reversal of merger

[Dorothy Disterheft]

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On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Benji Wald wrote:
 
> I think the reference is to the same thing usually exemplified with
> "meet - meat - mate".  It is indeed an interesting historical
> problem, but not one to be treated as casually as the above
> statement does.  The "mystery", well-known in the history of
> English, is that in Early Modern English, during the Great Vowel
> Shift, there was a point at which orthoepists and the like reported
> a merger of "meat" and "mate", more generally, for earlier /E:/ and
> /ey/, as "meet", and more generally /e:/ rose to /i:/ position.
> Later, however, /E:/ rose to /i:/ and merged with previous /e:/. A
> small residue of the apparent more general merger remains in the
> words, "great", "steak", "break" and a few others (like "drain" <
> "drean") and many words before "r" in closed syllables, e.g., "tear"
> (the verb), "wear", "bear", etc.  (contr. "spear", "tear" the noun,
> etc.)
 
> There have been many attempts to solve the problem.
 
For the record, I've recently been collecting published proposals for
accounting for apparent cases of reversal of merger.  So far I have six,
as follows:
 
(1) The merger occurred at the phonetic level, but speakers retained
different phonological representations in their heads, allowing later
reversal (Halle).
 
(2) The merger genuinely occurred, but just one of the merged segments
possessed a distinctive phonological role in the language, allowing
speakers later to separate out instances of the merged phoneme which had
this role from those which did not (Michelena).
 
(3) The merger occurred in the prestige variety but not in less
prestigious varieties; since only prestige varieties tend to be well
recorded, a shift in prestige shows up in the record as an apparent
reversal of merger (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog).
 
(4) The merger occurred, but only variably, and speakers retained both
merged and unmerged pronunciations, though they may have reported only
the merged one (Milroy).
 
(5) The merger never really occurred; instead there was only a
near-merger, resulting in the usual inability of speakers to recognize
the difference (Labov).
 
(6) The merger occurred for most speakers, but a handful of influential
conservative speakers succeeded in reversing the merger by semi-official
action (Jahr).
 
Of these,
 
(1) is now dismissed, I think;
(2) is unchallenged for the case for which it was proposed;
(3) is still widely accepted;
(4) is taken seriously but is sparsely documented;
(5) is widely defended;
(6) is documented for a particular case.
 
I do not claim that these six exhaust the proposals, especially since I
still have a small folder of relevant articles to read.  My final list
may be somewhat longer.
 
Of course, only some of these proposals can account for the cases of
"residue" noted by Benji.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk