Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-
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Roger Lass
Abstract
There is a wide array of spellings attested in Middle English for initial OE hw- in words such as when, where, what, who, which. Those beginning with ‘q’, found mostly in the North (including Scotland) and Northeast Midlands, have long been the subject of scholarly debate. The consensus is that they represented an articulation stronger than [hw], usually assumed to be [xw]. Just a handful of scholars have suggested that the articulation could have been [kw], but there is so far little detailed argument for this position. We propose that at least a subset of reflexes of OE hw- words came at least variably to be pronounced with initial [kw]. We suggest that this strengthened pronunciation existed alongside [xw], and lenited [hw] and [w], as well as simple [h] with the [w] deleted. We link (as some other scholars have) the history of these spellings with that of northern lenition of original initial [kw] to [xw]/[hw]/[w]. We approach the problem from a strongly variationist perspective, presenting (in accompanying appendices) detailed information on the ‘q’ spellings accessible from LAEME and eLALME. We review all the data, from the earliest attested forms through to modern dialect surveys, including place-name evidence, and we assess previous arguments on the topic.
Acknowledgement
We thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics for travel assistance. We also thank Rhona Alcorn, Philip Bennett, Michael Benskin, Donka Minkova and Patrick Stiles for helpful comments on an early draft. We are grateful to Pavel Iosad for help with Celtic. We also thank an anonymous reviewer and especially Stephen Laker for a very detailed review including some useful extra references.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article (DOI: 10.1515/flih-2016-0003) offers supplementary material, available to authorized users. It includes Appendix 1 and Appendix 2, the data-sets referred to on pp. 61, 65, 74 and 98–100.
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers
- Third-person singular zero in Norfolk English: An addendum
- Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-
- The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony
- Particle placement in Late Modern English and Twentieth-century English: Morpho-syntactic variables
- Language norms and language use: Hypercorrections in the Independence period of Chilean Spanish
- Basic valency orientation in Homeric Greek
- Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund
- Daily jottings: Preposition placement in English diaries and travel journals from 1500 to 1900
- Reviews
- James N. Adams: Social variation and the Latin language
- Emanuel J. Drechsel: Language contact in the early colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English
- Lucien Tesnière: Elements of structural syntax
- Carlotta Viti, ed.: Perspectives on historical syntax
- Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch: The evolution of Englishes. The dynamic model and beyond
- 2016. IE2.com. Online lexica for ancient Indo-European languages
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers
- Third-person singular zero in Norfolk English: An addendum
- Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-
- The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony
- Particle placement in Late Modern English and Twentieth-century English: Morpho-syntactic variables
- Language norms and language use: Hypercorrections in the Independence period of Chilean Spanish
- Basic valency orientation in Homeric Greek
- Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund
- Daily jottings: Preposition placement in English diaries and travel journals from 1500 to 1900
- Reviews
- James N. Adams: Social variation and the Latin language
- Emanuel J. Drechsel: Language contact in the early colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English
- Lucien Tesnière: Elements of structural syntax
- Carlotta Viti, ed.: Perspectives on historical syntax
- Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch: The evolution of Englishes. The dynamic model and beyond
- 2016. IE2.com. Online lexica for ancient Indo-European languages
