigations. Henry Sweet's Broad Romic transcriptions are what we
would today call phonemic analysis.
The Polish philologist Baudouin de Courtenay proposed to distinguish between
sound as purely physical and phoneme as mental. It was his student Mikolaj Krus-
zewski (tiber die Lautabwechslung 1881: 14-15) who first defined the word phoneme
and used it in its modern form:
With the name phoneme I propose to designate the phonetic unit (i.e. that which is phonetically
indivisible) in distinction to the sound — the anthropophonetic unity. The advantage and
the inevitableness of such an appellation (and such a conception) is already a priori evident.
However, in order to convey a greater power of persuasion I call attention to the following.
The combination ei becomes the correlative of the Greek T, (eXi-rcov || XEÍTCCO) ... Polish lo
becomes the correspondent of the Russian olo (cf. gwltová | [ glova = roJiOBa, glowa 'head')...
The phonetic unity can therefore be equal to several sounds or even to one sound and the
property of another. [My translation.]
What Kruszewski here calls sound (German Laut) we now call phone. What he calls
phoneme we would today term archiphoneme.
The most comprehensive description of the boundary between the two domains,
phonemic and phonetic, came from Ferdinand de Saussure whose lecture notes were
collected and edited by his students between 1906 and 1911. He laid the groundwork
for structural linguistics which prevailed until the 1950's and concerned itself generally
with matters other than syntax. De Saussure (1959: 18) made the differentiation
between langue and parole:
The study of speech is then twofold: its basic part — having as its object language [langue],
which is purely social and independent of the individual — is exclusively psychological; its
secondary part — which has as its object the individual side of speech, i.e. speaking [parole]
including phonation — is psychophysical.
A sound (parole) is real or a fact — an immediately observable phenomenon. A
phoneme (langue) is ideal or a standard — an abstraction resulting from analysis, a
necessary means of scientific research. The abstract phoneme is absolutely necessary
in order to define the limits and latitudes of given sounds, and their normative value
in a given language.
The phonetic shape of a phoneme is determined by its environment — word,
sentence, or dialect. The variable phonetic shapes or sounds attributable to one
phoneme are called allophones. Phonological change is based on the prevalence of
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE VII
one allophone over another until the newly predominant allophone becomes phone-
mic. In OE the phoneme /a:/ probably had the allophones [a:], [a:], [aA:], [o:].
In ME the prevailing allophone shifted from [a:] to [o:], and when OE /ae/ in open
syllables became /a:/ with [a:] as its predominant allophone, the [o:] allophone of
OE /a:/ became phonemic as ME /o:/ with a new set of allophones [ov:], [o:],
Richard Jordan was born in 1877, the year Sweet published his Handbook of
Phonetics. He was educated in philology at Heidelberg and Karlsruhe and taught at
the University of Jena until his untimely death at the age of 48. That he was thorough-
ly learned in the phonemic theory we can understand through his frequent citations
of and quotations from Sievers and Sweet. Although his distinctions between
graphemics and phonemics were not always as clear as modern methods permit,
there can be no doubt that his study of ME phonology and dialectology rests upon
the principles of phonemic analysis.
A more objective view of the worth of Richard Jordan's work can be determined
by its use in subsequent grammars. Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik der englischen
Sprache (originally published 1914-1940) relies on Jordan to a great degree for his
treatment of the consonants. E. E. Wardale's Introduction to Middle English (1937)
likewise refers the reader to Jordan. Jacek Fisiak, Outlines of Middle English (1964),
and Rolf Berndt, Einführung in das Studium des Mittelenglischen (1960), are two recent
authors who still depend upon Jordan. Others, not so chary of a dead author's just
due, use his work without quoting or citing him.
Jordan's methodology is one of objectivity, inductive approach, citation of the
data, formulation of observations, and reliance on the spoken form as recognized
through rhyme pairs. This places him squarely in the structural approach to linguistics
as it was formulated by the American, Leonard Bloomfield in Language (New York
1933), although writing out of a thoroughly European background. Bloomfield's
influence — greater than that exerted by Sapir and others — was due primarily
to the thorough organization of his book. Almost the whole of the Bloomfieldian-
structuralist position follows from the statement that in language some things are
the same, and some are different. The things which are different are the contrasts,
set in a framework of things which are the same. In technique Bloomfieldian lin-
guistics relied on finding contrasts to draw up the total structure. In point of view, it
was severely positivist and anti-mentalist (see A. Hill 1966: 3). However, since Jordan
does not pay sufficient attention to a balanced phonemic system he cannot be counted
as a strict structuralist.
Various attempts have been made by structuralists to reinterpret ME phonological
processes. Stockwell (1961, 1962) attempts to interpret historical phonology according
to the NE situation of vowel plus glide. His evidence is entirely subjective and he
ignores MS graphemics in his analysis. Lehmann (1969) among others rejects Stock-
well's analysis in favor of the traditional system of vowel plus length.
In the 1950's there arose in opposition to structural linguistics a methodology that
VIII TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
was more subjective and deductive in approach, based on intuition and rationalism
and concerned more with the written than the spoken language. The leader of this
school, Noam Chomsky, has been a prolific publisher since his Syntactic Structures
(The Hague 1957). The methodology has been unyieldingly defended in almost daily
publications. For Chomsky and his followers the failure of structural linguistics
was that it did not attempt to reveal the underlying core of generative processes in
language — that is, the processes that determine the deeper levels of structure (see
Chomsky 1968). With the rise of the transformational-generative approach to lin-
guistics and the subsequent decline in the structural approach the study of syntax
has given some different interpretations of phonology. In one of these recently the
traditional phonemic level of analysis has been attacked by Chomsky and Halle
(1968). For the phonemic level they have attempted to substitue that of the morpho-
phoneme. In order to achieve simplicity of rule-ordered phonological description,
transformationalists have sacrificed accuracy and completeness (cf. R. Hall 1969:
212, A. Hill 1966: 23-30). Whether their interpretation will stand, only time can tell,
but it seems a mistake to look upon language as just one hierarchy, neglecting the
two fundamental distinctions: content-expression, and form-substance (cf. Malm-
berg 1969).
Nevertheless, some accommodation between the statements in this Handbook of
Middle English Grammar and the theories of modern generative grammar must be
reached. Our survey of the principles of generative grammar and their applications
to historical linguistics begins with that of Robert D. King, Historical Linguistics and
Generative Grammar (1969). Generative grammar makes a distinction between com-
petence and performance which is comparable to de Saussure's langue and parole.
The bases of generative phonology are distinctive features and rule ordering. Dis-
tinctive features in generative terminology are articulatory as well as acoustic para-
meters — as in the features high, back, low, anterior, coronal, tense, voice, nasal, etc.
Change in an adult's grammar is confined to rule addition by the borrowing of
rules among adults. Rule simplification originates in the child's learning of language.
The consequence of this is that isoglosses formed by the spread of rules over a speech
territory form large, coherent dialect areas, whereas those formed by simplification
are characteristically discontinuous because of independent development of the same
change in several speech communities. Historical study, therefore, must be based on
the presence versus absence of rules, and not on differences in the form and order of
shared rules (Kiparsky 1968: 195). Although Jordan has not stated his grammar in
such terms, his statements are not inherently averse to these theories.
Change as it is conceived of in generative grammar must be differentiated into what
is called 'sound change' (phones) and 'phonological change' (phonemes). Sound
change is not change in competence but change in performance brought about by
external factors that affect and alter renditions of a particular sound type. To select
a less prevalent allophone from the group of allophones of a given phoneme does
nothing to change the value of that phoneme. This is the kind of change Jordan
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE IX
cautions against when he speaks of characteristics heterogeneous to a given dialect
borrowed for needs of rhyme. Under circumstances of prose such changes would not
be evidenced. Phonological change differs radically from simple sound change. In
the former, change is change in competence reflected by alterations in the grammar.
The performance level still causes the same kinds of fluctuations after the change in
competence as before. However, phonological change is reflected in what Jordan
speaks of as occasional spellings which testify to a given change.
Occasional spellings originate in scribes who tend to devise symbols for the under-
lying systematic phonemic segments of the language. They tend to alter the existing
orthography only when restructuring or innovations in the grammar have produced
segments phonetically close to other surface-level segments which have a stable
graphemic representation. For example the result of OE e in open syllables and the
result of OE ce was /e:/ in ME which could be spelled <ea> by back-spelling after the
monophthongization of the OE ea also became /e:/. In NE, steal < ME /sterlan/
< OE stelan is set off from its homonym steel < ME /ste:l/ < OE stele. The <ea>
spelling tended to be used for the ME pronunciation of /e:/ as opposed to <ee>
which gradually tended to be used for ME /e:/. However, in general the morpho-
phonemic representation (e.g. 'regular' noun-plural-suffix <-s> /-z/, /-s/) wins out
over the morphographemic representation due, to a large extent, to orthographic
conservatism.
Change by analogy is really the appearance of new underlying forms. The analogies
for which Jordan was criticized in the reviews of his first edition are generally retained
in this translation, since in general analogies are difficult to prove in particular cases.
In generative terms phonological change is not a gradual process in the competence
of any one speaker. Denying this does not deny the possibility that a phonological
change spreads gradually throughout a speech community. An interim position that
seems now to be valid indicates that the spread of a change is geographically and
chronologically graduated. Prestigious pronunciations spread out from the centers
and archaic pronunciations recede to the margins under pressure from increased
communication and schools. Generally the rule of a phonological change is gradually
acquired in the competence of an ever increasing number of contiguous speakers.
The study of dialectology is concerned with just this process.
DIALECTOLOGY
Many of the rules of generative grammar reflect historical changes, and the order
of applying the rules often reflects the relative chronology of equivalent changes
between dialects. This statement is supported by Sigurd (1966) and Saporta (1965).
But some of the methodology of Saporta is discussed at greater length by Thomas
(1967). The dialectologist works on the premise of the following three principles: a
certain definition of 'relatedness'; a selection of data to be considered; and a lin-
X TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
guistic model which both accounts for the data and distinguishes relatedness. In
generative grammar dialectal comparison is stated in sets of ordered rules which show
the differences in relatedness mainly in the reordering of rules within the grammar.
This process generally assumes that the phonology of a language may be studied in a
set of rules apart from the sentence-generating portion of the grammar. This is
generally the principle of Jordan who only occasionally resorts to sentence phonetics
to describe a phonological change, but more often he cites morphological influences.
Thomas' study considers whether the comparative statement should be based on the
comparison of the separately written grammars of different dialects and their con-
flation (the structural approach) or whether it can take the form of successive deri-
vative stages from a selected basal grammar which is the grammar of one of the
dialects being investigated (Saporta's method). The former method relying on
comparison of sets of rules yields questionable results. The latter method for a study
of ME might take the Southern dialect as its basal grammar and proceed to derive
the other dialectal grammars from it. Occasionally for purposes of simplification it
would be necessary to shift the basal grammar from one dialect to another which
would yield heterogeneous results. Finally, Thomas states that "the generative device
is clearly most powerful in comparative statement when it has an arsenal of abstract
underlying forms, from which all dialectal forms are derived through a set of ordered
rules" (1967: 196). For Jordan's study of the ME dialects most underlying forms are
older historical forms attested in writing. This notion of homogeneous input is made
very clear by O'Neil (1968: 630) who states very plainly that "at the phonological
level the notion 'dialect' means 'differing in phonological rules but not in the input
to the rules'".
The future of dialectal studies may lie in the hands of the generative grammarians.
But the structural approach is currently producing the more practical results. The
linguistic rationale for these studies is outlined by Sundby (1963: 12-17, 'The Struc-
tural Approach to Historical Phonology and Dialectology'). Sundby here argues for
flexibility in time. In dealing with linguistic data representing such an area as Wor-
cestershire it seems legitimate to compare sections or 'chunks' of material measuring
fifty or a hundred years. This method is second only to one of comparing texts
reflecting the linguistic situation of discrete years a century or so apart and taking no
account of the language of the intervening years. This latter method is made im-
possible by the scattered documentation of relevant forms. Sundby argues for a new
terminology. Where no sharp divisions of speech are observed there may, however,
be areas of overlapping which he calls bands rather than isoglosses. This is in spite
of the fact that he seems to agree with Gleason that an isogloss in most cases is not
a sharp line indicating an actual limit, but a representation of statistical probabilities.
The problems which Sundby raises are legitimate and have been discussed at
greater length by Marchand (1970). In describing the major types of linguistic endeavor
we may say that descriptive linguistics is synchronic and synoptic, historical lin-
guistics is synoptic but diachronic, geographical linguistics is synchronic but diatopic,
