LL-L: "Morphophonology" (was "Phonology") LOWLANDS-L, 08.OCT.2000 (04) [E]

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From: Andy Eagle [Andy.Eagle at t-online.de]
Subject: Phonology  was "Help needed" [E]

Criostoir inquired

> For a long time I've been trying to grapple with how
> the semi-vowel glide [j] in Ulster Scots developed so
> intrusively, particularly in the environment of [k]
> and [g]; this feature is at once striking and
> fascinating, and comparable with a number of features
> in my own dialect of English - I've heard a lot of
> people from outside the north of Ireland express
> disbelief and astonishment at the "effort" required to
> pronounce [kj] in words such as "can't".
>
> So my question is this: where, when and why has Ulster
> Scots developed such its own phonology and why isn't
> it just "western" Lallans? What substrata are at work?

Ian wrote:

>There's no surprise there actually, Cristoir. The feature is not a
>Scots one at all. It was, however, present in the English of the
>English Midlands at the time of Shakespeare, and it is from there than
>it entered Ulster (via the south-east, spreading across Armagh and
>Tyrone and into Donegal). It entered some dialects of Ulster-Scots
>(though not the 'core' dialects of mid-Antrim) from Ulster-English,
>rather than the other way around.

This is what  J. Braidwood in  The Ulster Dialect Lexicon, Belfast 1969. p.

7, has to say about this

"...Mrs Degges established that the English-type dialect of this area,
which
was settled mainly from Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire by

followers of Conway, correlates remarkably exactly with the boundaries of
the Conway (later Hertford) estates.
 One particular feature of this area is the presence of palatized velars kj

and gj in words like kjart for cart and gjarden for garden.

A paper (PDF) on the phonology of Ulster and mainland Scots with regard to
spelling can be found on my website at www.scots-online.org/airticles/

R. F. Hahn wrote:

>Given Críostóir's question about what seems to be a case of palatalization

of
>/k/ or of "j intrusion" in Ulster Scots, and given Ian's explanation that
this
>is likely an imported Northeastern English feature (and I assume it still
>exists in some of those dialects of English), I am wondering if this can
be
>attributed to Scandinavization (going back to the Viking invasion).  After

>all, in many Scandinavian varieties /k/ before front vowels undergoes what

can
>be loosely termed "palatalization", though there is no uniform kind of
>phonetic output.  It is very similar to /k/ palatalization in Mennonite
Low
>Saxon (Plautdietsch, k -> kj ~ tj) and also to similar phenomena in
Slavic.
>Of course, consonant palatalization adjacent to front vowels, not unlike
that
>in Slavic, is also a Celtic feature, particularly in the Goidelic group,
so
>there is a slight chance that the Midland dialects have this as a part of
a
>Celtic substrate.

In Northeast Scots a /k/ before <ae, aCe, ai> /e/ often produces a
yod-gilde
+ /a/, /kja/ in words like caird, cake and curn. Similarly with <naC->
/nja/
in words like nakit, naiter and naig.

Another feature of Ulster Scots I am curious about is the use of a prefixed

<a> before verbs,
There seems to be no trace of this in middle Scots and certainly none in
the
modern mainland Scots dialects. Except for a few fossilised forms e.g.
athraw (awry).This would indicate that a prefixing is a feature of Ulster
English and probably only occurs in Ulster Scots/English contact varieties.

G. B. Adams Ulster Dialects, Ulster Folk Museum 1964. p. 2 writes:

"The mid-Ulster dialect...Typical features are...while an interesting
grammatical form surviving from south-western English is the past
participle
with a worn-down form of the Old English prefix ge- still found in Dutch
and
German. Written y in Chaucerian English and a- by the nineteenth century
Dorsetshire poet William Barnes, this form survives in Ulster only when the

past participle is used after the auxiliary verb had (e.g. If he had a-done

that,...).


I sometimes wonder if some of what is often presented as Ulster Scots would

better be described as Ulster English, although how one defines contact
varieties is open to debate.

Andy

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