Abstract
This paper investigates the (re-)emergence of onset consonants in English loans from French, Latin and Greek, spelt with initial <u> (> /juː/; e.g. union, use), initial <eu> (> /juː/; e.g. eulogy, euphemism), or initial <h> (e.g. habit, homogeneous). It analyses Google Books data, exploiting the occurrence of the article allomorph a (rather than an) as a diagnostic of consonantal realisation. The analysis yields a fine-grained description of the (re-)emergence of consonantal onsets. It shows that their emergence has been a gradual process and has not reached completion yet. On a theoretical level, the paper discusses the interaction between categorical phonological processing and fine-grained phonetic distinctions in an exemplar-based framework. It also sheds light on the question of (near-)mergers and their potential reversibility.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Fabian Vetter for extracting relevant bigrams from the Google Books Ngrams raw data and for implementing the application with which the figures in this article were generated (accessible at https://osf.io/ht8se/). Further thanks are due to the participants of the dpt17 workshop at the University of Vienna in September 2017, to the editors of this volume, in particular Niki Ritt for his exceptional editorial support, and to two anonymous reviewers.
References
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2007. Diachronic phonology. In Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, 497–518. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486371.022 (accessed 24 June 2019).10.1017/CBO9780511486371.022Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 94.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612886 (accessed 24 June 2019).10.1017/CBO9780511612886Search in Google Scholar
Chang, Winston, Joe Cheng, J. J. Allaire, Yihui Xie & Jonathan McPherson. 2016. Shiny: Web application framework for R. https://shiny.rstudio.com/ (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Crisma, Paola. 2009. Word-initial h- in Middle and Early Modern English. In Donka Minkova (ed.), Phonological weakness in English: From Old to Present-Day English, 130–167. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-0-230-29686-2_8Search in Google Scholar
Dobson, Eric J. 1968. English pronunciation 1500–1700, vol. II: Phonology, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.Search in Google Scholar
eLALME. Benskin, Michael, Margaret Laing, Vasilis Karaiskos, Keith Williamson & The University of Edinburgh. 2013–. An electronic version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
EPD. Jones, Daniel. 2011. English pronouncing dictionary. Peter Roach, Jane Setter & John Esling (eds.). 18th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CD-ROM edition.Search in Google Scholar
Fox, John & Robin Wood. 1968. A concise history of the French language. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Gimson, Alfred Charles. 1994. Gimson’s pronunciation of English, 5th edn. revised by Alan Cruttenden. London: Arnold.Search in Google Scholar
Google Books Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams and http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew J. 2015. Exploring chain shifts, mergers, and near mergers as changes in progress. In Patrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical phonology, 173–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232819.013.009Search in Google Scholar
Graband, Gerhard. 1965. Die Entwicklung der frühneuenglischen Nominalflexion: Dargestellt vornehmlich auf Grund von Grammatikerzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Narr.10.1515/9783111658292Search in Google Scholar
Harviainen, Tapani. 1976. On the loss of the Greek /h/ and the so-called aspirated rhō. Studia Orientalia Electronica 45. 1–88. https://journal.fi/store/issue/view/3272 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2004. Mergers, near-mergers and phonological interpretation. In Christian Kay, Carole Hough & Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New perspectives on English historical linguistics, vol. II: Lexis and transmission, 125–137. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/cilt.252.10hicSearch in Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Turo, Joe McVeigh & Tanja Säily. 2017. How to turn linguistic data into evidence? In Turo Hiltunen, Joe McVeigh & Tanja Säily (eds.), Big and rich data in English corpus linguistics: Methods and explorations. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 19). Helsinki: University of Helsinki. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/19/introduction.html (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Ihalainen, Ossi. 1994. The dialects of England since 1776. In Robert Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. V: English in Britain and overseas: Origins and development, 197–274. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CHOL9780521264785.006Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1987. The overestimation of functionalism. In René Dirven & Vilém Fried (eds.), Functionalism in linguistics, 311–332. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/llsee.20.16labSearch in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change, vol. I: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William, Mark Karen & Corey Miller. 1991. Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast. Language Variation and Change 3. 33–74. doi:10.1017/S0954394500000442 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger & Richard Steiner. 1972. A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Search in Google Scholar
LAEME. Laing, Margaret. 2013–. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. Version 3.2. The University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. II: 1066–1476, 23–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CHOL9780521264754.003Search in Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1999. Phonology and morphology. In Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476–1776, 56–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CHOL9780521264761.004Search in Google Scholar
Lass, Roger & Margaret Laing. 2010. In celebration of early Middle English ‘H’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 111(3). 345–354.Search in Google Scholar
Lin, Yuri, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jon Orwant, Will Brockman & Slav Petrov. 2012. Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Association for Computational Linguistics. In Proceedings of the 50th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8–14 July 2012, 169–174. Jeju, Republic of Korea. http://aclweb.org/anthology/P12-3029 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
LPD. Wells, John. 2008. Longman pronunciation dictionary, 3rd edn. Harlow: Pearson Longman. CD-ROM edition: Longman pronunciation coach.Search in Google Scholar
Lutz, Angelika. 1991. Phonotaktisch gesteuerte Konsonantenveränderungen in der Geschichte des Englischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.10.1515/9783111353876Search in Google Scholar
Maguire, Warren, Lynn Clark & Kevin Watson. 2013. Introduction: What are mergers and can they be reversed? English Language and Linguistics 17(2). 229–239. doi:10.1017/S1360674313000014 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Mailhammer, Robert, David Restle & Theo Vennemann. 2015. Preference laws in phonological change. In Patrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical phonology, 450–466. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232819.013.032Search in Google Scholar
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva P. Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak & Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2010. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014). 176–182. doi:10.1126/science.1199644 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Milroy, James. 1983. On the sociolinguistic history of /h/-dropping in English. In Michael Davenport, Erik Hansen & Hans Frede Nielsen (eds.), Current topics in English historical linguistics, 37–53. Odense: Odense University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic variation and change: On the historical sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Minkova, Donka. 1991. The history of final vowels in English: The sound of muting. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110889512Search in Google Scholar
Minkova, Donka. 2006. Phonetic naturalness vs. orthography in the formation of a standardized consonantal inventory of English. In Ursula Schäfer (ed.), The beginnings of standardization: Language and culture in fourteenth-century England, 147–175. Frankfurt a. M. & New York: Lang.Search in Google Scholar
Minkova, Donka. 2014. A historical phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748634699Search in Google Scholar
Mugglestone, Lynda. 2003. ‘Talking proper’: The rise of accent as social symbol, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.Search in Google Scholar
Nycz, Jennifer. 2013. New contrast acquisition: Methodological issues and theoretical implications. English Language and Linguistics 17(2). 325–357. doi:10.1017/S1360674313000051 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
OED. Oxford English dictionary online. 2000–. Oxford University Press. http://dictionary.oed.com/ (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Ogden, Richard. 2017. An introduction to English phonetics, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Orton, Harold, Stewart Sanderson & John David Allison Widdowson. 1978. The linguistic atlas of England. London: Croom Helm & Munich: Hueber.Search in Google Scholar
Padgett, Jaye. 2008. Glides, vowels, and features. Lingua 118(12). 1937–1955. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.10.002 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Joan Bybee & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure, 137–157. Amsterdam/New York: Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.45.08pieSearch in Google Scholar
Pope, Mildred K. 1973 [1934]. From Latin to Modern French with especial consideration of Anglo-Norman: Phonology and morphology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Ramisch, Heinrich. 2010. Analysing linguistic atlas data: The (socio-)linguistic context of H-dropping. Dialectologia (special issue I). 175–184. https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Dialectologia/article/viewFile/242110/324722 (accessed 24 June 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Schlüter, Julia. 2006. A small word of great interest: The allomorphy of the indefinite article as a diagnostic of sound change from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer & Dieter Kastovsky (eds.), Medieval English and its heritage: Structure, meaning and mechanisms of change, 37–59. Frankfurt: Lang.Search in Google Scholar
Schlüter, Julia. 2009. Consonant or ‘vowel’? A diachronic study of the status of initial ‹h› from early Middle English to nineteenth-century English. In Donka Minkova (ed.), Phonological weakness in English: From Old to Present-Day English, 168–196. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-0-230-29686-2_9Search in Google Scholar
Schlüter, Julia & Lukas Sönning. In preparation. Comparing strengths and limitations of linguistic corpora and big data resources: Evidence for the pronunciation of initial <h> in the BNC, COCA and Google Ngrams. In Ole Schützler & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Data and methods in corpus linguistics: Comparative approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Schlüter, Julia & Fabian Vetter. To appear. An interactive visualization of Google Books Ngrams with R and Shiny: Exploring a(n) historical increase in onset strength in a(n) huge database. In Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (special issue). Bettelou Los, Benjamin Molineaux & Martti Mäkinen (eds.), Visualizations in Historical Linguistics 21. Atelier Digit_Hum. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02149498 (accessed 24 June 2019).10.46298/jdmdh.5582Search in Google Scholar
Strang, Barbara M. H. 1970. A history of English. London: Methuen.Search in Google Scholar
Sundby, Bertil, Anne Kari Bjørge & Kari E. Haughland. 1991. A dictionary of English normative grammar 1700–1800. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/sihols.63Search in Google Scholar
Uffmann, Christian. 2015. Loanword adaptation. In Patrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical phonology, 644–665. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. 1988. Preference laws for syllable structure and the explanation of sound change: With special reference to German, Germanic, Italian, and Latin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110849608Search in Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English I: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611759Search in Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. 2004. A review of perceptual cues and cue robustness. In Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner & Donca Steriade (eds.), Phonetically based phonology, 34–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486401.002Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
