Teenage speak and beyond

Paul Johnston paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU
Sun Jun 3 16:09:01 UTC 2007


And the "no-merger" constraint is only possibly held in the first
stages of the GVS.  Even London English has mergers in later stages
of /ai/ and /a:/ (BAIT/MATE), /OU/ and/O:/ (GROW/COAT) and /E:/ and /
e:/ (BEAT/MEET).  The last one may not even have happened in the
usual way in London and Southeastern England, by simple raising of /
E:/, but may involve a combination of normal sound change, borrowing
from nearby dialects, and word-by-word lexical transfers (again due
to contact).
I've been working on a paper about the other two mergers for a long
time, and that too might be more complex than it looks; the mergers
seem genuine in London, starting in final position, then before
sonorants, then obstruents, but, like the adoption of the pronoun
they and the -s ending of the 3rd person singular of the verb,
Northern, or at least Northeast Midland influence is probably
involved.  Furthermore, the actual pronunciation you get in Cockney
and so on MIGHT be due to normal sound change, but possibly helped
along by a dialect contact phenomenon with varieties next door
(Essex, Kent, Surrey) that lacked these mergers until the 19th
century, where the original pronunciation for BAIT and GROW was
adopted for MATE and COAT too.  This kind of thing shows up even
better for the Birmingham region, where the long vowel system was
completely refashioned probably due to London influence, and you can
see the before and after setups in the Ellis survey data from the
1870s, with the process farther along in big towns and smaller ones
on railway lines.

So, as with so many things in  life, what seems really simple turns
out to be SUPER complex when you delve into it.  But that's what
gives the lie to teachers of mine at U of Michigan, who told me that
everything that needed to be known in historical linguistics was
discovered by the end of the 19th century.

Paul Johnston
On Jun 3, 2007, at 10:11 AM, Alice Faber wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Teenage speak and beyond
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> James A. Landau wrote:
>>
>> I am certainly not an expert on the Great Vowel Shift, but when I
>> first read about it, as a senior in college, the book I was
>> reading said that the GVS had to have been a single process,
>> albeit erratic and long-drawn-out.  Had one English vowel rotated
>> while others remained static, English would have ended up with
>> that vowel merging with its "target", which has not occurred.
>>
>
> Well, I'm no expert either, but from the reading I've done, especially
> about various British dialects, it's only when all you look at is
> London
> English that you can get away with claiming that there were no
> mergers.
> It's kind of hard to abstract this information from _The Survey of
> English Dialects_, since it's organized around lexical items and not
> phonological systems. But, it *is* there. And if you look at the
> outcomes of the various ME vowels participating in the GVS, you find a
> wild variety of outcomes, both in phonetic quality and in the number
> (and types) of surviving vowel contrasts. As Paul noted elsewhere in
> this thread, when you take the dialect evidence into account, it's
> abundantly clear that different changes subsumed in the GVS started in
> different parts of England, some as early as the 13th C CE and some as
> late as the 17th; that not all changes occurred in all areas of
> England;
> and that in areas that were affected by all changes, the changes
> occurred in different orders. So to address the point alleged in your
> college book: there were indeed mergers in some areas that didn't
> occur
> in the ancestor of "standard" (i.e., London) English, and these
> mergers
> occurred precisely because of the interactions of the various discrete
> changes involved in the overall GVS.
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> ========
> Alice Faber
> faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
> 865-6163 x258
> New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
> 865-8963
>
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