On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
-
Margaret Laing
and
Roger Lass
Abstract
We offer a radical reinterpretation of the first step in the development of OE [h] in hēo towards PDE [ʃ] in she. This solves outstanding difficulties in accounting for the vocalism in ME [ʃe:], precursor of PDE [ʃi:]. The background is the etymology of she created for the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies, and its accompanying Corpus of Changes. The database for CoNE is The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, with 36 different spellings for she across 71 texts. First, we present the OE etymology of she, tracking the changes that gave rise to all the attested OE variants. Second, using Britton’s (1991) paper as a starting point, we give a new explanation for initial [hj], allowing a straightforward account for all three attested ME vocalisms: [e:], [o:] and [ø:]. Third, we unpack the changes underlying the complex of variants attested in LAEME.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
- On saying two things at once The historical semantics and pragmatics of Old English emotion words
- Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
- Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns
- On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
- Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
- On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari
- The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family
- Book Reviews
