Northern Middle English spelling evidence in the Durham Account Rolls

Lingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 103039
Author(s):  
Amanda Roig-Marín
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Spelling

A database of Middle English spelling

1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-374
Author(s):  
S. Horobin ◽  
J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Spelling

The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English Spelling

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Merja Stenroos
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Core Area ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Spelling Variation ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Almost All ◽  
English Spelling

This chapter uses a new resource, the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), a corpus of 14th and 15th Century English texts, to answer an old question: it is possible to find traces of a systematic distinction between the reflexes of Old English e/ē and eo/ēo in Middle English? An investigation into the spelling variation found in 27 lexical items that contain a vowel representing Old English eo/ēo as well as the equivalent Old Norse element jó throws up a wide range of spellings, the vast majority of which show <e>/<ee>. Spellings that might suggest a rounded pronunciation are also fairly robustly present, however, particularly <eo>, with the Southwest Midlands as its core area. The second part of the investigation retrieves all words that were spelled with the digraph <eo>. The vast majority of these turn out to be reflexes of Old English eo/ēo, and almost all of them are localized to the Southwest Midlands. They occur either as reflexes of OE y/ȳ, or in unstressed syllables, or in words where <eo> follows <w> – three groups for which a rounded pronunciation would be plausible.

scholarly journals On early pseudo-learned orthographic forms: A contribution to the history of English spelling and pronunciation

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerzy Wełna
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Regional Distribution ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Spelling

On early pseudo-learned orthographic forms: A contribution to the history of English spelling and pronunciation The history of English contains numerous examples of "improved" spellings. English scribes frequently modified spelling to make English words and some popular borrowings look like words of Latin or Greek origin. The typical examples are Eng. island, containing mute <s> taken from Lat. insula or Eng. anchor ‘mooring device’ (< Fr. ancre), with non-etymological <h>. Although such "reformed spellings" became particularly fashionable during the Renaissance, when the influence of the classical languages was at its peak, "classicised" spellings are also found earlier, e.g. in texts from the 14th century. In the present contribution which concentrates on identifying such earliest influences on spellings in Middle English attention is focussed on the regional distribution of reformed spellings, with a sociolinguistic focus on the type of the text. The data for the study come from standard sources like the Middle English Dictionary (2001) and Oxford English Dictionary (2009).

scholarly journals The Development of Old English ǣ: Middle English Spelling Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Variation ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Systematic Fashion ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
English Spelling

This chapter presents the range of spellings for the reflexes of ǣ1 and ǣ2 in ME dialects, as found in SED, LAEME and LALME. Old English ǣ appears to have raised early in Middle English, as the dominant spelling is <e(e)>; this is further supported by the fact that <a/ǣ/ea> spellings are more frequent in the early LAEME texts than in the later ones. The spelling variants show geographic variation in Old English, with ǣ1 and ǣ2 appearing to have merged in some dialects but kept apart in others. Their reflexes are not kept apart in spelling in any systematic fashion in any ME dialects, but their distribution is certainly are not random. As the sound-changes affecting the two ǣ’s took some time to reach completion, they overlapped in time with the early stages of the Great Vowel Shift; the author argues that they must be seen as part of that shift, rather than as similar but unrelated changes.

scholarly journals Stylo visualisations of Middle English documents

2020 ◽  
Vol Special issue on... ◽  
Author(s):  
Martti Mäkinen
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Real ◽  
Spelling Variation ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Current Article ◽  
English Spelling

International audience Automated approaches to identifying authorship of a text have become commonplace in the stylometric studies. The current article applies an unsupervised stylometric approach on Middle English documents using the script Stylo in R, in an attempt to distinguish between texts from different dialectal areas. The approach is based on the distribution of character 3-grams generated from the texts of the corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The article adopts the middle ground in the study of Middle English spelling variation, between the concept of relational linguistic space and the real linguistic continuum of medieval England. Stylo can distinguish between Middle English dialects by using the less frequent character 3-grams.

Two Candidate Approaches o Text Sequencing: An Addendum to “The Diachrony Debate: A Tutorial on Methods”

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean A. Forbes
Keyword(s):  
Computational Biology ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Diagnostic Tool ◽  
Reliable Method ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Quantitative Comparison ◽  
Curve Analysis ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
S Curve ◽  
Temporal Ordering

In a recent essay published in this journal, I illustrated the limitations one may encounter when sequencing texts temporally using s-curve analysis. I also introduced seriation, a more reliable method for temporal ordering much used in both archaeology and computational biology. Lacking independently ordered Biblical Hebrew (BH) data to assess the potential power of seriation in the context of diachronic studies, I used classic Middle English data originally compiled by Ellegård. In this addendum, I reintroduce and extend s-curve analysis, applying it to one rather noisy feature of Middle English. My results support Holmstedt’s assertion that s-curve analysis can be a useful diagnostic tool in diachronic studies. Upon quantitative comparison, however, the five-feature seriation results derived in my former paper are found to be seven times more accurate than the single-feature s-curve results presented here. 

INFLUENCE OF MIDDLE ENGLISH NORTHERN DIALECTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-45
Author(s):  
O. Hyryn
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Language ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
North Eastern

The article deals with the phonetic, grammatic and lexical features which penetrated into the London Dialect from the Middle English Northern and North-Eastern dialects and evenyually were fixed in the literary language. The article claims that the penetration of the Northern features took place as the result of the London dialect base shift which took place due to the extralinguistic reasons, namely by social and demographic reasons. The article describes both direct influence (lexical) and indirect (partially phonetic and partially grammatic). The article claims that systemic changes in English, such as reduction of unstressed syllables and concequent simplification of grammatical paradigms were greatly fascilitated by the influence of Northern dialects on the London dialect in Late Middle English period

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