"Now you see it, now you don't" once more: the loss and insertion of dental stops in medieval English.

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Adam Mickiewicz University Press

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the issue of the contextual disappearance of dental consonants in medieval English. The loss of dental [d] is analogous to the loss of labial [b] in that both occurred in homorganic clusters, although the loss of the dental is less systematic. In the study, a distinction is made between a permanent and a sporadic loss of the dental. The relatively rare opposite process of d-insertion after [n], observed in loanwords from French, is also given some attention. An effort is made to determine the extent of the loss of the dentals in both time and space.

1. Cluster simplification

The history of English pronunciation offers numerous instances of a simplification of word-final consonant groups and, conversely, a formation of new clusters, these processes operating without much consistency. Consonantal sequences subject to simplification include both homorganic clusters, like /ld, ln/, and non-homorganic clusters, like /mn/. Especially prominent are such developments in consonant combinations involving a nasal and a homorganic voiced plosive consonant, i.e. labial /mb/, dental /nd/ and velar /ng/, all the three contributing to the lengthening of the preceding short vowels in Old English. Occasionally we witness the rise of a cluster because of an addition of a new consonant to the existing one, as in OE puma > thumb, now again pronounced without the labial plosive. But while cluster simplification is a real phonological development, the formation of clusters in syllable-final position as a result of consonant insertion, has nothing to do with sound change, being merely an instance of analogy.

Since a relatively detailed account of changes affecting the labial cluster [mb] can be found in Welna (2005), the present paper concentrates on a description of the fates of words containing [nd], another word-final voiced homorganic cluster, in Middle English and at the turn of Early Modern English, with focus on the 13th and 14th centuries. The corpus of words containing the word-final sequence [nd] is based on Piotrowski's reverse word list (1993), while quotations of Middle English sentences come from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Middle English Dictionary (MED). (For a full list of words subject to analysis, see the Appendix.)

2. Hitherto accounts of the change

The authors of historical phonologies of English concentrate on the examination of vowels rather than consonants since changes in the latter class only rarely have a systemic character, i.e. they seldom affect the system of phonemes. To systemic changes belong, for instance, the acquisition of the phonemic status by English fricatives or the rise of the phoneme /z/, while the majority of consonant changes are sporadic and of a purely distributional type. For this reason the only modification of consonant clusters which offers some challenge to structurally oriented linguists is the simplification of the syllable-final velar combination /ng/ in which the loss of the final velar plosive was the direct cause of the rise of the new velar nasal phoneme /n/ some time in Early Modern English. Also the labial cluster /mb/ seems to have attracted some attention because its permanent simplification took place in words like climb, dumb, etc., exhibiting a relatively high frequency of use.

The author of perhaps the most detailed account of the process, Horn (1954: 1108-1116), suggests that the change, rare in the standard speech and more frequent in dialects, began in the 15th century under weak stress conditions. (1)

The assimilation within the voiced homorganic dental sequence /nd/ is not as adequately evidenced as the loss of the labial plosive in the cluster /mb/. That inconsistency is explained as due to the articulatory energy of /nd/ being smaller than the energy of /mb/ (Horn 1954:1115). Elsewhere Horn (1954:1113) tries to convince the reader that the change took place rather late. He adduces occasional d-less spellings, like blyne 'blind' or grown 'ground' from unspecified sources which come from a very late period, around 1600 ("um 1600"). Other words whose...

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