A A o =^ ^^ o c: < S^^SIS m 3 =^ 3D O 9 Z ^^^^ ? 2 s 4 7 ^^= 1 ^^= -< > ^^^^^ 8 =< 7 -< ^H ^^^H THE GIFT OF WILLIAM G. KERCKHOFF TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES L THE LIBRARY OF FRIEDRICH KLUGE UNIVERSITY of CATJFOK.h'IA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. ON Early English Pronunciation, 2j03ttl) especial Reference to Cljaucer, IN OPPOSITION TO THE VIEWS MAINTAINED BY MR. A. J. ELLIS, F.R.S., IN HIS WOKli 'ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION, WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO SHAK.SPERE AND CHAUCER." 1!Y RICHARD FRANCIS WEYMOUTH, D.Lit., M.A., FKI.l.dW Ol" UMVEKSITY CUI.l.lXiE, I.ONUON. LONDON : ASHER & CO., BEDFORD STREET, CO\'ENT GARDEN. 1S74. P RE FACE. It is now nearly four years since I first laid lance in rest to tilt at Mr. Ellis's views expounded in a work of already 996 closely printed pages 8vo., and still growing by read- ing before the Philological Society a paper in opposition to them. How I waited year after year, hoping, in the case of a book which cannot but have an exceedingly limited sale, that the expense would be at least partly borne by the Society of which I have been a member for nearly a quarter of a centuiy, and how the hope has proved to be vain, boots not to tell. Suffice to say the delay has enabled me to avail myself of the few and scanty intervals of leisure that relieve an engrossing and harassing profes- sion, to enlarge and to a great extent rewrite the paper, though it still is far from being as complete as I could wish. But I have no time to enlarge yet further, and must therefore console myself with the reflection that at least in some people's estimation a great book is a great evil, and that an argument, if sound, is often none the worse for being condensed. R. F. VV. Mil. I, IIii,i. Sciiooi,, MiDi'i.r.sKX, N.W. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Section Page 1. Introductory . . . . . . . i 2. Our starting point must be spoken, not written, language . . i 3. Mr. Ellis's delusive maxim that "the orthography shows the sound" . . . . . . . . 2 4. Orthoepists not to be too much relied on . . . . 2 5. Their statements how used by Mr. Ellis . . . . 4 6. Traditional pronunciation our main guide . . 5 7. In dealing with other languages Mr. PLlIis unhesitatingly admits the evidence of traditional pronunciation . . . 6 8. The separate dialects so many separate witnesses . . . 6 9. See for example the permanence of the characteristic peculiarities of the Scottish dialect . . . . . . 7 10. No reason to believe that civil war has greatly changed our spoken language . . . . . . . g 11. Nor foreign invasion . . . . . . 10 12. Other sources of information . . . . . 10 13. As to I (si) words, Dutch and German confirm the evidence of our own dialects : list of words . . . . i r 14. By aid of these words others may be determined . . .13 15. This positive evidence not to be flung aside tlie moment an olijcc- tion appears . . . . . . . 13 16. An objection based on Palsgrave's expressions . . . 14 17. Further evidence that ? final was (ai) in French . . .14 18. Confirmed by many Dutch words of French derivation . . 16 19. Salcsbury's statements as to I words . . . . 16 20. True llu'ory as to these (ni) words . . . . . 16 21. The sound of (dI) sometimes written ei in English as well as in Cierman . . . . . . . 17 22. The Englisli pronunciation of the Latin /defended by Lipsius . 18 23. A ray of light from an old inscription in /Eolic Greek . . 18 24. Conclusion, for the present, as to I words. (See below, \ 109) . 19 25. Fresh objections brought by Mr. J. A. II. Murray from tlie Scottish nioilc of writing Celtic proper names . . . 19 26. No such evidence dciivable from Wclsli . . . . 20 27. OU words . . . . 21 28. The v()wel> in their natural se 60. Whence others in (c'^-d), [celh), and (een) may be determined, many of tliem with distinct and separate evidence from Old Norse, Old French, Old Dutcli, &c. . . . . .' 44 61. In like manner, the authority of Meigret and the assonances of the Chanson de Roland, tSrc, fix m and V . . . 44 62. Three exceptions in French : Palsgrave on not through Stuart influence that the change took place in England . . . . . . . 50 71. A had in many words even in Queen Elizabeth's time a sound intermediate between (a) and (ee) . . . . 51 72. Classes of a words in Chaucer : some had (a) ; . . .52 73. Others (a) . . . . . 52 74. A third class short (x) . . . . 53 75. A fourth a longer (x) or {xx) Ormin's (I . . 54 76. A w preceding did not give the sound of (a) . . . 56 77. Mr. Ellis supposes Chaucer's a to have been always (a) . . 56 78. Tradition fixed the sound in a large number of E words as (ii) ; Anglo-Saxon mode of writing, / . . 57 79. Pronunciation of rtf and ), and (,) adoptedl into English, and Anglicized, the tliird becoming (ii) or (/), as all three classes are sounded now . . . . . 66 91. Words ending in -or not all pronounced alike ; some had (ii) like modern /u/r, some (ee), like tlhrc: the two classes ciuitc distinct . . . . . 66 92. French words in -i " -' ' ten, language, should rcally confound even for an instant language proper that is i\\c living voice with the black marks on white paper which are the mere symbols of language ; but it is quite possible that in dealing simul- taneously with both language and its symbols, he may allow its symbols to occupy too prominent a position before his own mind and in his treatment of the subject. The question before us should, I apprehend, generally shape itself as follows : not, what sound did such or such a .symbol represent .'' (though it may conveniently assume that form sometimes) ; Init, how ivetc such and such spoken B 2 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 3 -words of this \<^th century spoken in the \\th or in the ()th ? Mr. Ellis looks always to the symbol. 3 Mr.EiHs'smax- Now if wc examine in Heyvvood's Proverbs im that "The or- ^j^^^ Eoigrams the rhymes of words ending in thography shows ^ ' 111 the sound." -ear, -eare, -ere, -eere, and -eer, we shall soon find ourselves in inextricable confusion, if the letters alone are to guide us ; but if we notice that the words which we now pronounce with (ii) cleer, chere, here (adv.), here (vb.), neere, yeer, deer (adj.), deer (s), and appeare rhyme with one another in Heywood, however he may spell them, but never rhyme with there, zvhere, were, luear, stvear, Edgeware, hair, hare, ear, spear, fear, anszver, ere, bear (vb.), while these all rhyme, most of them repeatedly, with one another; and if examination of Sir Philip Sidney's poems leads (as it does) to precisely the same result, we may be warranted in drawing some conclusion from that fact. Besides, the former mode of putting the question has a tendency towards the assumption that each symbol, or group of symbols, stood only for one sound, or at most for one pair of sounds, one long and one short. Considering that our first vowel is at present the representative of at least four distinct sounds (as in fate, fat, father, fall), and our second vowel of at least three (as in we, zvhen, were); we must not assume that it was entirely otherwise five or ten centuries ago. Mr. Ellis leans on the broken reed of the maxim that "The Orthography shows the sound." How untrustworthy the support is though unhappily we some- times have no other will be abundantly proved further on. But besides trusting far too implicitly to this delusive maxim, Mr. Ellis in conducting his case exhibits singular partiality towards one class of witnesses, while others by far the most important he treats with undeserved dis- respect : they are not indeed put out of court, but they are by no means allowed full, a patient, and impartial hearing. 4 orthoepistsnot f ]^g ^qo highly favourcd witnesses are the to be too much . 1 1 1 relied on. grammarians and orthoepists, whose evidence may be impugned on the ground, not only that they are often as inaccurate observers as many of us moderns are. 4] EARLY ORTHOEPISTS. 3 and on many points do not agree among themselves, in which respect doubtless their writings only the more exactly reflect the variety of popular usage,* but also that they too commonly are not content to let us know the simple facts that was not the object they had in view in writing, but they endeavoured to guide usage to something different from what it was, and too frequently they mislead the modern reader by their assertion that the sound of a word is what it is not : they mean that it is so and so de jure, and the reader is apt to think they mean that it is so de facto. So Gil charges Hart with seeking rather "ducere quam sequi" our language by his mode of writing; Pals- grave again and again appeals to the speech of those "that pronounce the latine tonge aright," i.e. in the manner that he approved; Erasmus, Cheke, Smith, all argued from written symbols that a written diphthong must represent a compound sound, and Smith in particular insisted on a dis- tinction between ai and ci in English, which, though it may have existed in the dialects in certain words, his very insistence, as well as the rhymes of all the poets from Chaucer downwards, show not to have been observed in the received pronunciation; and Butler's language betrays the same ten- dency where he speaks of a "corrupt" usage. In this last case Mr. Ellis has very justly observed that "allowance must be made for the mode in which orthoepists speak of common pronunciations which differ from their own or from what they recommend by no means always the same thing" (p. 124); as elsewhere (p. 139) he remarks on Gil's "anxiety to give prominence to the first element" in the diphthong civ. All such "anxiety" detracts from the value of a writer's evidence when it is the simple fact that the reader desires to ascertain ; and probably many of the sounds which arc vindicated by these older orthoepists may deserve to be characterized as "a theoretical pronunciation, which may be as false as that which Erasmus, Smith, and Cheke intro- Gil says: "In (^/7i/ a'dificirc, nondum iactum est fundamenlum : pro siiopte enim cuiusque ingenio, vnus bvldctk per i;>//t\ov ; alter belldcth per ei; tcrtius beddc'h per i longum : et adhuc quartus bildcth per / breve." }! 2 4 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 5 duced into England for the Greek language" (see Academy for Apr. 15th, 1 871). But Mr. Ellis is certainly not unaware of the weakness of his case in this important particular. There are however other objections to our relying too confidently on these authorities. One is that the earliest of them lived nearly a century and a half after Chaucer, I lay but little stress on this, not believing that any great change took place in the interval. A second is, that these orthoepists comparative novices in their art seem to have overlooked sounds which can be shown to have existed in common use in their day. A reader of Ben Johnson's account of a, would suppose that that was the symbol for only two sounds, apparently (a) and (a) ; but Gil twenty years earlier, and Hart seventy, had recognized three classes of words the vowel of which was written with a. Smith in his argument about the Greek -q points out only two ^s in English, as in whet (wheet), now wheat, and whet; yet he himself in his Index, which Mr. Ellis seems not to have discovered, recognizes another which for our purpose is evidently more important, for he calls it the e Anglica, of which breed and heel dire, his examples. And so he says elsewhere : " Recte etiam fortasse nunc Domine ne in furore, per e Italicum, non quemadmodum olim per illud .e. Anglicum, quod in bee cum apis dicimus, aut me cum e/ic nostro more loquamur, obseruatur, &c." De Ling. Gr. Pron., p. 14 v. 5 Statements of g^j. ^ yg|- gravcr objcction is furnished by orthoepists, how ,.- y^,,. , . usedbyMr.Eiiis. Mr. Ellis s mgcnuity, he having shown but too frequently the possibility of extracting from their words a sense totally at variance with what / believe they really meant ; so that I prefer scarcely to draw any conclusions at all from premises which seem to be so doubtful. For instance once more to anticipate the general argument Salesbury represents the English words true, vcrtnc, duke, Jes7i, by trtnv, vertiiw, dmuk, tsicsuw; and Mr. Ellis, by a ratiocinative process which I cannot pretend to understand, concludes "that Salesbury 's uw meant (yy)." I have sub- mitted the words to several educated Welshmen, who all 6] TRADITIONAL PRONUNCIATION. 5 say that the is (/) and the w (uu), and the diphthong is as nearly as possible the long English n (iu) or (juu) of tunc, tube, union. It seems to me that Salesbury's descrip- tion implies, in a manner than which nothing can be clearer, that these words were sounded in his time exactly as they are now, except that (trjuu) has become (truu), and the first syllable of virtue is no longer sounded (ver). As to these orthoepists, it must be confessed that their language, as manipulated by Mr. Ellis, is singularly un- intelligible ; and yet if, instead of studying only frag- mentary quotations, and misleading explanations, and "transliterations" which assume every single point that is in dispute, we read the books themselves, and adopt the simple hypothesis that as a general rule our forefathers of those centuries pronounced their own language, and Latin and Greek too, just as we do now, almost every difficulty at once disappears. 6 Traditional pro- ^^d who are the witnesses that are thrust nunciation our main guide. asidc .'' Our cHakcts as noiv spoken. Suppose we have to inquire concerning certain common and familiar words which we have inherited as part of the old English speech of our forefathers, for instance, those which we in our 19th century mode pronounce with (ai), such as niitic, thine, Ji)ie, wine, shine, line, szcine, wife, life, knife, &c. &c. how these words, as to their strongly accented vowels, were pronounced several centuries ago ; I contend that we have above all things to consider how these words are still pronounced in various English dialects especially of course, for Chaucer, those south of the Humber. It is spoken language about which we are inquiring, and it is mainly language as now spoken that must furnish an answer to our question. The existing English dialects yield by far the most important evidence in the case, and their voice, in this particular part of the inquiry, Mr. Ellis scarcely suffers to be heard. If we listen to them, they with almost perfect unanimity assign to these words some such diphthongal sound as we still give them. There may be some discrepancy in their evidence as to the elements 6 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 7 of which the diphthong is composed, but almost all agree that it is certainly not the pure (i), but a diphthong ending in (i). 7 But has it been proved that these witnesses are unworthy of credit ? I cannot find the proof Mr. Ellis has no hesitation in believing and probably most will agree indeaiingwith ^jth him that those words in which the (i) Mr. Ellis unhesi- souud occurs iu strongly accented syllables in tatingiy admits j^odem Frcnch, Italian, Welsh, modern Greek, the evidence of traditional pro- &c., prcscrvc in thosc languages a traditional nunciation. pronunciation many centuries old ; but no reason is assigned for the singular inconsistency of rejecting the like conclusion in a precisely analogous case in the Teutonic languages. Mr. Ellis says confidently (p. 137), when speaking of the sound of the French en in Palsgrave's time, "the reference to Italian completely establishes the sound." And again of the same period (p. 149) : "There can be no doubt of the Italian u, which was certainly (uu)." On p. 164 he speaks in a similar tone of "the real Latin u long." Yet elsewhere (p. 530) he lashes "the historical ignorance which assumes that a language may have only one pronunciation through the generations for which it lasts." Now I do not for a moment object to Mr. Ellis's confidence as to the Latin and Italian u; but I ask that our English vowels shall be judged on like principles. 8 The separate Morcovcr it must not bc forgotten that each srlTatV "'\'1Z separate dialect, and even subdialcct, is a nesscs. Separate and independent witness. In these days of railways and newspapers and national schools, there are such facilities for locomotion and intercommuni- cation of knowledge and habits of thought and speech, that we find it hard to realize, and are very apt to forget how, even less than a century since, the inhabitants of one rural district were almost completely isolated from their neighbours only ten or twenty miles distant. Very recently I have heard of the death of a villager who durin! sometimes niiuous writiugs of h>rasmus, Lii^sius, and others, written f m hng- " > i > lish us well .IS in wlicu thcy had adopted the ci, caused their mode of representing the sound to become familiar to Ivnglish readers also. Hence we find Hart writing )rid bci for ride by, and Gil writing ei for ociiliis, which Smith tells us was sounded like / ^ tgo, and / or aye - ctiaui (I'Jlis, [). II2). But the modern proiuniciation ( l8 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCL\TION. [ 22 of ei as (ai) in certain words either, neither, and one or two more is probably due to court influence after the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty. 22 The English What Smith wrote about ei, as quoted by pronunciation of jyj-j. ^AXis on D. 121, concemcd the Ene^lish ei the Latin I de- . fended by Lip- {ee), which was not by any means what Justus '"""^' Lipsius (1586) intended Lipsius was a Dutch- man, it will be remembered when he wrote : " Pronunciant etiam nunc (ita accepi) recte soli paene omnium Europaeorum Britanni : quorum est Regeina, Ameicus, Veita. Recte dico, quia non aliud insonuit hsec longa quam EI diphthongum." De recta Pron. Lat. Ling., p. 23. So we had in Lipsius's time and rightly he affirms a different pronunciation of regina, &c. from almost* all the other nations of Europe ; and Gil emphatically declares : " retinebimus antiquum ilium et masculinum sonum, atque una etiam laudem quam Justissimus Lipsus \sic] nobis detulit in Regina, in arnica vita, &c." All of this becomes instantly intelligible and lucid on the simple supposition that both the Dutchman and the Englishman spoke of the same sound (9i) that tradition has handed down to us. I have not found in Lipsius's writings any statement of the reasons on which his opinion is based, but they were probably such as these: 1st, that the traditional sound in certain localities was (si), (see quotation from Sir Thomas Smith in footnote) ; 2nd, that Greek words with et generally have the simple i in Latin ; and 3rd, for which however in many cases itacism will sufficiently account that Latin words in i are not infrequently found in Greek with ct, as neicrat, Ocrreia, AetyT/p, SetptTts. 23 A ray of light gyt all southcm Europe, it may be said, is fiomancient . -... -, . ^- Greece. against Lipsius. It unanimously affirms that * Could the Lombards have been an exception ? Sir Thomas Smith writes : " Quis Anglus Galkim Latine loquentem, nisi assuetus intelliget? certe ego non potui : at Itahim statim, quia nos ab Itahs cum Latine sonamus, nisi in valde paucis, a Longobardis autem Italia; propemodum in nulla re dissidemus: at a Gallis infinitum quantum dissentimus, quamvis nostri sint vicini." De Ling. Gr. Pron. (1568), p. 14. I must leave this nut for some student of early Italian pronunciation to crack. 25] *l' WORDS. 19 the juice of the grape to take one typical example was not called (wain) but (wiin) in the ancient Classical Lan- guages. No doubt it is easy to assume that the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, &c., have preserved the true Latin sound of this word ; but what of Greek ? Some scholars believe that in the ot of olvos the o is merely a variant of the digamma, and that J'\vos is the old form and points to (wiin). But ancient inscriptions show us the /" and the o both used in such words. In Boeckh's Corp. Inscr. Gr., No. 4, we have TAN /'OIKIAN : which, being confirmed also by other inscriptions, conclusively shows that in that word at least very probably therefore in others like h the F was not followed by the pure sound of (ii). 24 Conclusion as And sucli is the conclusion at which I arrive,* to T words. ^j,Qj^ ^j^g evidence of Palsgrave and Mons. Le Hericher, of Salesbury and Lipsius, from that of modern High German and Dutch, and above all from that of our southern English dialects, both literary and provincial ; that Chaucer pronounced the class of words which we have been discussing with precisely the same long / (ai) as we now give to most of them ; and that in Southern Anglo- Saxon " the long / with an accent, as in av'//, ii'//, thn, rim, was," as Mr. E. A. Freeman has affirmed in the preface to his recently published work,| " ccrtain/y sounded as it is now." 25 Mr. J. A. H. Murray has called my attention to two facts of considerable importance in reference to Northern English. The first is that all Gaelic proper names that contain (ii) are written with y or / in Lowland Scottish, in There is yet one arj^uniLMil which I defer till after discussinj; some of the /:' words : see 10 1. t Old Kiighsli History for Children, jl xvii. -It is pleasant to he able to quote the name of any scholar who is a l)rothcr barbarian, if the system of pronunciation for which I contend is indeed so "barbarous" as Mr. S\\ect ])ronounces it in the .IcaiJi-iny for Oct. 22nd, 1870, ji. 27. Ji'/iy (ni-Tin w.Tin) should be a correct and classical pronunciation now in the mouths of a Inin- dred millions of mankind, and yet docrve to be stigmati/cd as " barbarou.s,'' supposing it to have been used by their ancestors five or ten centuries .igo, is not easy to discern, l^ut the question is not to bo settled l>y n nndnm cj-'iihc;. 20 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCL\TION. [ 26 which they are now pronounced with (ai). Thus Cantire or Kintyre, with (ai), is Ceanntir (Kaa'ntiir) in Gaelic, Fife is Fi'bh (fiiv), Skye is 5giath (skjiin), Dairy is DailrigJie (daljriij), and so on. The second is that numerous words with i that have been borrowed from Lowland Scottish into Gaelic are pronounced with (ii), as triabh (triiv) = tribe, priom (priim) ^ prime, spiorad (spiiradt) = spirit, pris (priisj, priish) = price, Criosd (Kriisdt) = Christ, sgriobh (skriiv) = write, fion (fiin) ^ wine, Hon (liin) ^-- flax, disinn (diisinj, diishinj) = dicing, rldir (riitjer, riitsher) = eques, mile (miib) = mile, tlm (tiim) = time, plan (piin) -^ O. E. pyne, piob (piip) ~ pipe, and iarunn (ii-ran) - iron. These facts consti- tute a double argument which seems to me incontrovertible. It concerns however Northern English only, that is to say the dialects from the Humber to the Moray Frith, whose affinity with Old Norse, and partial derivation from it, quite prepare us to expect (ii) where the southern dialects had (oi). 26 But Welsh, it may be said, is the language of a people adjacent not to the Northern but the Southern English, No such evi- ^j^(j there are instances of Welsh words which dence derivable rom Welsh. whcu transferred to English underwent just the same change as Cantire, the original sound having been with (ii). A good example is ap Rhys, which has yielded us the proper names Riee, Price, and Bricc. We know that the original sound was, as it still is in Welsh, (riis); and therefore these names were at first (priis) &c. : the English i, so it is argued, stood for (ii). But there is not the slightest difficulty in dealing with such cases. A Welshman bearing the name of Rhys or ap Rhys migrates into England, and spelling his name as hitherto with a y or an /, still calls himself (riis) or (apriis), and doubtless endeavours to get his neighbours to follow his example ; but the name being similar to the familiar rys or prys, they pronounce accord- ingly, and he becomes, in spite of himself, (rsis) or (prais). Another Welshman of the same name, anxious to maintain the sound, changes the spelling, and calling himself Rees or Recce succeeds in making his neighbours sound the name 28] 'OU' WORDS. 21 to his satisfaction. An instance just parallel to this is crape from the French crepe : the sound could not have been maintained without a change of the spelling. The Welsh pronunciation of borrowed words affords no trustworthy evidence, the forms being so much altered. It would for instance be very hazardous to conclude from the Welsh forms Lundaiii, Ffrainc, and Tain, that the words then first borrowed into Welsh had such sounds as our neighbours give them now: that London was (h'ndain), France (fraink), and Thames (tain). 27 'ou' words. I pass on to the consideration of another compound sound, as to which again our Southern dialects maintain a nearly uniform tradition, namely, the diphthong (so-called) heard in Jid^cse, mouse, ground, &c. Our dialects do not all give quite the same sound, but in all it is a com- pound, and made up of nearly the same elements. It may not be amiss to investigate those elements; for though the nature of diphthongs and other compound vowel sounds has been abundantly discussed, the subject is perhaps not yet quite exhausted. 28 'I'he vowels in Jt has bccH provcd by Willis's experiments* their natural se- , , .... , quence, that the vowcls HI their natural sequence are (ii) (ee) (aa) (aa) (oo) (uu) ; and this is the truth apparently, but not the whole truth. There are in fact as is nowhere perhaps more fully shown than in Mr. Ellis's Key to Paheotypc (Early English Pro- nunciation, pp. 3-10) numerous, or rather innumerable, intermediate sounds, all delicately shading off into those next to them, that occupy the intervals between these sounds, or extend beyond the series at either extremity. For sounds not used by one nation or in one dialect are familiar in another, not to mentit)n that probably no two individuals who speak any language utter vowels abso- * It is mlhcr surinisiiig that Mr. Melville Ik-ll, when inoinmmling his own ingenious ohservations and comiilicatcd vowel -system, has not shown the relation of his svsteni to Willis's. The facts which the latter observed and described are still facts, and should not have been i.;nored. I.epsitis also has overlooked them. 22 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCLVTION. [| 29 lutely identical, even when these are intended and supposed to be so. By way of illustration, here are a few of these additions to the vowel-scale. At one extremity of the series we have the French (ii) somewhat thinner than our English (ii), and at the other the French u and German ii (yy) considerably thinner than our (uu). Then between (ii) and (ee) we have (zV), or more commonly (/) short which in some dialects, especially in the West of England and north of the Tweed, is apt to approach very near {e) and {ee). Between (ee) and (aa) we have (aeae), or more com- monly (ae) short, as well as (ao) and (a) these two almost identical. Between (aa) and (aa), with various nuances of sound, we have the Prussian {aa). Between (aa) and (00) there is perhaps no recognized sound intervening. Between (00) and (uu) we have {00), and the German o, French en, (oe). This somewhat more complete series may now be seen in the vowels of the following words : il (Fr.), eel, ill, male, mare, man, vcetc (Fr.), bim, path, maun (Pruss.), lawn, robe (Fr.), robe,jeune (x),pool,Jl{ite (Fr.) 29 Nature of diph- And uow I liavc to observe that in the so- thongs, which are 1 1 j j 1 i_l J i. 1 J , , , called diphthongs we do not merely sound cer- not merely two r o J voweiscombined. taiu two vowcls of this seHcs iu immediate juxtaposition, but we glide from one to the other, thus of necessity passing with extreme rapidity through all the in- tervening sounds. A diphthong therefore is not merely two vowels compressed, but a whole series compressed ; and it is the length of the series compressed which marks out the diphthongs, and compels us to recognize them as such. When for instance Mr. Melville Bell says, " The diph- thongal quality of the English a will not at first be ad- mitted by every reader"- and a similar remark might be made about our :l r, and :.). as well as the true defuiitions (if the terms vowel and conscnant. See jip.per "()ii the Letter R" in the Transactions of the I'hi!()l(i_;ical Society f.r iS()2 ^ yy. 205 tu 2b-. 24 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCLVTION. [ 32 almost all our vowels are compressed into it. An Essex man speaking of his Jioiise or coxv begins his diphthong with (e); the Londoner commonly starts from (ae); while the customary pronunciation begins with (or about) the (ao). The termiinis ad qiicni is in Essex and commonly {0) ; but the Devonshire dialect prefers to terminate with (ce) : you cannot without an effort advance as far as (u). In German there is a similar diphthong, differently pro- nounced indeed- as might be expected -in different parts of Germany. It begins however with (a) or {a), and ends with (u) rather than {0). Yet it requires close observation to distinguish the German Haus from our house. (In Ice- landic there is a like diphthong, written d, which Mr. Hjaltalm told me was pronounced exactly like the cus- tomary English oiv of how and iiozv; but see Ellis, p. 540.) And in Dutch we have the well-known ui or tiy, which Mr. Ellis writes in palaeotype (ay). He adds in a note (p. 235): "In the actual Dutch pronunciation oi Jiuis, mtiis, it is very difficult to distinguish the sound from (su), and the differ- ence seems mainly produced by altering the form of the lips into that for (yy), which is slightly flatter than for (uu), rather than by bringing the tongue into the (i) position. Still (ay) was the best analysis I was able to make on hearing the sound." This my own very careful observation corroborates. 32 To return now to my argument : just as I have above Traditional evi- insisted ou the traditional evidence concerning dence as to ' OU ' . . words. (ai), SO I argue as to (ou). In a certain small class of words a sound almost identical is given in all our southern dialects, having been handed down from gene- ration to generation ; and this uniform tradition furnishes evidence of the greatest possible weight, and, unless there be strong opposing evidence, it fixes approximately the ancient sound, whether the symbol be ou or oiv, or, as in A.S., n. 33 Moreover to confirm this evidence, just as in the case of the (oi) words, we have in German and Dutch almost the same sound in many of these words ; and these too are all 34] 'OU' WORDS. 25 monosyllables, in which therefore the stress of the voice This evidence j-ests on this sound so as to render any change confirmed ''V r 1 jo German and oi vowcl especially in SO many languages and Dutch just as dialects simultaneously all the more difficult. that about (ai) ' words: list. The natural conclusion is that these words had the (au) sound long prior to historical times, and when the great divisions of the Teutonic race had not yet split asunder. It is needless to give all the dialectic forms, but here is a short list of words in which English, German, and Dutch ; all give very nearly the same sound of (au). Of course, if these are fixed, many others that habitually rhyme with them are fixed also, as well as many of the derivatives Engl. house Du. huis Germ. Haus louse luis Laus mouse muis Maus loud luid laut OAVI fou! uil vuil faul liowl huilen brown bruin braun town tuin (^ fence) Zaun (^ fence) crown (of the head) Kruin down (= ' hill) duin out uit aus sprout spout sjjruit spuit south zuid Sau sow bow (vb.) buigen oA ,. And the German raunicn is very like the old .i,'ust, K/, US. English j-oiin whisper, Anglo-Saxon rnii. To these must be added three others which are now pro- nounced with the n of bitt, namely, (/oi'c, dust, and up. The provincial and I'Larly luiglish doi^'vc or ({oi^'f \^ well known, and in Devonshire doiist i.s coniint)nly u.sctl in the sense of chaff: the former of these is Dutch ditif^ German Taidh', 26 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCL\TION. [ 35 and the latter, Dutch didst, but not found in German. I know no tradition of up sounded as oiip, but the German u\ bone, stotK, to gon, lo i^roiic, io, lo, loam, lore, loth, mo, more, mow (vb.), no, none (now pronounced niin), road, rope, sore, sow, soul, show, snow, swope now swoop stone, so, toe, token, two now (tuu)* tho, w'oe, ore-weed (a term still used in Devonshire for sea-w^ecd), wroth (now more commonly wroth); and the preterits arose, bote (from bite), glode (from glide), shone (now shon), and wrote. ,y Apparent ex- The fivc words cxcluded from the list are ceptions really ^j^^^^ ^^,j^j^j^ ^j^^ qjj j^^^^^ ^^^ modified Or Old iNorse words, notAngio-Saxoii. supcrscdcd, just as the above words in the Scottish dialect, ane, ain, aik, hame, rape, bane, stane, &c. are not really modern forms of the Anglo-Saxon words above quoted, but of the Old Norse einn, eigin, eyk, heimi, reip, bein, steinn, &c., with ei = (eei). Our five words arc spatl, which the Old Norse spyta now pronounced (spiita) but of old probably (spyyta) has transformed into spittle; and swiin, swat, wac, wafian, which the Old Norse sveinn, sveiti, veikr, and \'cifa have ousted altogether, becoming swain, sweat (sweet) now (swet), weak (week) now (wiik), and waive and waver.] 48 Mr. Murniys Mr. J. A. H. ^lurray says, "There seems vicwofihc^aiu- ,Ti-ound to regard many of the characteristics ill iiic Norihcni of tlic northern dialect which currently pass as "'''''''^^'" Danish as having been original elements of the North Angle speech, due to the fact that this dialect was, like the P^'isian, one which formed a connecting link be- tween the Scandina\'ian and (icnnanic branches. Such * It is ilnulillc^^s i1k' intliicncc of the 7.' prict.- .iiiL; tliat has chaiiijcd the souiul of (()) intii (vi) in -who, hvo. .w.vv^",- wiiilo loon) i hanm-d into (\\.in) funis its exact a aloj;iic- in 7.7//.f (wots) as the I)evoiiian toiin of cd/s. t Siapan liail tlie liv-foiins sl.ipan ami sK']ian, tlie last of whicli alone has sui\i\e 1. I) 34 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 49 characteristics would of course be strengthened and in- creased by the influx of Danish and Norwegian settlers, but the influence of these was necessarily at first confined to particular localities, and only gradually and at a later period aff"ected the northern dialect as a whole."* These views are probably correct; but there can scarce!)- be a doubt that in England south of the Humber the forms spittle, &c. were due to the influence of the Danish invaders rather than to that of the Northern Angles, unless indeed we extend Mr. Murray's hypothesis to the whole of the Angles, instead of limiting it to the northern division. 49 Inasmuch then as, with only these five exceptions so easily accounted for, all the Anglo-Saxon words in a which survived to or beyond the age of Chaucer are now pronounced, according to the tradition of all oicr Southern dialects (for I resolutely hold to this argument), with (o); and there is no reason to suspect that there has been any change since Chaucer's time ; and in Chaucer too these The (o) sound words rhyme with French words like cJiose, or confirmed by ^^.Qrds from the French like rose and suppose; French and -' -< ' Italian. nor is there any reason to suspect that the French cJiose, rose, &c. -especially as confirmed b)' the Italian cosa, rosa, &c. have failed to preserve at least approximately the true ancient sound of their principal vowel; we seem to have pretty good ground for conclud- ing that these words in the 14th century were sounded with (o) ; and there is no sufficient evidence that the}- were not sounded exactly the same in the earliest English. 50 Chaucer's ir.r'- (Consideration of the pronunciation of the tooihcd. Anglo-Saxon a will help us to decide the mean- ing of Chaucer's much disputed epithet of the W'if of Bathe gattootJied ; at least it enables us decisi\-cly to set aside the explanation of the word as signifying goat- toothed, whatever that may mean. Gat (goot) would never be shortened into gat (gat), but into got (got), whereas all the ]\ISS. ap'pear to have gat or gate. The true sense is gate-toothed, where however we must bear in mind that * Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, Historical Introduction, p. 24. 5i] 'o' WORDS. 35 gate, from go, originally means, not a wooden barrier, but a passage : see my edition of the Castle of Love, Gloss, s.v. 3at. The compound signifies therefore that the "worthi womman" had teeth, not set in close rank, but with gate- ways, interstices, between them. I am glad to sec that Dr. Morris similarly explains the word.) 51 Anglo-Saxon Lct US go again to our dictionaries. Now Nvords in <^ sound- ^^,^ ^^^ anotlicr sct of words with 6, of which ed with (uu), ' modern English thc following is, I belicvc, a complete list of ""' such as reached Chaucer; blod, blowan, boc. bog, bosm, bot, broc, broker, coc, cofa (.?), col, dohtor, dom, don, eogolS, eoh, eow, flod, flor, flowan, fo^or, fostur, fot glof, glom, god, gos, growan, h(')C, h(>f, h('p, hrof, hrust, hwopan, locian, mod, m('Sur, mcuia^, mor, non, nosu (.''), o^er, pol, rod, Rom, rose, sceotan, scolu, s6^, softe (.'), sona, stol, stow, to, to^, wod, woh, wrotan ; and the preterites forsoc, sceoc, stod. Of twenty-six of these the 19th century re- presentatives are boot (" it boots not"), cool, doom, do, youth, yew, you, gloom, goose, hoof, hoop, roof, roost, whoop, mood, moon, noon, pool, rood, school (" a school of mackerel"), sooth, soon, stool, to, tooth, and root ("to root u[)"), all with (uu) ; twelve others we pronounce with 06 (u) book, bosom, brt)ok, cook, foot, good, hook, look, shoot, forsook, shook, stood ; seven others have the // (o) of /'/// blood, brother, flood, glo\'e, mother, month, other; and of these nineteen ten are found in the Ormulum, all with the long vowel. Of thc remainder two (wod and W(')g) are now obsolete ; of two (b(')g and d(')htor) the gut- tural following, which has now disappeared, has disturbed the vowel, so that from the sound of bough or daughter we can conclude nothing. The few that remain blow ("full blown"), flow, grow, slow; fothcr, foster ichild; ; floor, mo(> (adv.), po (pvon.), f/v, rhyme with one. another e.\clusivel\-: do rh)-mes regularly with to and its comi)ounds: t:<.'o rh}'mes once with slo, once with d(> : but so and ttlso, curiousl}' enough, and cjuite contrary to Chaucer's usage, rhyme oiil\' with do and t(>, except once on!)- with the doubtful numeral tu\>.* in like manner * .As s,<, i7/.u\ /Ti'.i, all I'.ad .--iiiiil:'.! r"iiii>, in .V.S,, s\\;i, alswa, t\\,i, tlicy inii;hl have l)LX'n exiicclcd to uikIcil,'"' like chaii-cs. lii fat,! ;hc :.- tciuicil t.i 40 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 55 iioon, soon, shoon rhyme with do)i (inf.) and done (part.), never with bone, stone, gone, one with its compounds, &c. Once only the part. do7ie rhymes with none, and twice with nouns of French derivation in -un (which R. of Br. writes more commonly than -on or -onn). So fote ( = foot), boot ( ^ remedy), rhyme with each other, but never with Jiote (adj.), Jiote ( = promise), smote, grotc, nn-ote, zvote, note, \rote, and so on, though a bad rhyme, such as come with gone, goste with hast, occurs here and there. 55 Occasional ex- As to oue impcrfcct rhyme here and there, r/MTEmffor any reader of modern English verse might m ell the rule. be surpHscd if there were not in Chaucer any such maculae quas aut incuria fudit, Aut humana parum cavit natura.* With such imperfect rhymes Chaucer seems to have been content in dealing with proper names and foreign words. Thus while Amazone and Salamon alone occur, rhyming with stojie, &c. ; we have not only Palamon rhyming with anoon, &c., but also Palamoun rhyming with doun and toun (eleven of the former rhymes, eighteen of the latter). Plato rhymes once with tho, once with to ; Jnno with for'do; principio with scJioo ; Qipido, Placebo, change the (o) into (u) in all of them. They all hesitated, two finally gave way, but so and also stood firm in the original sound after ejecting the semi- vowel. * A lady has kindly collected for me a few such faulty rhymes from some of our 19th century poets : Keats : ivood, flood; loll, poll; Arabian, man; trees, essences; these offices ; exhalations, cons ; beautifjd, cull ; strawberries, butterflies. Shellf-Y : hail, inajestical ; death, path; shun, on; noiv, glow ; feet, yet; abode, brotherhood ; burning, morning. Coleridge: guest, dismist ; hear. Mariner; groan, one ; fear, were ; full, dull ; fair, are ; humming, women. Wordsworth: flood, wood; gone, alone; dead, laid; ere, near; /loic, fro; long, hung; fo7-th, earth; noav, loiv ; road, abroad; come, home; groves, loves ; breath, underneath ; year, fair. Tennyson: early, barley; weary, airy; brow, snozv ; close (vb.), house; ran, swan; was, pass ; wood, bud. W. Morris: afar, war ; were, near; heard, afeard ; bear, rear- stood blood; gone, alone; throne, upon ; below, bozu (vb. ); here, artificer. 57] 'O' WORDS. 41 and Thcnialco with the somewhat doubtful tivo ; Ekko and Erro (=Hero) with woo ( = woe). Yet, strange to say, it is upon these foreign words, yielding such incon- sistent evidence, that Mr. Ellis chiefly relies. His view is mainly, if not even exclusively, based on the single rhyme of schoo with principio (p. 266) ! 56 Recapitulation Thc facts then as to these '0' words may be on 'o' words, briefly re-stated thus: There are words with similar ivrittcn terminations which clearly pair off into two classes, which in Chaucer refuse to rhyme with each other ; of these classes the vowels are fixed by universal English tradition as {6) or some modification of that sound for the first, and (u) for the second ; this tradition being confirmed by French and Italian tradition for the first, and by Ger- man and Dutch tradition for the second. The hypothesis that they were sounded with io) and (u) respectively satis- fies all the conditions of the problem, save only the very few exceptions above noted. It has been suggested that thor^e t"'^ ^s are simply the Italian b and 6. But there is this grave objection, that those two can rhyme ; in Dante they rhyme habitually; while, as we have seen, in Chaucer and other English poets the two classes are kept distinct. C7 Could, -.vouid. This seems to be the proper place to remark shouid. on the forms could, would, and should. There can be little doubt that the similarity of grammatical use of these three words has affected the spelling of all three, and exceptionally the pronunciation of one of them. The pronunciation of would and should, except that in quite modern times we drop the /,* has been the same for at least three centuries, the vowel being fu) or (uu). Thus Gil, 1 62 I, writes shuld, with // (uu) ; and Hart, 1569, writes uld and shuld (with ii - Gil's it) or (through carelessness or misprint?! //A/ and shuld; and Chaucer's forms and those of other \\. E. writers are woldc, :oold, 7oool- rale, none with ou. And the A.S. forms were woldc and t'ooper, 1685, condemns woudst and -vid>t, for uvuldst, as belonging; to llic "haibaia ilialectus." 42 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 58 sceolde, never with ti. So far therefore as the testimony of ancient orthography and of these orthoepists goes, the vowel was not (au). Could on the other hand is in A. S. aide, and in Chaucer and his contemporaries coiide, cou\e, cowde (or with k or tit) ; and it has these forms only, the vowel being the same as in dim, down, hi'is, house, &c. Now- a-days we sound all three words alike. We may therefore not unreasonably infer that the o in the A.S. wolde and sceolde had the accent (though I do not find it so written in the dictionaries*), and that these words have always in the " Englisce spraec" had the sound of (uu) or later (u), and yet, as to their written form, they borrowed a ii from coude, which nevertheless failed to affect their sound : that coude on the other hand, in sound, but not in writing, exchanged its diphthongal (su) for the (uu) or (u) of its comrade auxi- liaries ; as it also, in too slavish imitation, assumed the /, which was radical to them, but to which it had no claim. It may be added that this / in could is sometimes sounded in the West of England ; and, curiously enough. Hart also sounded it. At least we find the word, even in his pho- netic wTiting, as kuld, or kuld, or once (by mistake, no doubt) kould. 58 Now, as I have above assigned at least plausible reasons for believing that the / of A.S. and Chaucer's long i (I am speaking of the written symbols now) were sounded (si), and not (ii), I shall not be expected to accept Mr. Ellis's view as to ai and ei, that these were both sounded (ai). For if so, we could not but have had i and ci or ai at least occasionally rhyming. There is not an instance of the kind in Chaucer, nor have I noticed one in any other poetry, always excepting the two words die and dry, which had also the other but rarer forms dey and drcyc. The latter of these I cannot account for : the former is simply * Grein is the best authority as to accents, yet not always correct. If he is right in refusing the accent to luolde and sceolde, as analogous forms to the Ger. wollte and solUe, then these are the only A.S. words I have met with, which have an unaccented o that becomes (uu) in the later stages of the language. 59] 'AI' AND 'El' WORDS. 43 the O.N. deyja, ek dey. What sound then is represented The symbols or what sounds by ai and ei (or ay and ey^ ? z and soun- jj^ggg svmbols are at present pronounced alike ded as in modern ' ' '^ French. in French ; and that they were pronounced ahke in early English (as Mr. Ellis admits) the rhymes of Chaucer and the frequent interchange of these digraphs in writing one and the same word, seem conclusively to prove. And if again we appeal to tradition, the traditional sound in both countries is, with certain exceptions, (ee) or (r^), as in I'ai/i, vci}i ; faitcs, vcinc. But let us as before examine a few of the words themselves ; for, as I have remarked of previous classes of words, when a few are fixed, the rhymes of Chaucer and other E. E. poets will show that these few draw a multitude of others with them. 59 Now the verb dey { = die), as has just been pointed out, is the O.N. deyja (dtrrja). May ( = maid) is the O.N. mey. Obey is from obedire through obelr. Journey, valley, chimney. Proof from the ^^^ ^hc Yx. joiunice, valltx, chernince, which have O.N. and o.Fr. jij^jj \\-\2X termination (as written) unchanged for originals of cer- i i i ^-., tain of these at Icast thc last SIX centuric-s. 1 he words lay ^"'^'*- (^law) and _/0' (--- faith) are in O.Fr. Icis and fci (feis .'') or fcid or fc, the former of which to glance at the derivation, a point which Mr. Ellis far too commonly overlooks is evidently the Latin Icgi-s with the guttural drop[)ed, and the latter a syncopated {oxxw oi fidci ; and these in the Ciianson de Roland arc in assonance with reis (-^-king, from regis), fedeil (from Jiilelis), nwi (Lat. mci), meis (Lat. mensis), erei^ (Lat. credit), &c. Array (vb.) was in O.Fr. areer. Moneye was inoiieic (Jku-guy), or monnoie, and oi we know was pronounced (oee) or (wee), with no (a) in it, Nobleye is noblcc in Keliiam. I'Vom the noun/;vjvis the \iixh prcer in the Concjuest of Ireland. And these twelve words draw with them way, away, alway, they, say, day, lav, (vb.), biivrey, may, May, jay, play, abbaye, t7ceye, and many besides; all of which indiscriminately and constantly rhyme with one anotlicr. In the Ornnilum, wln'ch, according to Dr. Morris, exhibits the Lincolnshire dialect of the earl\- part of the thirteenth centur)-, we find a distinction be- 44 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 6 1 tween da33 and ma33, and ])e33 and we33e, of which there is no trace in Chaucer. (See 65.) 60 The endings If then thesc -ay words are fixed, the pre- (eeiL) (^ah), and ^eritcs of the verbs among them, deyed, pleide, (eexi), thus ascer- 7 ^ ' j: tained ; with fur- uffvayed, pvcydc, &c., will fix other words rhym- ther independent j^^ ^j^j^ ^j^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^-^ (O.Du. meeghd) evidence ui many t* ' ^ o / cases. and brayde. And in Hke manner we are taught how to sound fayth by deyth, seytJi, laytJi. Next, words in {ee\\). The infinitive of sey (see) is of course seyu (s^un (Orm.) lead on to day (dr^). Many other words now sounded with (ee) or {ce) are shown by their etymology to have undergone like change of sound, air, Lat. aer, chair, Lat. cathedra, Spain, Lat. Hispania, cJiavi- paign from campanus, &c. 67 Summary of jj^ taking leave of these ai words it is im- arguments on az words. portant to observe that, varied as are the sources of information to which I appeal, there is little clashing as to the general results they yield, which lends to the several results most weighty confirmation, based as they are on entirely independent evidence. Rhymes in Early English, Early Scotch, Early French ; orthography, especially of the Ormulum ; distinct statements of old grammarians ; assonances in Early French poetry ; etymo- logies ; modern pronunciation of German, Dutch, Icelandic, French ; and above all, the pronunciation of most of the English dialects* all these for the most part harmonize in the conclusions which they dictate. Early rhymes habitually associate these words juay, dcy, lay, fay, obey (above 29). Icelandic pronunciation fixes the first two ; assonances and etymology fix the other three ; modern French pronunciation also bears witness co the last ; and these sources of information all g'" us the same sound, while modern English pronunciation fully accords both as to these and others that rhyme with them. We shall find entirely independent, though less various evidence as to the vowel sound in knee, see, lie, nie, Sic. ; and these \\-ords I must notice at least in a foot-note the objection that in Middlesex and some adjoining counties words -written with ni are often sounded w'nh (ai) (xi) or (a>Ki). But i;i fact this sound being given to words with the simple .. as well as to words with a/ to pane, lane, mane, as much as to pain, lain, main the argument proves too much, and therefore nothing. If :ail, A.S. sei^el, Oer. Segd, O.N. segl, Szc, with no radical (a), is now locally sounded with (rea'i), the simplest solution is that this (regen) has become (reen), then (nvn), then (n-^'in), and that this the prevailing pronunciation has then bjen corrupted into (ra-cein). 6g] 'a' words. 49 though Mr. Ellis would sound them (kne), (se), (He), (me), &c. never rhyme with the class we have just been dis- cussing. Now it needs but a slight acquaintance with Chaucer to fift 'A' words: ^iscovcr that many pairs of words which rhyme Chaucer's a cer- now onc word Containing one of the last dis- tainly not ''ee), i i- i 1 11 1 1 1 but some (a) cusscd diplitliongs and the other the snnple sound. ^ never rhyme in Chaucer. Thus travayl, aveillc, apparaillc, never rhyme with dale, vale, talc ; nor cyr, despch', /aire {s. or adj.), debonaire, with, fare, care, snare, tare ; and so on. Moreover many of these words with the single vowel are of French derivation, and there is no reason to suspect that tradition has not preserved in them in French the true pronunciation of (a) ; and hence it is likely that such words, though now sounded with (ee) or {ce), yet, having certainly undergone some change, were sounded in tlie 14th century with some (a) sound ; so that also the Dutch faajii, naani, dal, taal, aap, staat, ivaar (s.), ivakoi, maken, at least approximately represent the English pronunciation of these words for several centuries. But a change having taken place in the sound of so large a class of words, is there any means of ascertaining when 69 ""- "''""'''^ that change took lilace } from (:0 t., the '^ prcs.jMt (,r) It was certainly effected much sooner in hmd tha'il'in Kn- ScPiiand than in luigland, and mainly, I be- uiand, prot.ai.iy Ijcvc, ar' ' 'g froui the fact (see above, 48) throll;;ll (,. N. in- 1 ^'"^ 1 \ 1 I- 1 iiiicKc. that the Aortli Angle dialect was so close akin to the Old Xcm'sc. In the Lancelot of the Laik, in Ratis Raving, and other carl\- Scottish poems, we fmd woixls rhx'niing habitual]}- which never rh)-med in Chaucer, nor e\en in \Sc\\ Jonsun, though some of them did fi-e- ([ucntl\' in Spenser. "V\\v\<< i^racc, place, pace, ov pa/ss, space, ss, picc, all (a) words in Chaucer, rhyme with fadyrlcss, niaklcss, perches ( purchase), icaiito/iasc, ^i^i/dlj'ucs, la:ely- //r.s, mckiies, ryc/u'ss, iS:c.* }faaiic \'b.), dci^rade, raide * .Ml'. Muri-.iv >u:^'L;i'^t^, wiili s .nu- plni^iMlily, tli.it the (a) aiul (c) clusx-s of words iiK-t 'HI tlu- inmiiiii'i ;;niU!;'l nf i.ii, \W_ -,.>> ni" -.V.o-. -ii.ss, vSrc, liciiij.; siiundcil much like the hjii^hs'i ,r,-,i- (.e-). /:::.':,! \i\-.- as (-.niLvd/h), ami so lui. This, however, seems to ai/iily only to the >hi ;l \oweI->. 50 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ "JO (vb.), rhyme with paid, affraid, saade ( = said),* arayd, and manhcd ; visage and rage with knawlcge ; scJianie, name, blame, with tJiaivi (O.N. jjeim), and Jiainc (O.N. heim) ; declare, spare, are (vb.), with mare or ;;m/r (adj.), dcbonaire, fare or yia:zV (adj.), rcpar (vb.), zV^ or ^;r or ere or ^//r (adv.), aire (s.), 3i?r^, frere, hair, &c.; estate, debait. See, with ^/(f?//, from O.N. bleyta, and hate ( = hot, shortened in later Scottish into het) O.N. heitr, and hare and eraif (A.S. habban and era/an, but O.N. hefi and kref) with /;/ or lave or /(^zjft' (O.N. leifar) and resaif. So in Barbour, who was contemporary with Chaucer, we find slain, which elsewhere and most frequently rhymes with again, as it might in Chaucer, rhyming repeatedly with a)ie = one (O.N. ein), gane = gone (O.N. geingit), and tane = taken ; none of which rhymes would be admissible in Chaucer. Can it be that toward the close of Elizabeth's reign the probability, and afterwards the fact, of a Scottish succes- sion to the throne, aided and accelerated, if it did not even cause, the change of pronunciation in England .-^ 70 The change in It sccms vcry uuHkely that mere court influ- Engiand did not g^cc could havc thiuucd doAvn a full bold (aa) through Stuart iuto (cc) Or (ce) in the mouths of the sturdy influence. Englishmen whom the early Stuarts ruled ; and there are miany indications of a rugged spirit of inde- pendence among the people that was quite prepared to resist court influence even in smaller matters than ship- money and episcopacy. Yet in ^lilton and Dryden such rhymes as maid shade, fail ale pale, spare air bare, praise amaze, state ivait, are sufficiently common to suggest a * No argument can l:ie based on the mere spelling of the Scottisii words, if Mr. Murray's view is correct that the i or y in these digraphs in Middle Scotch simply indicated the length of the vowel preceding. This view how- ever still leaves it an open question what that preceding vowel itself was whether (aa), (ee), or [ce] in these words. But it will he observed that the rrgument in the text is based on the words themselves, irrespective of modes of writing. In Chaucer the past tense made, however spelt, never rhymed with saide, however s]5elt; and I should argue that the ladical (a) in the former, and the radical (e) in the latter, sufficiently intlicate an orii;inal dis- tinction which in Midille Scotch has been blotted out. 7i] 'a' words. 51 suspicion that their not occurring more frequently is simply due to the fact that a word which is seeking a mate to rhyme with naturally looks among those of exactly the same form.* Still this is only a suspicion, and we may not tread on such thin ice with safety. Here, however, are facts that may help us. Even before the close of the i6th century we find Smith, Hart, and Bullokar (like Gil. only a little later) clearly distinguishing the a in far, mark, allozv, grammar, manner, half, after, &c., from the a] m another large class of words blame, fiame, tame, same, bacofi, capon, able, table, stable, declare, cradle, made, lady, make, take. Sic. &c. And yet all these ortho- epists have a third quite distinct class of words, though they nozc are (e) words and would rhyme with the list last given. Such are remain, say, great, plain, stvear, their, be- sides many more, which in modern times have changed {ee) or (ee) into {\\) irceive, either, breathe, please, &c. 71 A hnd in some SiHcc thcn blavic, namc, Sic, had lost the words, in Queen souud of (aa), aud had not yet acquired that of Elizabeth's time, , , . , a sound between (ee), aud yct wcre on the road to it; the con- - {a.) and (ee). clusiou sccms Unavoidable that in the time of Queen Elizabeth they had some intermediate (see 28) sound. Most probably it was {^), the sound of the a in mat or man, or (a-'aj), the same sound prolonged. More- over Giles du W'es charges Englishmen in learning French to j)ron()unce " }'our e almost as brode as ye pronounce your a in englysshe;" which [joints to the conclusion that it was the established habit of the ICnglish in Henry the Eighth's reign to sound their a, at least in many words, almost like e, that is probably ('.virc). Palsgrave also (1530) clearly recognizes two as in hhiglish, one of them the same Altlio'a,:;h in :his 19th ceiitur}- -.7// anl -n'f, -,77V .iiul -atr, ivc, are beyond question, jnonounccd witliout tlic slii^^litcsl ciistiiiclion, yct in Hymn's iliynies of (c) wonis, seltint^ aside the ir.ial iiy, I find, in nearly seven instances out of eleven, the words are spelt alike ; so al-n in Tom Moore's. Sir Walter Scott, on the contrnrv, seems to li.nx- CMiniileteiy eaiancipated himself .inni such bondage, and to rhyme accordin:; to the ( ir n! >ne. t Written a by Halt, a b}- Smith and (HI, ;i l)y liullnkar. I. 2 52 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 72 as the French and ItaHan, the other different. It is there- fore clearly not Scottish influence that commenced the change from (aa) to {ce) in these words, though it not im- probably gave the (aa) its coup-de-grace. 72 Classes of 'A' But what of Chaucer, from whom Henry words in chau- yjj-j_ j^ ^jst^nt morc than a century .? Answer, cer : some had (a). as in other cases, distinguendum est. Some words there are which in their earliest stage in the language had almost certainly (a), as certainly had (a) in the 1 6th century, and still have (a) in the 19th century. It is therefore scarcely questionable that they always have had that vowel in English. Such are large, charge, bar, spar, from the French large, charge, barre, Italian sbarra, and other such, including the interjection a! which takes Emelya with it (C.T. 1080), and therefore also probably the Latin termination in omnia, and the name of the vowel A itself (C.T. 161). In these words all the evidence is in favour of (a). 73 othershad(A). A sccoud class, SO far back as the orthoepists will carry us, was distinct from these, being written, or described as equal to, aiu by Cooper (1685), an by Butler (1633), a by Gil (1621), an by Bullokar (1580), and an by Hart (1569). It includes all, call, royal, several, dance, coni- inand, &c. ; many of which still retain the sound of (aa) : that sound we shall probably be right in assigning to them in Chaucer's time also, though in so many of these words as are of Anglo-Saxon origin there is no difference in the mode of writing these and the class preceding. It may be added that Ijutler expressly states"^' that in his time a before /, nc, and ;/c/ was sounded as an ; and it is exactly in these words that the oldest and best MSS. of * ^' A is in English, as in all other languages, the first vowel, and fiist letter of the Alphabet : the which, like / and 11, hath two sounds : one \\hen it is short, an other, when long : as in inait and viaiic, hat and hate. And before /it is sounded like an : as in also, palsi, fals, altar, alter, halter: except f, v, k, I, or 7)1, for then al liath the sound of an : liefore ng for (//, as in chaiiij;v, range, dangvr, stranger ; before nc like an, as in chance, dance, france, lance ; and also before nd, as in demand, civmnand.'' V 5. 74] 'A' WORDS. 53 Chaucer seem to write almost indifferently -ance and -aiince, -and and -aimd ; more commonly with an. (I assume for the present, what I shall endeavour to prove further on, that an in Chaucer's time stood for (aa), as it does now.) Such words in Chaucer are al, bal, callc, Malle, halle, schal, falle, zval, thral, general, and other words of Latin deriva- tion in -al; penatcnce, pitaiuice, eJiaiicc, ineschance, dannce, daliaunce, remembrance, snffisannce, conntenannce, plesannce, comannde, &c. To these must be added land, hand, stand, and strand, which occasionally rhyme with comajindc, and show a sound other than (a) by their being not uncom- monly spelt with o ; and words in -ant {servant, niarchant, covenant, &c.) are at least as frequently written with -annt. Butler adds that channge, stranngc, daunger, &c., in the North of England still retained the old pronunciation ; and Chaucer's orthography indicates the same. Lastly the spelling of ensample also as ensaumplc, and its rhyming with temple, suggest the French sound of the vowel in both of these. I take all of these words to have had (AA). But words in -ale do not rhyme with those in -al or alle, even when both have the final c. Such are tale, pale, ale, male (adj. and subst.), dale, nightingale, &c. I find, on running through over 6000 lines of the Canterbury Tales, twenty-two rhymes formed by these words with one another, and sixty of words in -alle with one another : only in three other instances does a word in -ale rhyme with one in -alle, and in each case it is smale, the pronunciation of which is thus seen to have been at that time unsettled. The sound then of these -ale words seems to have been with (a) or (;e), but which of these, we will for the present leave undetermined. The repeated rhyme of talys, i.e. tales, with Alys, helps very little. Alys, now (jelv's), may have been (alv's) in Chaucer's time ; or it may have been an inexact rhyme. 'jt A ihir.i dass A third class had a in Chaucer, but not in ii.ui short (;i) Anglo-Saxon, and the modern pronunciation is various. The A.S. form has u\ whicli was j:)robably (;e),^' * See sN 117. 54 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [75 or, thinner still, e, i.e. (e). Such are hadde, A.S. haefde; was, A.S. waes ; black, A.S. blrec ; bak, A.S. baec; bladde, A.S. blaed; glas, A.S. glaes ; bras, A.S. braes; skathe, A.S. sce'San; Bathe, A.S. bae^; hath, A.S. haef^. Some of these are now pronounced with (a), some with (ae), some with (a), some with {ee). The i6th century writers do not assist us, as they do not distinguish short (a) from short (ae) ; but as the majority had apparently the same sound in A.S. as in modern English, it is reasonable to conclude that they have had the same sound during the whole interval. Some words of French derivation go with these cas, pas (subst.), solas, alas, &c. rhyming with bt'-as and was, for instance ; so that we must suppose them also to have assumed this peculiarly English vowel. Then these words will be (brses), (glses), (alaes), (haeth), (hsed), (blaek), (paes), just as at present ; and (solaes), (Baeth) or (Baeaeth),* (waes), (caes) (skasth), (spraed), (spaek), contrary to present use. It is notable however that the verbs pace and solace, to- gether with space, grace, face, place, embrace, maiiace. Trace (i.e. Thrace), purchace, of French derivation, and lasse and asse from the A.S. la^ssa and assa, refuse to rhyme with gras, bras, &c. The final e however sufficiently accounts for this. 75 ^ f""^ <^'=i^^ But there yet remain others chiefly of had a longer (a;) . . . , o or (aeae). ^ rcncli origm m -age, -able, -ante, -ate, occ, as to which, as well as those in -ale and -ace already referred to, and numerous English words in -are, -ake, &c., the imperfect evidence seems to leave it doubtful whether (ae) or (a) was the pronunciation in Chaucer's age. But though the problem is difficult, a faint ray of light seems to fall on it from the Ormulum. Assuming that make, * It is not easy in the case of several of these words to determine whetlier the vowel is long or short, and therefore whether (k) or {xx) is the right sym- bol. It is certain that few or perhaps no English speakers pronounce ass, glass, grass, pass with as short a vowel as that in the first syllable of asirotio- mical, and yet they do not so prolong the sound as a Somersetshire peasant in naming Bath. We have in fact, as Mr. Melville liell and others have pointed out, various degrees of length of our vowels, minute differences of quantity as well as quality in different words. 75] 'a' words. 55 from the A.S. macian, and take, from the O.N. taka, were in their earliest forms sounded with (aa), we find that in Ormin's time they had undergone a change, at least in the imperatives, which he writes viacc and tacc. This doubled consonant is Ormin's mode of indicating a short preceding vowel ; and these imperatives in this form have the same vowel as that of aimd, atf, bacc, brass, chappmenn, &c. It is true, Ormin's short a, like his long one, may have stood for more sounds than one ; so that before r, as in arrke, arrmess (i.e. arms), arrt, the vowel may have been the .short (a) ; but the point that I call attention to is the fact that the a in niacc and tacc has been shortened, and before the guttural tenuis it is more likely, as in the other in- stances, that the sound was (ai). And it may be so that the very thing which Ormin intended by his a (sic) was (aeae) ; for six out of the eight words which he so writes the other two do not occur in Chaucer are among the very words which we are discussing. They are, dale, h&tenn (also hatcnn), late (also late), ndj)ie (also name), t&kenn, and tale (also tale). And we are not at all bound to assume that the ^ signified what we now use it to signify, especially as Ormin had another mode of showing the short vowel. At any rate this a indicates some other sound' than the a o( afell {\cq\. afl), aflcdd, abidenn, abufeiifi, abutenn, ad I, anig, &c.,* in other words, some change ; and since four of these words have forms in a also, the change itself seems to have been incomplete, and the pronunciation unsettled when Ormin wrote. If then En- glish words had (aa) in Anglo-Saxon, but at least since the seventeenth century have had (cc), and there are even as soon as the early part of the thirteenth century signs of an incipient change ; it is but reasonable to suppose that that change was somewhat advanced when Chaucer wrote, a century and a half later. And if we may so conclude for English words, it is highly probable \'(.Ty many of Ormin's a words, as i?/./, i/;/, ;/,?;/, i:;an, gast, />:art\ rap, were from A.S. words wilh ', p. 126) that thi.s form arose in the Northern dialect and then "was adojitcd also into the Midland and ."^outiiern dialects." 6o ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [82 Poems and Mrs. Gwatkin's Devonshire Dialogue may talk of going " to say" for " to sea," but he will never pronounce the verb see as say, nor knee as nay, teeth as tayth, and so on. There are on the other hand cases in which the A.S. word had an e which in some counties is now (ee) or {ee), as crayp (though creep is more common) from credpan; haym from beam or beoni in Sussex and some parts of Cornwall, though (biim) or (biiam) is the pronunciation elsewhere. But such words are far from numerous. Almost all the words which in A.S. had e, and which survive in modern English, have the sound of (ii) or {ii). g2 Evidence for Morcovcr the Dutch and German forms of (ii) from Dutch r ^ ^ and German. many of thcsc words pomt to the same con- clusion as the English dialects, as will be seen from the followinpf list : Engl. Du. see zien flee vlieden knee knie reed riet lief lief wheel wiel heel hiel keel kiel -teen -tien deep diep shete ( = shoot) schieten flete ( - : float) vlieten beer bier deer dier here hier reek ricken fleece vlies seethe zieden Germ. (sehen) fliehen knie Rieth lieb Hiel Kiel (-zehn) tief schiessen fliessen Bier Thier hier riechen Vliess sieden Then again in many instances where the go Or a .sound near (ii) is found in the German, Gcrmau cougcncr of au English word with (i) Dutch, &c., con- (^Qgg j^q{- itself contain (i), it has a sound close genersof Enghsh _ ^' V words. akin to (i), but very remote from (e). Thus: 84] 'e' words. 61 the natural order of the vowel sounds, as is now admitted, (i) (e) (a) (A) (0) (u) (y) ; and the extremes meet in some way that has not yet, so far as I know, been explained,* so that our Miller and the German Miillcr are pronounced almost alike : the one sound passes with great facility into the other. And in the words referred to, while the English word has the first sound (i) of the above natural scries, its congeners are fur- nished from the other end of the series with (y) or even (u), the latter especially in Dutch. Thus hiiten (Du. hoeden, Kil.) ^= Jiccd, kiihn (Du. koen) = kcai, griin (Du. groen) ^ green, sijss (Du. zoet) =szveet, griissen (Du. groeten) ^ greet, fuhlen (Du. voelen) =/cr/, Fussc (Du. voeten) =feet, &c. In like manner it may be argued that the congeners in other languages of many of the words which Mr. Ellis would pronounce with (c), are all found vowcllcd from the other end of the system. Thus knee has for kinsmen the Greek yia; (\\'\ih. yvv^.Trpoxw^lyvva), Lat. germ, Skt. j'df/u, Zend seuu, M.G. kuiu. In O.N. alone is there any (e), but then accompanied by (i), line' being pronounced, and some- times written, linie (llnicc). Indeed scarcely any congeners can be found with (e) for any of the words above given ( 78), except only seize// and -eel/// given in the last list. The conclusion to which I am forced by this evidence from various sources confirmed as it is to a certain extent by the testimony of Ben Jonson for the 17th ccntur\-, and I'alsgrave for the i6th (see 86) is that all these words have been sounded with (ii) in every age of our language, the 14th century t)f course included. And with these go many other words whose final syllable has a long e for its vowel, as the rhymes of the poets jirove beyond all doubt. g^ KA words iiad But Mr. Ellis finds reasons for believing (rv) or (cc) : lliev 1 T 1 1 i- i 1 i , ', and 1 have arrived at tlie same cone usion never rliymeil wiihEK u.irds. that most, or perhaps all. of the words which in Chaucer's time were spelt with a simpler, but which two centuries later were spelt with et/, were at this later j)eriod * I am told that .Mr. .Melville liell has thrown light on tliis. 62 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 84 pronounced with (ee) or (ee), while those that continued to be spelt with e or ee were at that later time pronounced with (ii). Such words are sea, flea, each, teach, preach, reach, beast, feast, read, lead (vb.), mead, sheaf, leaf, iveak, speak, meal, deal, beam, dream, stream, bean, mean, lean, clean, heap, rear, tear (s.), tear (vb.), eat, heat, meat, wheat, heath, ivreath, leave, zveave, please, ease, tease release, cease. (I have not had time to make a complete list ; though I should like to have done so, for such inquiries are, to a much greater extent than Mr. Ellis seems to suspect, inquiries about individual words.) All of these are often perhaps most commonly pronounced in the western counties with {ee) say, vlay, aycJi, taych, and so on ; but almost all of them (though T^^iT? has the same form in A.S.) are derived either from A.S. words with ^or ^ (i*^). or from O.N. words with ei, or from French words with some modification of (e). These words therefore having been formerly pronounced with [ee) or (ee) rccdan, tcecan, Jicep, vcikr, prescher, aise, &c. but being now pronounced with (ii), have at some time or other undergone a change ; and I agree with Mr. Ellis that the change (at least in our southern dia- lects) has taken place later than the middle of the 17th century. In Ben Jonson the words deem, sceni, esteem, re- deem, rhyme with one another, but do not once in all his poems rhyme with dream, stream, moonbeam ; feel, steel, eel, heel, ivJieel, do not once rhyme with veal, seal, steal, ivcal, deal (portion), deal (board), meal, heal, conceal, reveal, zeal ; geese, piece, Greece, fleece, do not once rhyme \\\X\\ peace, in- crease, cease, release ; deep, sleep, zueep, keep, peep, steep, creep, sheep, not once with cheap, reap, heap, leap ; and so on. In Spenser, so far as I have examined, the same distinction is observed, though I have found speed once rhyming with dread, and peer with ear, as occasional imperfect rhymes must be expected.* I have also examined the whole of Sir Philip Sidney's rhymes, and all of lieywood's But as \.o peer, ear, if the latter was (eer), we may remember that the former is from the French /r;/r, and Spenser may jjo.ssibly have used tlie word with the ancient sound, speUing notwithstanding. %86] ' E ' WORDS. 63 rhymes in his Proverbs and Epigrams (1562), and with like result. 35 Nor do these But now I must recall attention to the re- words rhyme in ^^^^ j ^^^^ ^^ Starting as to the importance Chaucer, though *-> ^ spelt alike. of not confoundittg written language with the spoken, which alone is language proper. It is the spoken language with which we are primarily concerned ; and Mr. Ellis has been seriously misled through his attending too exclusively to the written symbols of language. I shall doubtless astonish him when I assert, and demonstrate, that t/ie very same distinction that exists between these classes of words in Ben Jonson, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Heywood, and other poets of that age, exists also in Chancer, clearly and strongly viar'ked, thongJi disguised by the spelling. What Mr. Ellis, justly for the most part, calls an innovation, namely the spelling of words of the latter class with ea, in Chaucer's time was yet unknown. But for all that the words, though spelt alike, were not spoken alike. The "so sharp distinction" which Mr. Ellis imagines (p. 242) between the English of Chaucer and that of Spenser does not exist. This must be looked at more in detail. ofi Final e in Thcrc Is not indccd in the case of the Chaucer was (ii). accctttcd final e any distinction between (ii) and (ec) words, I assume for the moment that the two classes may be correctly thus designated ; and I shall endeavour to prove that all belong to tlie former class. The only word which for reasons already indicated we might expect to find pronounced with (ee) is the noun sea, in the Devonshire dialect say. But it had in A.S. not only the form sc'e, but also se (se?) and seo (Bosw.) ; and Chaucer seems to have retained only these. He uses the word rhyming with he, see, tree, &c. Now Ben Jonson lays down the rule that " When e is the last letter, and soundeth, the sound is sharp, as in tiie I'Vench /." In Palsgrave, a century earlier, we do not find this stated as a rule, nor iiave we a right to expect it ; but all the examples he gives are in accordance with it bee (s.), fee, and also " dyvers other prt)nownes ending in e, 64 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ Sj as we, me, the, he, she, and suche lyke." All of these he sounds like the French or Italian i. But was the usage the same in Chaucer's time ? I claim the right to affirm, on the ground of the vis inertice of language (see 6 to 9), that it was the same, unless the contrary can be proved ; and the only arguments to prove the contrary are, first, the pure assumption and a highly improbable one too that in common English speech foreign words (such as the Latin bcnedicite, and the French niageste, degre, &c.) were 7iot anglicized ; and secondly, the use of one actual French word. And this one French word, parde to deal with it first 87 Parde. in fact only confirms my conclusion, if at least the final i in French was sometimes sounded (i) (see 13). For pardi is the common form in French, as used by Voltaire (quoted by Littre) and at the present day. Chaucer uses the word both as parde and pcrdy. Spenser and Shakspeare also use the latter form, Shakspeare making it rhyme with fly. I suspect it had both sounds in French (ii) and (oi). (If parde existed in French in Chaucer's time but I cannot find it, though I do find de ^Qiod. we must simply consider the pronunciation as anglicized.) And as to anglicized pronunciation, even if we did not gg Tendency to find mctttion in Chaucer of French spoken .anglicize foreign ,, \ r i i ,- r. r i ^^.Q^j^ Alter the scole of Stratford atte Bowc, wc might expect such anglicizing from the tendency con- tinually exemplified around us to pronounce foreign words in the easiest manner. Not only do we hear Mounseeriox Monsieur, and (sundziindiirrk-i) for .S7. Jean d'Acre ; but witness the recognised pronunciation of chagrin, bombazine, ehenille, patty, berganiot, and of military terms as enfilade, ealibre, &c., and of geographical names as Mexieo, Sara- gossa. Sherry, Canton, Sedan, Paris, &c. Especially might we look for such modifications of foreign sounds in an a"e when there was liardK' any travelling, and when there was therefore no motive for preserving them with exactness. A curious instance of this anglicizing is found in the 89] ECCLESIASTICAL PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN. 65 Rom. of the Rose (p. 164 in Bell's edition), vfherQ parcuere, i.e. par coeur, is made to rhyme with lere. The latter is probably in this case an (ee) word (as we shall presently find that it is, very exceptionally), but even then the vowel is sufficiently remote from the French cuer, coer, or qjteur, all of which I believe to have been merely different modes of representing the same sound as cceur represents.* I have therefore not the slightest difficulty in believing that inageste, equite, and such like words, when adopted into English, assumed the common English pronunciation of the final e, i.e. (ii) or (/). 89 i-atin no ex- ^g |-q l^j-|j^ howevcr Mr. Ellis seems to ception to the rule. think himself warranted in assuming that the vowels were sounded in England in the continental mode ; nor is he alone in supposing that the priesthood in this island had a traditional pronunciation of ecclesiastical Latin in which an approximation to the Italian pronuncia- tion was maintained.! So far as I can learn, this notion is simply a delusion. Two learned Catholic Doctors of my acquaintance, one the president of St. 's College, and the other the Prior of , inform mc that such traditional pronunciation has no existence. The late Cardinal Wise- man endeavoured with considerable success to introduc; the Italian pronunciation of Latin among English priests, but before his time there prevailed and still largely prevails a mongrel pronunciation, half French half En- glish. The French element was due to the dispersion of the priests at the time of the Persecution (what wc call the Reformation), when many of them took refuge in St. Omcr and other places in France; but prior to the Persecution there was only the Jiiiglish pronunciation of Latin in this country. I have not had the opportunity of referring to * In Stanza xxii. of the Chanson de Roland wo find several words with or in assonance with fteus (plur. o[ fieu = fiefs), as well as oilz = ycux, while one of these oe words, eslod --^ il faut, is found in Mat/ner's Altfr. Lieder, xxxiv. 26, in the form esluet. t Thus Mr. I'ayne says : "The assumption with which I commence is that the literary pronunciation of Church Latin in the tiiirtecnth century w.i.-, a tradition of ages," p. 369. I- 66 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 90 books in corroboration of these statements, and therefore content myself with quoting as my authority men of learn- ing who speak with confidence as on a matter with which they are familiarly acquainted. Precisely what " the En- glish pronunciation" of Latin was, it may be hard to say; but at any rate the assumption that the final vowel of benedicite was sounded in the French or Italian manner cannot for a moment be admitted as a trustworthy premiss pointing towards Mr. Ellis's conclusion. The "English pronunciation" was far more probably just what it is now. Then we notice that three classes of words with vowel 90 Three classes terminations have been borrowed from French of words now ter- -^^^^ English, all of which in the 19th century minating m (j), t> ' -' J formerly distinct, commonly cud in [i), but wliich in the 14th century had different terminations, as exemplified in enemi (enemai) I take Palsgrave's authority, though two centu- ries later, for its pronunciation, cheniine^ (tshemin' first caught my eye. t To make the meaning of these figures clearer, I may explain that in the Cant. Ta. the adj. i/c-nr is found in eighly-one di-^tichs in all ; that in seventy- nine of these it rhymes with (ii) words, and only in two cas- s, wliich are speci- fied lower down, does it rhyme with (ee) words. C/:if>c- is found in fi.ty-one distichs, rhyming exclusively with (ii) words. 68 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 92 (A.S. ber) twice;* soper, three times. t The (ee) class con- sists of these words : were (pret. of be), 32-2 ; there, 24-0 ; where, lo-o; were (=Lat. gerere), 3-0; teere (s.), 16-0; swere (vb.), 8-0; here (vb.), 8-0; here (s. = ursus), 6-1 ; here ( = hair), lo-o; ere (s. = ear), 14-0; ere (adv.), 2-0; fere (=timor), 6-0; gere, 8-1; her (pron.) 8-0; spere\ (s. = hasta), 7-0. With these are the A.S. metier e, tapster e, 8ic., with Fifiistere, mere (=mare), were (--^defend), dere { = \n- jure), shere (s. = shear-s), tere (vb.), miswere, enqnere, and requere. The exceptions out of a total of 659 rhymes, year and bier being set aside, are only the following nine. Dere (adj.) rhymes once with zvere (from be), and once with werre ( = war). Frere ( = friar), rhymes once with mere. Matere rhymes once with gramere, which I assume to be an (e) word, Fr. grammaire. Bere (s.) rhymes once with stere ( = ox), A.S. steor, which I assume to be an (i) word. Gear rhymes once with brere, A.S. brer, Cld Norman briere. Requere rhymes once with Icere (s.) And lastly clear and Chatmliclere rhyme once each with poivere, which I assume to be an (e) word from its French form pooir, puer, poeir, poiieir, which were all probably (p(?weer), and from its Scottish form potvare. But in examining these words in -ere, I refer of course to the spoken words, regard- less of varieties of spelling. The first of the above classes has eight varieties : er, ere, eer, eere, ire, ier, iere, and yere (as in prayere, a Picard corruption of Prov, preguiera or some such earlier form). 92 French words A Hst of thc Frcnch words in ier or iere bdong'^Jthe'S) above alluded to which Chaucer uses an im- ciass. perfect list I fear is the following, some, which are bracketed, being guessed from analogy, though most are to be found in the dictionaries : (annuelier), This preterit bere also rhymes with bachelere in Rom. of the Rose, p. 55 (Bell's edn.), but in p. 63 it rhymes with there. t Which Mr. Payne also (p. 441) quotes as rhyming with clere in "Land of Cockayne." X Spere = sphere is an (ii) word, rhyming with c/eere, manere, and clere hi Tr. and Cr., bk. v. 93] I^WO DISTINCT CLASSES OF ' E ' WORDS. 69 antiphonier, archier, bachelier, bouclier, charpentier, collier, (corniculier), coursier,* daungier, escolier, escuyer, (ferme- rier), forestier, gaufifrier,f Gaultier, heronier, hosteller, (labourier), marinier, messagier, officier, (pardonnier), par- ticulier, premier, rosier, seculier, {soupier ?), tavernier, ver- gier, (volupier); briere, chambriere, corniere, derriere, maniere, matiere, panthiere,;}: priere, riviere. The termi- nation -ier is so common in Old French that Cotgrave has in one place no fewer than six such words in two consecu- tive pages coursier, courtier, coustellier, coiistillier, coustu- mier, and cousturier. And that there might be a form labourier side by side with laboureur is shown by the co- existent fourjnagier and fourmageur, tuillicr and tuileur, &c. As to the pronunciation of this termination as (iir) in the English forms of these words, we still preserve it in cashier (O. Fr, caissier), grenadier, engineer, (O. Fr. cnginier), croupier, cuirassier, arrears, &c. ; while the sound is the same in the Dutch Kassier, officier, griffier, granadier, &c., and in the German Offizier, Granatier, &c. 93 Pronunciation '^^ <^\^^. samc cLiss bclougs the name of Chau- and meannig of T- 1 T T j Chaucer's name, ccr, or Lliauccre (Man ol Lawes lale, Head- link, 1. 47, Petw. MS.), himself I cannot indeed find in the dictionaries the form cliaussier, but it would be quite regularly formed from c/iausses, as eJiaussetier from cJiauss- In the Flower aiul the Leaf occurs tlic strangely loose rhyme of u^are (=\vorc), were, corscre ; but Mr. Furnivall has shown gootl reasons for believ- ing this i^oem not to be a genuine production of Chaucer. See Af/uuiEtini for July 13th, 1872. t This or go Ifrier must have been the French form which waferer represents in (Jant. Ta. 13894, one of the two lines which Mr. Wriyht brackets. The passage stands thus : And right anoon tlicr come tombesteris [P'etis and smale, and yonge fruitesteres, Singers with harpes, bandes, ^vajcnns,] Which that i)en veiray develes ofticeves. The omission would give a filse rhyme of I''r. -err (iir) with A.S. -ere (eer) tombesteris with ojficeres. In other words, if established on MS. :uithorilv, it would add one to my nine bad rhymes nicnliont'd above. [This nole wr.s written long before the publication c^f the .Si.x-'l'cxt Chaiioer, in which tlie lines are found in every one of the texts]. \ ranter in Rom. of the Rose, p. 6() (Hell's edition). 70 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 94 ettes, while the modern equivalent hosier has preserved the same brief form. It is an idle dream indeed that the name was ever sounded i?io}'e semi-Gcrmanico, as (khaukj). 94 Influence of ^hc influeuce of the final e in these rhymes final e in -iere <- 1 1 i rr words. I have no time fully to discuss ; suffice to say that it prevents the Fr. -icre words from ever rhyming with the Fr. ier words (except, perhaps only, bachelor with ryver 1. 6466, and archers with comers in Rom. of the Rose, p. 143), though both rhyme almost indifferently with here (vb.), here (adv.), &c. But if I may here recall attention to the theory which I have ventured elsewhere* to advance, that 'whenever the final e represents a final syllable in Anglo-Saxon [or old French], it may not must be sounded, and never otherwise;' I would suggest that when nianere rhymes with the verb Jiere, they possibly both sounded the final e ; but if with the adverb here, which never had the final e (except as a mere orthographical expedient to indicate the length of the root vowel : A.S. hdr, Icel. her, Du. hier, Ger. hier, PI. D. hier, M. G. her\ manere also dropped it ; while there was felt to be an incongruity in rhyming two words both of French origin, such as archere (O. Fr. archier) and rivere (O. Fr. riviere), and pronouncing one accurately, while taking a liberty with the termination of the other. gS Words in -cm Lg|- ^g proceed to -eiie ; and for a change let fall into two dis- . r r^i > i tinct classes. US cxamine some of Chaucer s other poems. Well, in the Troilus and Cryseyde, Chaucer's Dreme, Chaucer's A. B. C, The Boke of the Duchesse, and one or two minor pieces, I have noted 125 rhymes, of Avhich 100 are furnished by what seem to be (ii) v\'ords seeiie (inf), sene ox y-sene (part), teiie (^vexation), shoic, denienc (-^de- meanour), strciie, zvene ( = think), Polixene anglicized, it will be observed, qivcne, grenc, kcne, bifi^Hiie, kncne (pi. of knee), ben ( = arc), bai (inf), bene (part.), been (--bees), eene ( = eyes, Sc. e'en, in four passages : elsewhere we have once yen rhyming with crien), snstccnc, contcenc, cvciic ( -^ c\-ening) 3.ndi fiftcne. The other 25 are made by tenc (-^ta'cn), and * See below, ^^ iiS. 97] TWO DISTINCT CLASSES OF ' E ' WORDS. 7 1 five Other words which in the West of England are now sounded with ayn {een) inene (s. = means, O. Fr. meyn or meen), bene (s. = bean), lene (adj.), vicne (vb.), and dene. Now the notable fact is that in these poems of Chaucer these six words only twice* rhyme with the former class, namely viene twice with wene ; but Chaucer then uses mene in the special sense of to moan. This obviously suggests a doubt whether our etymologists are right in making inene -mean and ;;^^//^=moan the same word. I cannot believe they are the same. I suspect rather that at least to Chau- cer's ovv^n apprehension the word was totally unconnected with mind, Slc, and simply one of the imitative class, con- veying the idea of a thin, feeble, plaintive cry, like squeak, sqiceal, and the old peep, rather than of anything approach- ing a groan. The inf sleen rhymes with Egipeioic, which, judging from the analogy of Polixene, must have had (ii), and so sle rhymes with he ; but sleth occurs rhyming with dcth, and the modern form is slay : usage as to this word was perhaps unsettled, as in many words now-a-days. 96 Two distinct J Yi^yQ examined almost or quite the whole cl.isscs of Words \n-enu: of Cliauccr's pocms for some other termina- tions. In -enie we have sone, demc, quenic, diadeuic and SLaBrjiMa we know has been pronounced for centuries with ^ = (ii), rhyming repeatedly with one another, but not once notwithstanding that Mr. Ellis v.'ould make them all (eem) alike with drenw, renic ( realm), rood-beine, sunne- bcvie, strccm, Jerusalem. Lccvic (flame, A.S. lecSma) is once only used exceptionally rhyming with bcnie. 97 Two distinct ;^o cl/eeke, leke, seeke (adj.), seke (vb.), bisekc, i [eu. eeke, weke (s.), meke, and iDimcekc, form one class yielding a large number of rhymes ; spe'.e, breke, tc'.r/v, ft)rm a second. Only once in all ClKuicrr have 1 found eke rhyming with speke, and once with bi'eke. A third excep- tion must be admitted in the rliyme of speke with i-reke --^smoking, from A.S. rcc. It is nc^ doubt w\t\\ speke, &c., I have noticed also one exception (and there may lie more) in the Cant. Ta. In tlie Prolo_i;ue, 1. 1,^3, ue have i-/.-7/t' rliyniini,' willi scene. 72 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 98 that Chaucer's kcke and qncke (Assembly of Foules) would have rhymed, had he used them at the end of lines ; for the natural sounds imitated those of the goose and duck are much nearer to the French e (ee) than to (ii). 98 Two distinct When we turn to words in -ede, we seem at classes of words ^^^^ |-q |-jg jj^ inextricable confusion. But three in -ede, with one or two excep- of these have two forms in A.S.; hence the '"'- difficulty. They are dr^d ( - deed), dnl-d, bnl-d ( = breadth), or less commonly d6d, dred, bred. Setting these aside, and the anomalous prefix -Jiede, I find the other words clearly divisible into an (ii) and an (ee) class. The numbers of the rhymes they yield, with the excep- tions, in those parts of Chaucer that I have examined, are as follow. The (ii) class : nede, 45 - 2 ; bede and forbede, 9 - O ; spede, 22 - 2 ; hede ( = care), 25 - 4 ; fede, 9 - 2 ; yede, 5 - O ; mede ( = reward), 8-0; wede ( = herba), i - o ; precede and siiccede, 8-0; blede, 10- i ; glede, 7-0; eredc ^again a classical word anglicized 2-0; stede (^ horse), i-o; breede (vb.), i-O. It will be observed that (except the subst. bead derived from or identical with bede) not one of these words has been or is spelt with ea in its later form ; while most of those which follow all except sede and ivcde are so spelt : vid. sup. 84. The (ee) class : dede ( = dead), 60 - O ; hede ( = head), 66 - i ; scdc, 8 - 2 ; rcdc ( -^ red), 59 - 2 ; rede { = xQ.-3idi, advise, advice), 72-1 ; Icde (yh), 29-4; Icde (s.), 2-0; viede (^meadow), 16-0; thredc, 4-0; brede ( = bread), 6 - o ; zucde ( ^ vestis), 8-0. The affix -/ude, and dede (s.), drede, brede ( = breadth), rhyme chiefly with (ee) words, thus: -liede 46-8; dede, 66- ig; drede, 84-31; brede, 12-5. 99 Two distinct Words in ^/^can be classified in like manner: classes of words .,.. /,, ^ in-^/.'. '^v'th (n) apparently, szvete (adj.), fee/, Jiete (vb.), shete (vb.), sJiete (s.), mete (vb.), victc (adj.) and ufunete, grete (vb.), quyete, bihete, plancte, poete ; with (ee), szvete (s.), hete, wete, grete (adj.), ivhete, trete and etitrcte, plete ( ^ plead), viete (s.), coiuiterfctc. But some other terminations do not occur often enough for the distinction to be so satisfactorily made out that an argument can be built upon it. In all lOl] TWO DISTINCT CLASSES OF ' E ' WORDS. 73 these cases however of which details have just above been given, we find two distinct classes of words. Distinct most assuredly ; for the supposition that the symbol e always represents in Chaucer either the sound of (ee) or any one sound, is utterly irreconcilable with the facts above stated. Mr. Ellis indeed recognizes (p. 751 note) the fact that Salesbury, to whom we are indebted for the earliest exist- ing treatise (1567) on English pronunciation, claims 'diuer- sitie of pronounciation ' for c in certain words, such as ' bere^ beer or bear, ' pere,' peer or pear, ' hele,' heel or heal, and ' mele,' ground corn or portion ; and yet without cither authority or argunioit, Mr. Ellis affirms that e was always (e) in Chaucer ! Just so Salesbury distinctly admits two sounds of o : Mr. Ellis allows Chaucer only one. 100 That the words of the former class in each case were sounded with (ii), is proved first and chiefly by the evi- in the former dcncc of our dialccts ; secondly, by the exis- of all the^e pairs ^^^^^ ^^ ^.j^^ /jx j^^ ^^ ^^^^^ j^^ ^j^^ FrCnch of classes the ^ ' ' souna w,s(ii>. form of the word; and thirdly, by some con- siderable amount of evidence which Holland and Germany afford, as shown in 82 and 83. In the second j^jjj- ^^\^^<^ about the (c) cLiss ? That they class of each of . , , . these I'airs the Were souiidcd wjtli {cc) OX (eei) I do not for a vowel was not jyiomcnt bcHeve, except some words in -esc. (lcse (Fr. plaisier), with dis- plcsc ; r . / -x , (ii) into (ai). languages to change (n) into (ai) .? Many scholars suppose that in High German, Dutch, and En- glish, the (ai) is simply a modern substitute for a more ancient (ii). The mode of writing in Early German, Low and High, favours this view; for the symbol was commonly i, and throughout modern Europe, England alone excepted, this stands for (i) ; and it is supposed always to have done so. Now let us see what this theory involves. First, it involves the assumption that in far remote anti- quity there was some one mother tongue from which alike the Teutonic and the Classic languages we need not climb still higher up the family tree were derived ; and so long as it existed all words that we now sound with (ai) wine^ for instance had (ii). It is sufficient to say that this assumption, however plausible, rests on no foundation of history or tradition. The one ray of light which the Mosaic records shed upon it (Gen. xi. 7) seems to make it doubtful. But this is treading on v^ery slippery ground. Secondly, it assumes that both Celts and Scandinavians in the north and the Latin and Hellenic races in the south persistently adhered to the (ii), and their (wiin) or (viin) remained and remains immutable. Thirdly, that during long centuries and whole millennia the Teutons too tcndcucy notwithstanding persevered with (wiin), until they learnt to write, adopting the Roman alphabet. Fourthly, that the Latin / was alwa}'s (ii), which is not certain, and can only be maintained by precisely such argu- ments as would prove the English / to have been ahva}-s the symbol of (oi). I'ifthly, that after the Teutonic tribes had received the Roman alphabet post Jtoc, x\ot propter Jwc some of them, owing to this most curious tendenc}-, came, at some period 8o ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ I 1 1 during the early middle ages, to change (ii) into (ai) : (wiin) no longer, but (wain). Yet only some of the Teutons made this change: most of the Hollanders, the Frisians, and the peasantry who speak the Platt-Deutsch, retain (ii). And all this is to be assumed in spite of the fact that there has been no such manifestation of the tendency in question since that period. After thousands of years during which it lay dormant, it came with a sudden and unaccountable gush, and has from that time sunk into torpor equally profound. For I hold it proved by the reasoning in the last few pages that there was a large class of (ii) words in Chaucer not written with i but ^ which have continued the same for at least the last hundred years. Nor is there now any prevailing tendency, either in England, Holland, or Germany, to change (ii) into (ai). I do not mean that you may not find in some outlying districts a habit, purely local, of mispronouncing certain sounds, and in particular of mispronouncing (ii) in a manner approaching (ai), for this I admit as fully estab- lished ; but as to the general speech of the people all over England, our we, she, deem, seem, queen, betray not the slightest inclination to become (wai), (shai), (daim), &c. ; nor the German l^ied, ticf, Thicr, or the Dutch lied, diep, dier, to become (laid), &c. We all have Teutonic mouths, and can judge each for himself whether we can detect in ourselves any such tendency. Mere intermittent and partial tendencies cannot but be regarded with suspicion : if there really existed any such bias in the Teutonic mouth, why should it be exhibited in North Holland and not in Brabant .'' why in politer Hoch- Deutsch, and not in the Platt-Deutsch of the peasantry of the same district } 111 Finding this theory so unsatisfactory, I should prefer to suppose that the first divergence of the (ii) and the (ai) Another view divisions of the Teutonic race as to this par- suggested as to . the use of /. ticular of spccch is not to be assigned to mediaeval times, but is lost in the mists of far antiquity, and that the Latin i, when it is adopted to write these (ai) IN MCESO-GOTHIC. 8l languages though I would not affirm with Lipsius that its proper sound was (si) yet had, or to Teutonic ears seemed to have, in the northern part of the empire,* besides the pure sound of (ii), at least in certain words or in certain mouths, a more or less perfect diphthongal sound approach- ing! that of (3i), so that it was capable of being used by- different tribes as the symbol of different sounds. In Ulphilas's Moeso-Gothic version of the gospels, we find most commonly ei substituted for i in proper names, as in Teibairius,t Seimon, Daweid, Peilatus, Paiaufeilu, Aileisabai]?, jaeirus, Befsaeida, Galeilaia, and in many other borrowed words, as Helei Helei, Talei))a Kumei, rabbei, rabbannci, &c. At first sight one might be dis- posed to ascribe this simply to itacism ; but while Ulphilas doubtless stood in close relation to the Greek churches and their civilization, he also knew and wrote in Latin, and his alphabet, like his nominatives in -us, the h in such forms as Abraham, JoJiannes, Bc\lahaivi, is derived as much from the Latin as the Greek (witness his Latin Y, S, and H, and disuse of the Greek 0) ; and it seems probable therefore tliat he decided to use the i only for the pure sou ;d of (i) or (ii) which was common to Greek and Latin, as in Christus, Filippus, Gabriel, Didimus, employ- ing ci for the long diphthongal sound. We thus seem to find an (oi), or a sound Closely reseni- * As also in I,oml)ardy ; for I tliiiik we are forced to tliis conclusion by the remarkable statement of Sir Thomas .Smith quoted in the foot noteon p. iS su/>7-a. f It is obvious to remark that probably no two languages have i^recisely tlie same systems of sjioken vowels. I'lcnch and l\nglish for instance have scarcely or shall I say, ;/('/-- a single vowel-sound in common. Not lo men- tion the h'rench , ru, -r. iSr-r., m I''rench the vowel-sounds of our sit, sij^ht, not, note, nut, wall, na;^', are unknown ; while our (ii) of ni,\in is a fuller, and not merely a longer sound th.Tn that in the I'lench tiiint', nor (unless my ear deceive.^ me) is the hrench a absolutely identical with our (/ in father, theii su. (.See also Inot noli' i)ii \^ 70.) J The (// stands for (ee) 01 (<() be\i>iid all re.isiuiable dmdit : see \ I 13 ; and the '!u f )r (o), see ^^ 1 12. ( ; 82 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ I 1 1 bling it, in the earliest written German that is extant ; while the same or a similar sound was written i or / in England, and probably in at least 07te word in Moeso-Gothic, bi. Germ, bei, Du. bij., A.S. big. This (ai), as being in the spoken language of those por- tions of the German race alike in Germany and in Holland which were endowed with the greatest intellectual or destined to achieve the highest political power, has become dominant and extended its rule with the spread of educa- tion, while the (ii), which survives in Platt-Deutsch and Flemish, has been abandoned to the inferior classes, amongst whom education and the far-reaching influence of fashion are fast stamping it out. The Moeso-Gothic mode of writing the diphthong was not generally adopted till about the fifteenth century, the reason being simply that the rest of the Teutonic natiofis received both their religion and their mode of writing not from the East but from the West, not from Greek but Latin sources ; and while diphthongs abound in Greek, they are but little used in Latin. While therefore nothing could be more natural than for Ulphilas, or the yet earlier missionary who first wrote Gothic, to use the diphthongs at his disposal to express in letters partly derived from the Greek the sounds of his native tongue, nothing was less to be expected than that those in the West who under similar circumstances employed an alphabet entirely derived from the Latin should make a similar use of it. It scarcely occurs to us now-a-days that it was a real stroke of genius, a great philological feat, to invent a diphthong, especially when the compound sound is somewhat difficult to analyse. But Ulphilas's ei having at last come into more general use, this change of spelling has been commonly assumed to be an unfailing indication of a change of sound. A fallacious argument, as I believe ; but even that cannot be alleged in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Early English. The change of pronunciation in German and Dutch being supposed to be sufficiently proved by the change of spelling, a like change of pronunciation is then assumed to have 112] (9U) IN MCESO-GOTHIC. 83 taken place in English also, where there has been no change of spelling. I think the evidence quite unsatisfactory in each case. And how were the bishops and missionaries who first 112 Last words taught the Goths, the Allemans, or our Saxon about (3u). sires the art of writing, to deal with (au), sup- posing that sound to have been in use, as I believe it was, side by side with (uu) .-' Here not even Ulphilas had materials ready to his hand. Nay, I shall be told, he had an, which the modern Germans actually employ. True, Ulphilas had an, but it had a different sound to him. He found in it a fitting representative of the Greek o. He had no symbol for (au). Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, when their turn came two centuries later, were in the same predicament. Both did the best they could with the appliances within their reach : they used the symbol that came nearest as they thought, namely, u; the Anglo-Saxons simply adding (not perhaps at first,* but in course of time) a diacritic mark, . It is not reasonable to expect them to have done other- wise. Moreover, neither Ulphilas nor Augustine would have been likely to find among his colleagues men who would readily adopt a symbol to which they were unac- customed. Even now any chaiije in our mode of spelling is not easily introduct, hoivcvvcr accomplisht ?iv\<\ persuasive the writers who employ it ; and probably Mr. Fry iz not very sanguin az to Jiiz chances of success with dhe, dJiat, euiejf, ganz, &c.; still less likely is it that scholars will be able to bring about the general adoption of any new letter or digraph, or even to restore a letter that was once in familiar use, as \. However evident to philologists the advantages may be, they are not evident but to the few, and t)ur conservative instincts rise in fierce rebellion against such cluDigcs. Just so in those early times, aii}' novelty in spelling or in the use of alphabetic signs would be very * I may have boon in ciior in assoitini; [\ .^5 supra) that tlic accents in .V.S. "appear even in the carhrst MSS. we pi)s>es>. ;" fir in the Cotton MS., fioin wliieh Mr. Sweet is pvil'lisliiiii.; his ailiniraMe eililion of (Ire^ory's I'a^toral l^'jiistles, there ajipear to be nn-->aL;c. 84 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ II3 slowly adopted, and it should excite no surprise if even centuries elapsed before ou, au, uy, etc., were invented and accepted, there being a general acquiescence in a simpler though more imperfect representation of the sound. And now to return to AI words. 113 It is a theory that very obviously suggests itself, though not therefore necessarily a sound one, that any vowel- is ai properly digraph must originally stand for the sound (a)-i-(i)? compounded of the two simple sounds repre- sented. But be this theory true or false, it is not applicable in the case of our derived alphabetic systems. Ulphilas adopted vowel-digraphs already in use, and his ai was simply the Greek at transferred to the service of the Gothic tongue. And what sound did at represent } Not (ai) but (ee) or {ee). In modern Greek at and c are pronounced alike, " a little longer than the first e in veneration : further, a in mate, without the vanishing sound, expresses it almost exactly : " says Sophocles ; and the codices Alexandrinus and Sinaiticus, by such forms as (f)o(3r]6r]Tai (for -re), avaf^evayv (for -ySatvcov), upocroXvixeLT (for -Tat), MaKatSovta, &c., which are of very frequent occurrence, demonstrate the approximate if not entire identity of the sounds belonging to these symbols even earlier than the age of Ulphilas. The Greek moreover was equivalent in quality- I say nothing of quantity to the e in Latin, which universal tradition makes (e). We may therefore confidently conclude that the Gothic ains, aips, braids, are identical in sound as well as in sense with the Dutch een, ced, breed, and the Gothic air\a, bairgan, bairgs, wair\ai]), with the German Erde, bergen, Berg, zuerdet, and so on. In like manner it is highly improbable that ei in Moeso- Gothic was used for (ee) + (i). Ai was (ee) or {ee), and the nice distinction between the a of mate with or without the vanishing sound was not likely to be observed when this branch of philological study was in its very infancy; just as Mr. Bell (as above quoted) points out that "the di[)h- thongal quality of the English a will not at first be admitted by every reader " even when his attention is called to it. I 15] 'El' WORDS. 85 114 Two classes of ^]^q casc is different with the symbol ei as ei words in Old -, 1 1 i^ 1 1 High German, uscd 111 wcstem liuropc, vvhcthcr in lingland or Holland, in France or in Iceland, or on the Rhine. This ci was derived from the Latin, in which tongue it was never equivalent to ,* and, being rare, it is all the more likely to have been employed for the compound sound which it would at once suggest to the eye. If so, we have a large number of words r/;/, stehi, lcitc7i, -kcit, &c., a totally different set from those given in 13 which have certainly undergone a change : these were sounded with (eei), {cc\), or some such sound, which is now (ai). When therefore we find in Old High German writings of the eighth century / and ci side by side in classes of words which arc now both sounded with (oi), I believe the former of these .symbols to have stood for a diphthong which was nearly (oi), the latter for a diphthong which was nearly (eei), which is strong!)- confirmed !)) tlic fact that in Mcjeso- Ciothic (which the V'ocal^ular)' of St. (jall of the 7th cent, seems to follow) u ords of the latter class as a rule have ai, which we have seen was ccrtainl)- (ee) or (cc): the former was nearly (;ea,') + (i), the latter nearly (ce) 4- (i); and these sounds being so near one another accounts for their having in course of ages run into one another, just as I shall show further on that the marked distinction between two classes of rr^' words in English became wholl}- obliterated between the times of Chaucer and the I'^lizabethan poets. Hut to admit that a change of tin's kind has taken place is a very ditferent thing from belie\'ing, in spite of impor- tant facts which contradict the belief, that in the Teutonic tribes there is a uni\ersal tendency to change (ii) into (oi). lie The short c in Chaucer 1 and the unaccented c in A.S. riic -iH.ri , ill ^ believe Ui haxe been short (e); not merely (.iiaucLT u. (.J . howex'cr on the ground of such vx-iy slender * Tlic proofs are, 1st, tliat n in ( ircik words always Lccainc [ or ; in Latin; and 2iul, that the Latin i7 lieeame )/i' inCoeek. as in Ud/irrj/niC, KoKd-iyior, 'Aioi'A ;;ia. t It will l)e liorne in mind tli.it many words iiave a slmrt vowel now wliieli bad not in I'.arly Ln^lish, and viee \ c r.>a, as ,//,/ (iindi, de\ il (ir, wairon, wrl-t, hwr^t, h.ner, mrjd, l.jn, mrL-nan, clren ; beam, read, heap, dream, bread, leaf, lead, dead ; beran, bera, derian, werian, brecan, sprecan, wrecan, swerian, &c. All these have the same vowel e in Chaucer. J J9 AW or Au was Tradition gives us the sound of (a) in a con- sent.' siderable number of words, most of which are spelt with an or azv. Mr. Ellis, fixing his eye as usual on the symbol, sees two written letters, and, as " the ortho- graphy shows the sound," infers that two vowels were pronounced. But surely there is no very gross improba- bility in the supposition that our Anglo-Saxon and Early English ancestors possessed the simple sound in those words in which we have it ; and that the spoken language has varied but little, while the written language has varied much amidst the throes and convulsions of a )'ct unsettled orthography ; and that when the written an first became common in English, the novelty was only in the mode of representing a sound which itself \\'as as old as the lan- guage. And the almost uniform evidence of tradition points strongly to this conclusion. All our dialects have a simple sound in these words, either (a) or a vowel very near (a) ; and not one of them, I believe, has a diphthong. But what of the grammarians to whom Mr. Ellis appeals } Well, the 1 6th and i/th century authorities quoted b)- Mr. Ellis to prove that an v/as a diphthong seem to me to prove precisely the reverse. 120 Gifs authority Gil's Statements (1621) about all the v^owels not adverse. ^j-^ intelligible from beginning to end on the simple supposition that he pronounced his vowels just as we I20] GIL ON 'AU.' 89 do now, except only that ii was not as a rule (a) but (u), and that words now written with ca were perhaps still pro- nounced with (ee).* Many dififerences in individual words there were undoubtedly, as 7ione was then (noon), once (oons), true (trjuu), malady (maladai), and so on ; but no other in any large class of words. Gil thus read is easy to understand : as interpreted by Mr. Ellis, his language is more mysterious than the Egyptian hieroglyphics ; though he has not, it is true, formally distinguished the short (a) from (ai), nor the German {aa) from (aa) ; and he seems to have had a trick of appending (u) to the one (.'*) word azue. There is little difficulty in all his work except to one who imports it, coming with a fixed resolve to make En- glish in its earlier stages something very different from what it is now. And as to au, he says expressly of lanu and paiin : " Ubi adverte ati nihil diffcrre ab a," that is, from the a of ta/l."^ * I do not feel sure of this, because about half a century later (1685) Cooper so clearly gives tlie sound of (ii) at least to one word apparently a typical word of tliis class, namely, zi.h\in. And here observe how readily intelhgible Cooper's statements are as to the (ii) sounds, if you simply give him the benefit of a nineteenth century interpretation. He says for instance that the sound of 7 in tiie French firivih-gc and the German tvidcr is that wliich you liave in ft male, wean, gravity, deccivt-. And again he says: "/ (juiescit in adieu, con- criv, dccei~>, cither, friend, neither^ Nothing can be clearer, unless you are determined to misunderstand. t Here are a few lists wliicli I have made of words in Gil's ortliography, ilhistrati\e of his " vocales ijuinque, omnes plurisouK," with my interpretation added. 1. Typical word talou : bark, wrath, tliank, bad, water, was (also waz), lialh, arm, chau^ ( chan:;e\ ar, ba5 ( = badge), blak, kap, mari, liarkn, clians, ax, glas, an;_;er, ?at, hand, az, man, harsh, mareliant. Hall ( = Henri- culus), hav, part, star, slarv, faiSer (also fiiSer), gader, wash, land : = (aa), (a), (lex), or (a-). 2. Typical word tiil [i.e. tale) : wiist, siim, cliiist, shav, hatful, komprir, la/i, fiiSer (also faSer), mak, hiivn, pliis, liiil ( == drag), skid, mid, iiker, liim, kiim, hit, piitiens, griisious, stalli, oulrii/., Iddi, stav/., bas, dii/, ( ;= daz/lc), aniii/, foundiision : ii = (ee) fir {ee). 3. Typical word A// [i.e. tall) : walk, wal, fill, "dSoh, tiilk, k.al, advans, mort.il, roial, prodigi'd, strilu, (also stra}, drd, denj.-il, bal (n.), bal (vb.), hal (n.): u--[.\\). 4. 'i'ypical woi'd net: wel (n.\ them, best, wet, lent, whet, cheri, thens, pcni, \iens, end, heil, welth, brest : <.' = (e). 90 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 121 121 BuUokar, Hart, Bullokar (1580) confiriTis this, making an to Smith, Saks represent the same sound as a in certain cases, bury, and Pals- ^ grave, on au. aS aill, UUm, aUH. As to Hart (1569), we cannot know with sufficient cer- tainty what sound " the Dutch " gave to their au, nor how accurate an observer he may have been of the sounds of foreign tongues. As to Smith (1568), Mr. ElHs has utterly misunderstood his expression when he speaks of " tanta soni commutatio." Smith is alluding to the sound of au as a^ (before vowels or sonants) or a(^ (before surds) as in modern Greek ! That was the modern corruption (at least so supposed) against which Smith and Cheke fought so vigorously and success- fully.* Mr. Ellis's conclusion " So that his au was certainly (au)" is in no degree warranted by Smith's language. 5. Typical word nit (i.e. neat) : deth, lievn, perch, bred, prech, ech, indevor, best ( = beast), lef, zel, egl, ez, et, gret (magnus), neuer, brek, pleze, ^er, lerned, insted : (?=(ee) or {ee), etymological reasons alone, I suspect, causing these words to be written with e rather than a. 6. Typical word win : bri3 ( == bridge), skil, kin, mil, thik, quins, thistl, children, liv, which, witnes, Ingland, king, wimen, with, kis, prins : i = {i). 7. Typical word win (i e. ween) : hi, <5i, ttii, y'l, tu si, hw'i'l (sive huil), chastiti, kin, si'm, bi (vb. ), shi'ld, pipl, quin, ch'n<, bif, ship ; i = (ii) or (ii). 8. Typical word ay' (i.e. wine): mjn, Ijf, enemj, euerj, adulter], wjf, fjn, swjn, twjs, tjm, chjld, wrjt, kjn, aerj, sjlent, bisjd, qujt, wjz, kaitjv, eksidinglj, ^jself, bj, opnlj : j = (ai). 9. Typical word /y// ; hors, klok, not, box, ornament, onnor, long, strong, sorro, born, flok, skorn, shok, soft, blok, ox, oxn, foli, rod : o = (o). 10. Typical word poi (i.e. pole) : yok, brod, abroad, gold, holi, holsum, kol, bost, glori, hiJp, ros (n.), horn, on (unus), 6ns ( = once), hoz, ok, trou (vb. ), skor : o = (oo) or (oo). 11. Typical word vz {i.e. use, vb.) : pvr, trv, yvth, rvl, svr (certus), de- mvrlj, natvr, hvz, Jvlins, virtv, endvr : 7/ ^= (Juu). 12. Typical word zts : wud, wul, wuman, wurd, bruSer, 5U3 (judex), put, wur^i, gud, trubl, muni, hurt, dung, duzn, bush, luv, Lundon, tung, punish : =(u). 13. Typical word iiz (i.e. ooze) : miin, niin, tii (duo), spiin, miisik, miiv, biik, shiild, dii, yii : ii = (uu). 14. Gil writes dispair rh. w. fair, which is elsewhere fair, faier, and faier ; al.so aier (n), dai, strai, retain, restrain, swain, disdain : Hi or ai = {ee). * So Butler condemns the sound of eu as taken from the Byzantine pronun- ciation of sv : "Therefore they err grossly that for Eunuke [i.e. eunuch] say Evnuke, for Eutykus, Evtykus." (In modern Greek /3 almost = the Engl, v.) I2l] "AU" WORDS. 91 Salesbury again {1547) shows that aw had the sound of a in balde, ball, wall* Were these words really sounded (bauld), (haul), (waul), as Mr. Ellis tells us } It is hard to reconcile such a supposition with the teachings of etymo- logy. Wall is the A.S. weall or wall, O. Du. and Flem. walk, Ger. Wall, Lat. vallicm, Dev. (waal), Northumb. (waeail), and so on : where is there a trace in any of these of an almost distinct syllable (u) which thrust itself in for a time only to be ejected with ignominy after a brief usurpation .-' Lastly, Palsgrave (1530), the earliest authority to whom we can appeal, uses an to express the a of the French cJiavibrc, taut, quant, &c. Are we then seriously to be told that the French descendants of the Latin camc7'a, tantiis, quantus, &c. at one time admitted an almost distinct sylla- ble (u) after the (a), and that it has again disappeared } It is certain that the a in those French words approaches our an (a), and even now there are books which teach English learners so to sound it. The case of French words of Latin derivation in which al was followed by another consonant differs widely from that of diambir, &c. Such words are the modern repre- sentatives o( al'q/a's, alt us, alt are, alter, calaariinii,calefacere, calx, falco, falx, saltarc. Here we have abundant evidence of an intruder a usurper rather. The / first assumes an ill -defined introductory sound or glide, as in the Dev. (sk(L-o_Nil) for (skuul) above remarked on, 79 ; then this glide dcvelopes into a full (u) or (o), as in aulcuu, aultre, aultel ; next the (o) drives out the /, as is shown in the Mcigret's aotre, loyaos, faote ; and finally this (o) absorbs tlie (a), as in the modern pronunciation of autre, Sp. otro. Port, outro, S:c. There is no evidence of a similar insertion before ni or ;/. Only when the ;// or // is final, and is then (through Celtic influence, as I have elsewhere remarked) Acconliiij^ lo the ^ranunarians a used to be ]>r()nounce(l a-^ au before Ik, If, Im, fi(-, and frd. As to -lu/xi; (lil tjives ihaiii^t (unless his ihain is sinijily a niis])rint for chiiii)) with llic same vowel as arm, .i.-'/rt.r, at, &c. : Butler pro- nounces the (7 as (7/ in this word, as we do now, adding that it is still calleil f/iaufti^e in the Not tii in common with s/njuni;,; autis^el, dauu^^cr, >S:c. 92 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 122 pronounced much like the Sanscrit anuszvdra, the vowel is modified from (a) into (a), or nearly that ; but there is no insertion of an adscititious vowel, either (u) or any other. 122 AS- s reasons for hoJdmg that the A.S. unaccented ce, e, and / or, in late A.S., jf, were (ae), (e), and {i). To his conclusions however I assent, and for this reason, that in the great majority of words that were written with these vowels, an almost unvarying tra- dition gives those sounds. For example, (slinesse, appel, cesc, cesce, cet (prep.), (sx, bcec, bceiid, cceppe, clceniian, &c., are all pronounced, as has been already pointed out in regard to some of them, in modern English (ae) ; though <2g has changed ce into (e) ; cefter, b(E%, blcest, crceft, into (aa) ; and bl(2d into {ee) unless indeed the true form was bleed, or, as seems not unlikely, the two bleed and bleed existed side by side, and the latter alone has survived. So bedd, belcettan, bell, belt, bene, bendan, beria, betera, betst, bletsian, cempa, Cent, cetel, cwellan, &c. are sounded with (e) ; and many of the continental kinsmen of these words have the same sound, as Icel. bed, Dan. bed, Du. bed, Ger. Bett, and so on. And again, bicce, biddan, bil, bin, bisceop, bitter, blis, bringan, cicen, cinn, clif, clingan, clyppan, cnyt- tan, crib, cwic, cyn, cyning, cyssan, &c., are sounded with (/) ; though cild* has become (tshsaild), and climan is now * Or should it not be did? The vowel is long in the singular in the Or- mulum, and short in the plural, just as at present. Since this sentence, and indeed the whole essay, was written, Mr. Furnivail has called my attention to an interesting and carefully-written paper on this subject in the Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1871. It is " On English Vowel Quantity in the Thirteenth Century and in the Nine- teenth," by the late Mr. James Hadley (obiit 1872), Professor of Greek in Yale College. No careful reader of the Ormulum will be surprised to find that Mr. Hadley's conclusion is " that in the great majority of cases the vowels which had a long sound six hundred years ago are long now, those which had a short sound then are short now." My contention is that, as a general rule, our vowels have remained unchanged in quantity and quality alike. Combine Mr. Ellis's view with the result of Professor Hadley's inves- tigations, and you are forced to believe as to the long vowels that a whole series of forcilily pronounced sounds has undergone a simultaneous change into another widely different series of sounds equally forcibly pronounced. 125] SHORT 'A.' 93 (kbim), but in provincial English (kh'm) still. Here again our conclusion is fortified by Icel. bitur, Da. bitter, Svv. bitter, Du. bitter, PL D. bitter, Ger. bitter, &c. &c. 123 A.s. a short Sliort a in Anglo-Saxon was also probably = (=*) (a),* though that sound has now almost died out except before r and in provincial English. It may however often be heard in Devonshire, as in (kandl), (man), &c., where the politer pronunciation gives (a;). 124 .,., , . That ^was not very remote from c is shown I he sounds oi (C J ^ . and e very near by thc numcrous by-forms such as f(Est /est, modern' pmnun'^ cBftt'r cftcv, Iiceu kcH, stcBppau stcppttH. Instanccs elation of /^. ^j-g i^Qt numcrous in which only a form in ce having existed (so far as is known) in A.S., this ( has become (e) in modern English. Such however are cBg = Q^^, lass = less (on which sec below) and cEt = ate, wdien this is pronounced, as commonly, (et) ; but when pronounced {ccf), this is properly the plural from d'toi : (et) and {ecX.) really differ just as sang; and sung. 125 Chaucer's short Aud as to thc short cof Chaucer. Mr. Ellis, e : lessf, lasse ; . i 1 r i /,/?<-, /a/u. rcasonmg as elsewhere irom the exception rather than the rule, finds the double forms /esse lassc, Icfte laftc, and thinks (p. 263) these "indicate that c short was occasionally pronounced as broadly as (a)." He adds, " Perhaps the e was generally broad, as (e) rather than (e)." Strange that he docs not perceive that while almost every word with thc short c in Chaucer (bed, reck, -ness, leg, &c.) had the short c in the earlier A.S. or O.N. form (bed, recc, -nes, leggr, &c.), and has it still, these two words had not the same vowel in A.S., but cc hcssa, hefdc. In Chaucer's time thc transition from (a^ai) or (<'e) to (e) was yet incom- plete. Lcessa and hefdc have now in fact undergone pre- cisely the same change as cet into (ct), and unet into (wet) ; One would surely inini^itic tli.il energy of tone would tend to produce perma- nence of character in the ^ound. * Or ((/) ; but I will not follow Mr. I'.llis in the chimerical attempt, on mere conjecture, to mark such minute distinctions in the s])eech of men who lived a thousand years a_L;o. l)oui)tless words then as now were slii^htly dilTerent in different mouths, even when the sound was supjiosed to he the same. 94 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 26 but in Chaucer's time the old form and the new apparently- coexisted, just as the English die coexisted with the O.N. dey, and parde with pardy. But they furnish not the shadow of an argument for a broad sound of the e in words which had not the d or ce in A.S. As to the unaccented final e in Chaucer, I may venture 126 The final e ^o repeat here what I have said in the Fore- when sounded, word to my edition of Grosseteste's Castel off Loue, page v. : " My theory is that whenever the final e represents a final syllable in Anglo-Saxon [or Old Norse or French], it may not imcst be sounded. See notes on 11. 32, 331, and 830, and Glossary s. vv. Drihte, Bo\e, lVi])oute." But the question remains whether the precise sound of this -e in Chaucer was that of the final e in French, or in Ger- man, or was like our -y in many, happy, &c., or what it was. iQ-y Finals not (ii), Assumiug that the final accented e in Chau- norO). cer is proved to have been (ii), for I hope some at least of my readers will have been so convinced the first question that now suggests itself is whether the unaccented e might not have been the same, or at least a close approximation to it; so that we might take it to be the (i) which we now write as a final j^. There is this difficulty: Chaucer's final c was often dropped, especially before an initial vowel in the next word, and {i) seems to be too sharp a sound to be easily so elided. But a weightier objec- tion is this : that final ^ in a large number of cases stands for -en, and there is no reason to believe that this was ever (iin). On the contrary, the Ormulum makes it clear that the vowel in this termination, as also in -cs, -est, -etti, -ed, -e7', -ness, was short. Ormin's spelling is enngless, angels, findesst, ^ndiQ.?X,finde\\, ^ndQXh, fullhtredd, baptized, faderr, father, halihnesse, holiness; and so diiso findenn, to find, zve lufenn, we love, biforenn, before, zvi\\iUenn, without, and so on. 128 Final ^'^'""'' '"''' As to A.S., the short final c in inflexions (ic probably (c.) lufige, to cy^aiHic, hine sclfne, &c.) not being liable to elision in that earlier stage of the language, we Hut in fact, as tlie older forms show, ^iiv/I) and (dcv/I), like (ai'dlu) and (n.ii'dlu), arc simply corruiit pronunciations, however ^a^-hionable. 96 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 13O could not expect a change into (b), and the sound was most probably (e): not (ii), for then we should be likely to find such forms as ic Infigco, to cy'Saftneo (or with -d), and so on ; but none such, I believe, ever occur. But would not this argument prove that the A.S. he and me were short, (he) and (me).'' They may have been so. 130 ^'. ^. ^'^^. The forms inec and 7nech which occur in Caed- Saxon' with (e) ; mon may have had a short vowel like the in Early English Icelandic mik, M.G. Jfiik, Da. and Swed. mir, with (B) ; in both . ' ' . "^ ' also with (ii). and Ger. mtch ; and the final guttural being lost, the short (e) would remain. And just as Mr. Ellis believes that many (e) words these very words for ex- ample have in course of time assumed an (ii), and as beyond doubt very many have done so, these words may have undergone such a change between the ages of Cfed- mon and Chaucer. It is in fact exactly the same change as all Greek words with 77 have undergone in the process of itacizing. And yet there is no reason why older forms may not still have survived in occasional use. And so I have no difficulty in understanding the exceptional rhyme in C. T. 673, 4, where it will be observed that there is no ictus on the me That straight was comen fro the court of Rome (riurmc) Fill* loude he soong come hider loue to me (luu"vi3 tuu'me). Or (ruu'm^) (tuu'm'c) : or this may have been an imperfect rhyme. The me here is the archaic apocopated form of mec ; but the common sound nevertheless, and the only one when the ictus rested upon it, was (mii), rhyming with be (A.S. beon), three (|5re6), thee^ prosper (feon), tree (treow), free (freo), &c. And as me was apocopated, so were he, which has lost a final s or r as in the M.G. is, Lat. is, Ger. er ; thee, which is \ik in Icel., thuk in Moeso-Gothic, dich in Ger.; we, which is ver in Icel., iveis in M.G., wir in Ger. ; and a final r or s * Mr. P'urnivall writes ff: erroneously, I venture to think. The Gotliic capital ^ having a double downstroke look.s like the double letter. Why should y?// at the beginning of a line have twoys, and never otherwise? 131] FINAL 'E.' 97 appears at the end of the Icel., M.G., and Ger. equivalents for ye. All of these may therefore have been (he), (dhe), (we), (je). Suppose it so, yet all of these had before Chaucer's time submitted to the change of vowel which Mr. Ellis supposes to have occurred some centuries later. Yet not to the utter exclusion of older forms. So Chaucer rhymes sothc with to the, that is (suu'the) (tuu'dhe) or (suuthn) (tuu'dhe), or the rhyme may have been imperfect ; and elsewhere swithe with hy the ; but there is no ictus on the the in either of these ; and the use of 'a for he, as in the phrase quotJi 'a, is familiar not only in the mouth of Mrs. Quickly, but in modern provincial English. So (dliB) for thee,* (me) for me. And probably other such forms are in use. But while admitting that these pronouns may have been so sounded, the accented forms m^ and \e which occur in Caedmon (if Thorpe's edition may be trusted) point to a different conclusion. t Perhaps a thousand years ago as at present both forms existed side by side. 131 Y probably re- Many argumcutssuch for instaucc as that presented (y). wliich I havc uscd ou dyde, 53, based on derivations of words and forms might be adduced to show that J in early A.S. was akin to (u) and was probably (y), and y was probably (yy) ; while in course of time the (yy) changed into (ii) as also in both Icelandic and Greek and finally even within the A.S. period, i and y came to be used indifferently. This was evidently the case, at least in part, even when those MSS. of Gregory's Pastoral Care * TIC Song of SoLinturi (Cornw.) has, "When I shud find ///(/ outside, I wiul kiss tha ; " and Mr. Baird ^ives us the following; : " Stay wa way vLag- gins, konifn-t ma way hapjilcs." Thf Zoui^ of Zolaniin. " Here Rabin \'inch wliose haid ad zunk Look up an zcth liit wadd'n ha drunk?" Xath.in H()t;i;'s Letters, p. 57. " Deer Jan, yu hant niver zeed zawjers to druli, Zo I '11 gie thur a hinsite intoot if yu wull.'' Iliiil. p 44^ t C'ailnuin lia.-> ic al^o, whence our / (oi) ; while (/k) was pmhahly the ori- ginal of the later (M.sh) and the modern Sonier^L t^hire (t.^hr). II 98 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 32 were written which Mr. Sweet is now editing for the E.E.T. Society ; for many words are there spelt with y, in both MSS., which have no affinities to words with a radical o or u. 132 Short o. To the short o both of A.S. and of Chaucer Mr. Ellis assigns the sound of (o) ; and as I see from the top of p. 226 that this (o) is the of cross and go7ie* I am happy to be able to assent to his conclusion. He seems to me also to have proved his point as to short u as being commonly the symbol of (u) or (//). But of this more anon. 133 The sound of the long u as (ju) is now commonly re- garded as distinctively English, and this sound I believe, on the evidence of almost uniform tradition, to have been familiar in a small class of English words, though written otherwise than with the simple u ; as in treowe,\ getrywe, bled, niwe, new, heazu, iiv, iwJi, euwa, men, Loewes, &c. The uasi-diph- "^^^ ^^ ^^ exclusivcly in words of French deri- thongai u, so vation that the simple u the written symbol written, found i ., i r / \ * . i only in French HOW has this sound of (ju),I cxccpt Only words. pure, mule, and cucumber ; the first two of which being also French words may easily have adopted a French sound as more fashionable, and in some such way the ex- ceptional cucumber may probably be accounted for. Now the French sound of u is (y) ; and French pronunciation is * Distinguishing it from the o of on and odd, which he writes (d). But in fact there is no such difference between gone and on, when the latter is used adverbially (" Pray go on''^), though when on is a preposition, we do cut the sound a little shorter : that is all. Indeed sometimes gone is made quite as short as ever on is. In "He's gone on,^' is not the gone\\\ti shorter of the two ? And as to odd, the vowel is still the same, except that it is necessarily sharpened by the d, as all vowels are when followed in a close syllable by an explosive mute. t There is, I think, ample proof producible from various writers from Pals- grave to Cooper that many words which we now sound with the simple (uu), such as true, blue, rude, rule, flute, drew, dew, had formerly the quasi-diph- thongal sound, as (trjuu), (bljun), &c. X Mr. Ellis writes (iu) or (iuu), yet he makes the pronoun you (juu). Is this an oversight ? Or does he really think educated Englishmen pronounce you and u-\\\0Vi at all differently? 134] LONG 'u.' 99 unchanging, French tradition trustworthy; therefore u was (y) two, three, four, centuries ago ; therefore also our (ju) is a modern corruption : so Mr. Ellis seems to reason. 134 The French But with all defcreuce I think we have had formerly a abundant cvldence that the French -and Scots diphthongal sound. formerly sounded u as a diphthong, and that we have preserved the true sound. Baret, 1573 I quote from Mr. Ellis speaks of the Scottish u as "rather a diphthong than a vowel, being compounded of our English ^and " (p. 168). Somewhat earlier, Hart, 1569, describing the Scottish sound of gud and the French fiist (i.e. fiU)^ says expressly, " you shal find the sound of the diphthong ill* keping both the i and the ti in their proper vertu " (p. 796). He also implies (ibid.) that the pronoun yoii has the same sound, when he asks : " What difference find you betwixt the pronoun yon and ti in giici and fust f" f Smith, 1568, says the French tc "per se " was sounded like the English yeiv (p. 166). Salesbury, 1 547, writes some of these words with uzv, which, as I have elsewhere observed (see 5), every Welshman pronounces like, or as nearly as possible like, our you (juu). Then again, for I admit that sometimes and to a certain extent " the orthography shows the sound," the prevailing orthography of many of these English words has been in every age with a digraph or other compound symbol, from hu in A.S. to cw now-a-days (see p. 98 supra), including Palsgrave's complicated evn, and In his new orthography he writes usj (noun), use (vb.), abuse, you, ruJe, as ius, iuz, ijbiuz, iu, mid. t An instructive passage from Hart's book is the following ; " Now to come to the M. I saydc the French, Spanish, and Brutes, I maye adde the Scottish, doe abuse it with vs in sounde, and for onsonant, except the Brutes as is sayd : the French doc neuer sound it riglit, but usurp cu for it, the Spanyard doth often vse it right as we doe, but often also abuse it with vs : the Frencli and the Scottish in the sound of a diphthong : which keeping the vowels in their due sounds, conimeth of /, and u, (or verie neare it) is made and put togither under one breath, confounding the sounds of /, and u, togither." These words "or very near it" fully warrant the conclusion that the French and Scottish "abuse" was to make their quasi -dijilithongal u (jyy), while the English "abuse" was to sound u as (juu). This passage has, I beIie\o, been over- looked by .Mr. Ellis. II 1 ICX) ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 35 Bullokar's ey, e//, and e7f; and even words of French deriva- tion are often written with such combinations, as vertiiwes, &c., in Chaucer. 135 This quasi diph- I^ wc acccpt this mass of direct and positive thong was com- evidcncc for a diphthongal sound as represented p'sedofthesame , , , , . -.^ , j <- i,j_* i elements as our by the symbol u \x\ T rcnch and m bcottisn, iong(juu). ^^^ ij^ many English words, the question arises, of what elements is this diphthong compounded.? Salesbury, as I contend, gives a clear answer. And Hart distinctly affirms the antiquity and authority of "the Italian and high Dutch and Welshe pronounciation of their letters" in opposition to "our errors" (Pref. p. 5); as elsewhere he writes : " To perswade you the better that their auncient sounds are as I have sayde, I report me to all Musitians of what nations soeuer they be, for a, e, i, and o : and for u also, except the French, Scottish, and Brutes [i.e. Welsh] as is sayd." What can be clearer than that the i and u, which according to Hart make up the diphthong in question, are to be sounded as the Italians and Germans and all musicians sound them, viz. as (i) or (ii), and (u) or (uu) 1 Examples from Hart are t^^th and m^^t, instrz^ments and the French on. And surely these sounds when compounded yield the diphthong which we now hear in use and abuse. Yet, strange to say, Mr. Ellis cites Hart as a witness to the sound of u as the non-diphthongal (y) ! But again, Hart, after describing the five vowels, adds : " And holding the top of your finger between your teeth, you shall the more sensiblye feele that they are so made with your sayd in- strumentes." Can Mr. Ellis perform the feat of sounding (y) with his finger between his teeth 1 I have heard a member of our Society make the attempt, and he satisfied his own ears, but by no means mine. In fact (aa) (ee) (ii) (00) and (iuu) can be easily sounded just as Hart suggests : (yy) cannot possibly be so sounded, and this test eflect- ually excludes it from Hart's list of English vowels. I find too that Mr. Ellis believes, as I do, you to have been pronounced even in Chaucer's time just as we now sound it (Ju) or (Juu), (p. 719, 11. 720 and 728). But Hart 137] LONG 'U.' lOI writes it in. Was there then an "interregnum" between Chaucer's time and ours in which this pronoun was sounded iyy) ? The exigencies of a foregone conclusion have not often driven a man further in the direction of the utterly- absurd, than when they impelled Mr. Ellis to say (p. i68) : " Thus Hart writes : (wi did not mutsh abiuz dhem), mean- ing (wi did not mutsh abyyz dhem) as I shall hereafter transliterate his zV^." 136 Mr. Ellis's It is much to be regretted that Mr. Ellis has transliterations, not pcrccivcd how immensely his translitera- tions detract from the value of his book. Where old writers on pronunciation, who have adopted a .special orthography expressly to endeavour thereby to convey their meaning more clearly, are cited as authorities, but with Mr. Ellis's newly devised orthography substituted for their own, not only does this so far as the argumentum ex auctoritate is concerned utterly nullify the argument, which thus be- comes a mere begging of the question, but it also deprives the reader of all chance of forming an independent judg- ment by means of the passages adduced. J3y oi.jcctions to j^^^- -^yhilc I contend that the long u in words (juu from c , , , . . , chekeandSinith. of T rench derivation was sounded as a diph- thong, the startling objection occurs that the Greek v with which Chcke* identifies it "simplex est: nihil admixtum, nihil alienum, adjunctum habet;" "and it was therefore," Mr. Ellis adds, "a pure vowel, with which he identifies the English long ;/." The difiiculty is not hard to clear up. The Scottish ii has at least two sounds. In most parts of Scotland it is at present the Ercncli cii ((ccr) but api)rc.ac]i- ing the u (v}'). But in some parts it is sounded after the gutturals, as I am credibly informed, and as I believe I have myself heard it, with an interposed (j), just as the same semi-vowel is appended in Icelandic to k and o- before the so-called "weak vowels." Nt)w Cheke was writing about Greek pronunciation, not ICnglish, except incidental!}-, and * There are vi-ry few niispiints in Mr. MUis'.i hmik, hut t>n ]1. 165 for "(ii'.eeum i' somremus'' /(^'. "Gr.ecuni v soiiaimis,'' and before " ailjuiietum" Icii. "alienum ' as above. I02 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCLVTION. [ 138 the Greek v being the simple (yy), his mind dwelt only on such words as (poeoer)* and (soeoen) or (pyyr) and (syyn) for />oor and sooft. Smith and Hart were writing about English pronunciation Mr. Ellis's quotation from Smith on p. 166 is from the De recta et emendata Lingucs AngliccE Scrip- Hone and hence they naturally thought of that Scottish sound which more resembled the particular English sound they were dealing with, viz. that which included the semi- vowel, as the English yezv and the Scottish not (goeoed) or (gyyd), but (gjoeoed) or (gjyyd). Gud is the one Scottish word which Hart quotes repeatedly (see Ellis p. 796) : and we can easily understand how he may have considered the (jcece) or (jyy) a diphthongal sound. 138 Thetruesound Hart takcs the French and Scottish sounds ^ ,"'" ^[^"'^'^ to have been quite equivalent, and in his time and Scottish was ^ t- ' (jyy). that may have been the case : indeed to many ears the Scottish and French n now may seem to have the same sound, and in some parts of Scotland there may be no difference. But whatever doubt there may exist as to the exact sound of the Scottish ti, I do not suppose the French sound to have been (joece). At any rate the tradi- tional pronunciation of neuf, peut, peiiple, jeune, Sic, com- bined with their varied spelling in early authors, leads me to the conclusion that the sound of (oe) was not represented in Early French by w, but by 7/e, en, oe, and eo. Yet if u was not the sign for (oe) it may have been for (joe) ; but accepting the evidence of tradition, I think it more likely on the whole to have stood in French for (jy) or (jyy). That this French (jyy) and Scottish (jceoi) or (Jyy) was not quite the English (juu), but "verie neare it" is ad- mitted by Hart in the passage quoted in the footnote on p. 98. We pass on to EW. 139 'i"^ classes of But as thcsc sounds of (Juu), (joeoe), (jyy), EW words ac- aoproached one another very closely, it does cording to Pals- "^ ^ j j ' grave. uot sccm improbable that three or four centu- ries ago custom may have sufficiently varied even among * I do not of course mean the open sound of the I'Vench pfrtr, but the thin vowel of ;eune, approaching (yy). I40] 'EW' WORDS. 103 "the better learned" for some to have used one of these sounds in certain words, and others another, for we know that there were differences of old as to many words, just as there are now. If therefore we think we have now satisfactory reason to believe that the French u in Pals- grave's time, 1530, was (jyy), we can understand that he pronounced the words retvc (an herbe), niczv (for a hawke), clew (of threde), and trewe with this (jyy), but sounded dewe, shrewe, fezve with some different sound see Ellis's quotations, pp. 137 and 163; while yet Smith knew no such difference. Did Palsgrave imagine a difference which did not exist .'' or did it exist in his day and soon after- wards die out altogether .-' There is undoubtedly a diffi- culty about the words which it was long the habit, as it still is partially, to spell with ew : will Chaucer help us to find our way out of the labyrinth } We may at least learn something of the usage of his day. 140 There are in jj^ l-j^jg hope I havc oncc more gone through fact three such /- /- 1 -it i classes. the wholc of Chauccr, mcludmg the poems attributed to him,* taking Bell's edition, and collected all the rhymes of words of this class. The following tabular statement will exhibit them all, 202 in number. * It is between two and three years since I went through the first 12,481 lines: the rest I have done recently (September, 1872). Whether in doing the first portion I included or omitted the Cokes Tale of Gamclyn, I cannot now recollect. But it is of no importance, nor does it matter that a rhyme here and there may possibly have escaped my eye. I have no fear that any one who may go over the same ground will impugn the substantial accuracy of my statements. 104 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 140 n-jBq M MM M3jp M ; : " fpB '3M3[q M N ] M ' M3jS N ; ; 3M3jq " '. : : S}ld=3M3J ^u, ro AV3Jq}(j3AO) AV3U?1 3A\3jj(un) " : : : - t^VO VO '. f^ w M M ^r.M > c. M > JUKAjas = 3A\3l{ ; : : ^ : : : : ; jnojoo =3A\3q (^ . . r^vo 10 w M A\3U M ;i>. imt^ot^MMM ; ; 5 'avoj = 3A\3J 3M3135]UOjp - " M " 1 : qA '3M3q " ; i : H 9.V13J *" ; : " uiojsnD =A\3qj MM : : 3AV3JqS * : M M 1 M M 1 Tt- M Tj- M ' ' 3AV3q3S 3nu353a qSnH - -T^_~^7:W~rT-r\-. 3.njj " M3U34 - s 'S.WSJS " 3A\3[S M : M3JJS -uoosXui - nsiqosa M M : M " \ .': \ :: I ^ fp's 'snp : - " : ^- '"':: "^ ::::::: : anSjK - : " sni^A - : -; A\3s(jnd) - MM : : ; H M : : : : ; M : S '3A\3UI - " " : n " I 3A\3UI3J - - : TTT^ '.y.y.y:[ AV3Ul(SUEJj) cs - 3.tt3]13S :c, M " scheme . . ... shrewe . . ... thcw = custom . ... fowe . . . 1 . . howe, vb. . . i . . dronkclewc . . ! . . rewe = row, s. . . ! . . nowe . . . 1 ... hewe -^ colour . . i ... licwe =; SOI vant . . i ... (un)trcwe, adj. .... knew . .... {over)thrcw . . .... revve = pits . . .... brewc . . ... grew . . . ... blewe, adj. . . .... drew . . .... Lat.-u . . .... salewe . , (trans)mcw . remcwe mcwe, s. . (pur)sew value argue due, adj. eschiou mj'sconstrcw glewe stewe, s. . renew trmve Hugh retenue 142] 'EW' WORDS. 105 Now at the first glance it will be evident that some of these words are very exclusive in their social intercourse ; for the words sJiew, shreiu, theiv, few, hew, dronkelew, rew, keep themselves entirely to themselves. There appears at once to be some truth in Palsgrave's distinction. But let us look at the whole of these words more in detail. 141 Class I. of Class I. is of French origin. French origin. ^ Salcwc, saluc I Fr. s^alucr, O. Prov. and Span, saludar, Lat. and Ital. salutare. 2. Mcwe, transmewe, remewe : O. Fr. muer, O. Prov. and Span, mudar, Lat. and Ital. mutare. 3. Mewc, s. : O. Fr. mue, Span, and Port, muda, Ital. muta, from the same root as the verb mew : see Wedgwood. 4. Sewe, swe, and pursew, pursue : O. Fr. suer. 5. Valew, value, valu : O. Fr. valouc, s., verb valoir, part, valu. 6. Argue, argewe : Fr. arguer, Lat. arguere. 7. Due, dewe : Fr. deii, deub, du. 8. Eschieu, eschewe : O. Fr. esquiu, eschiu, eskiu, adj. ; whence the verb cschever, eschiver, esquiver. 9. Mysconstrew : Fr. construire, Lat. construere. 10. Glewe : Fr. gluz, glu, Lat. gluten. 11. Stewe : O. Fr. estuve. Mr. Wedgwood thinks stewe ^= fishpond to be a dififcrcnt word, which seems to me very doubtful. 12. Rencwe : Kelham gives rcneuf - renewed : Fr. ncuf 13. Trcw, truwc == truce : Froiss. has unes trues : modern Fr. treve. 14. Hughe, Hewe, IIuwc, Hwe: O. Fr. Iluwe, Ger. Hugo. 15. Retcnue, rctcncw : I-'r. rctcnue. 14.2 ^''''"' '^' ^ Class II. is of Anglo-Saxon origin. '^'^ Anglo - Saxon "^ , . ori>;in. I- Shewe, schcwe, sschcwe : A.S. sceawian, sceawigan, sceawigcan, &c. 2. Shrewe, schcrcwc, slicrcwe : A.S. screawa for scrcawa, judging by analogy.) 3. Thew - custom : A.S. )}l\i\v, J)cau. 4. I'^cwe : A.S. feawc. 5. Hcwc, vb. : A.S. hcawan. I06 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ I43 6. Dronkelew, dronklew, drunkelewe: from A.S. druncen, and laewa (Isbwa ?), a traitor = one who blabs secrets when intoxicated. The A.S. aew becoming ew in Chaucer finds an exact parallel in lewde from laewd, laewede, rhyming with i-thewde. 7. Rewe = row, s. : A.S. raewa (rrewa >) or rawa (rdwa .'). X43 Class in. also class III. is also of Anglo-Saxon derivation. of Anglo-Saxon / ' 1\ origin. I. New, newe, nwe : A.S. new, neow (neow i*), niwe, nyw, niow (ni6w }). 2. Hew, hewe, hwe, hue, hiew, hiewe : A.S. hiw, heow (he6w .''), heaw, hiwe, hyew, hyw, hywe, he6. 3. Hewe : A.S. hiwa. 4. Trewe (and untrewe), trwe, treu, true, trowe : A.S. treow, tryw, triw, treu, trew. 5. Knew, knewe : A.S. cne6w. 6. Threwe (and overthrewe): A.S. ))re6w is a form that does not, I believe, occur; but would be just analogous to cne6w from cnawan, seow from sawan, and ble6w from blawan. (On the primary meaning of frawan I have re- marked in the Glossary to my ed. of Grossteste's Castle of Love, s. V. Throw.) 7. Rewe, rwe, rue : A.S. hre6wan. 8. Brewe : A.S. briwan. 9. Grewe : A.S. gre6w. 10. Blewe : A.S. ble6. 11. Drewe, drew, drwe : A.S. droh. 12. Latin words in -u (Jhesu, coitu) were in the same class. 144 Now of Class L two words, " inczu for a hauke and [else- in Class I. where] gleive," are among those which Palsgrave ew = (]yy). soundcd witli the French 71, which, if the above reasoning is sound, was (jyy). This helps us to the whole class. The sound was (jyy). But there are somewhat numerous imperfect rhymes. Saleiu, mew, vb., transmew, remeiu, value, argue, my scons trew, glezv, stezv, renew, trinve, Hugh, rctcnue, rhyme only with this class : the rest offend as many as seven times in all out of twenty-eight if that is many. Palsgrave puts " rewe an herbe " also in this class ; and that is the Yx. rue, Lat. ruta. 146], 'EW' WORDS. 107 1^45 In Class II. Class 11. ill no instance rhymes with either ^; = (eu). of the others. What then was the sound ? One of these words is few, in which, among others, Mr. Ellis (p. 139) discovers in an "anxiety to give prominence to the first element." But the AS. forms all indicate that the first element was of importance ; and that first element was ed* or in one instance d, both of which I have above shown to have become (ee) by Chaucer's time. The diph- thong therefore was very probably (eu) or (eeu), much like the Essex sound for 07v, as in cow, ho7ise, (keeu), (heeus). And this is confirmed by Palsgrave's statement that the ew in dnve, shrewe, jfezue, was sounded like the Italian eu. That dew (Lat. ros) belongs to the same class, as Palsgrave makes it, is shown by the A.S. form deaw. As to rewe, a row (of which we also find the form rowe in some passages in some of the MSS., though not at the end of a verse), there seem to have existed two forms from a very early period. 146 In Class III. Then we come to Class III, with words which / = Ouu). in A.S. had eiv, iw, yw, &c. The very diversity in spelling indicates the little importance of the first ele- ment as compared with Class II.; and there seems to be no reason why we should not here accept the traditional sound of (juu). And this is confirmed by Salesbury's authority ; for this class includes the words irezoc Txnd jfes2i, which Salcsbury writes as trma and tsicsmv, and I cannot concede to Mr. Ellis, what every Welshman that I have consulted denies, that tiw would represent to a Welshman either (yy) or any sound whatever that is at all familiar to English ears, other than that of the long English ii (juu). Palsgrave puts tnic and "a clew of thredc" in the first of our Classes ; but as to the latter which finishes no line in Chaucer, the A.S. orthography clrwe would assign it a I .issunie that in sccdwian tlic accent l^elongs to the whole diphthong e,i. lUit it may ])elong only to the (/, the c .serving the puriwse of indicating the .sibilant power of the c ; then this is the fjini from which the modern sitow would he derived. I ajiprehend the word, even in .\.,S., was pronounced in two ways, as it certainly was later. See \ loS. Io8 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. J 147 place with new, hue, &c., and as to true, both the A.S. spelling and Chaucer's rhymes show that Palsgrave's pro- nunciation was faulty. The exceptions in this third Class are certainly not numerous. New forms 103 rhymes, only two of which are with the thinner u. Hue 68, all without exception with words of the same class. And so on as shown in the Table. 147 Objection from But Salcsbury presents a difficulty which Saiesbury. ^fj\\\ need carcful examination. In his Welsh representation of English sounds, he spells virtue with the same termination as true and Jesu, thus, vertuw ; though in all probability this word, being of French derivation, would rhyme with salew, value, due, &c. in Chaucer's time, and would therefore not end in (juu). Saiesbury moreover was nearly contemporary with Palsgrave, whose evidence we have just been hearing. Of course it is possible that Palsgrave's pronunciation was somewhat antiquated, and that even within half a century of his time the distinction which he observed might have become obsolete. The rhymes will no doubt help us. Here then is a second table to which the reader's attention is requested. It ex- hibits all the rhymes of this class (208 in number) that occur in Sir Philip Sidney's Poems, Heywood's Proverbs &c., and the First Book of the Faerie Queene. The words are classified according to derivation as before, except that some which refuse to drill with the rest have to be formed into an awkward squad by themselves. 147] 'EW' WORDS. 109 in o o '(Jn -a o ^ H op - qA 'Moq - s 'avos - MOU ro nouX - Avay " :m - (JEO B jo) A\3UI " anpqns - : c. M M ; M : M nsipE : : ; ; i - : AV3J3 : c, r^ : " . ::: : : i : : - A\3jp (qjiM) : : " - :..:: . : : : : : : - M3|S ; ; ; - ; qA 'MOiq noA : : ! : - : : - : N e, : : : : : : : : : : anj^fun) : : N t^ : : t^r^M " : i/i M ;<-'-" In : aniq qA 'anj A^^^>^ : : : : - : N M : : : M : : : ^. : M en f, M : m w M tt ^^ 1 : '^ : -!.:- ;:;::: : : : - : : ro : N M : ^- * ; ; : " " : : i : ; : ; ; A\3U(e) , : - ^, : ^ " " :"*-*- - : : ; H :;:;;: M3j3 : : : r^ : - - - M : : N M M M : : M M N : N I i : : : : Avajqi anq : : : " : c : - : ! ; - ; ! : i ! P N M VD - :MUDrnrnN.O ; ; ; - : - i ; ; ; ; A\.-.j .v\3qs qA 'A\nq S '.V\3p :: ^ ..:.:.:: -.1 : - * - - -- - - : - :: i ; i ;;;:: -j . " " A\3U3J i qSilH M C " " -; - ; M f :<,: M 0, : f ;'-;;;:; i i i - !::::;; -1 i : : : : : ; 1 ; : : : ! : ; M3IA : - r. - w -<*- ; N - rn rn rn : r- : : :-";: ;;;: :l 1 A\3q,1SD 'r - ^ - i -.^ ::.: . ' anpiia .-.. .]::- : !:;;-:;:!;; : 's 'oru -- -; ir:-/-\^T--r~^. :::::::::::! aujqtiii . " -' J, 1 .V\3J!i ::-::-::: 1 t nnsjnd ) ansiin snp " ; - - - : N " - __._ i ; "I !:;:::: ;| 1 s 'a\.iiu A\3UI (MIIUI) 7 2 3 i. i J B ,5 iiU rt no ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ I48 148 Palsgrave's dis- What do wc HOW discovcr ? The sharp dis- tinctions had tinction that the other Table exhibited has died out in the ... , , ... , age of Queen quitc disappeared here ; and curiously enough Eiiz.-ibeth. ^j^g ^^^(j class (dew, heiv, shew* few), which in Chaucer rhyme exclusively among themselves, do not happen to do so even once throughout these poems, but everywhere with words of the other classes. The distinc- tion which was so clear in Chaucer and familiar to Pals- grave is here entirely obliterated and forgotten, and the reasonable conclusion is that from the time of Queen Elizabeth these words have all been commonly pronounced as at the present day, though no doubt some orthoepical purists would try to fight against prevailing usage. But to judge from such authorities as those quoted by Mr. Ellis on p. 139, they contended for a distinction which etymo- logy and ancient usage alike ignored. 149 Another diffi- There remains yet one difficulty more. If cu'ty- so many of these words were sounded with a quasi-diphthong ending in (uu), and certain otter words though differently spelt had the same sound, as do, to, tivo, how comes it for it is the fact that they never rhyme with these latter .'' For in Chaucer there is not one such rhyme, and only one {you with do) in these later poems. In Chaucer this may be partly accounted for by the fact that so many words in -eiue would (or at least might) sound the final e, so that hewe could no more rhyme with do than in modern French heure could rhyme with bonheur. But this does not fully solve the problem. Anglo-Saxon verbal preterites in -eow, had no additional syllable that could be rasped and pared down into an -e, so that when -ewe in knewe, threwe, &c. was written the final e was a mere addi- tion to the eye, and never could have been sounded : at least such a corruption is in a high degree improbable. But we find in Chaucer the Latin -ic rhyming not only with knew and escJiieu, but also with hewe and treiue, with the final e ; and yet it does not rhyme with do or to. I suppose * Spenser uses this form as well as shoiu. Sidney ues the latter alone, rhyming with slow, low, grow, &c. I5l] SHORT 'U.' Ill the reason to be partly that t le first element in the quasi- diphthongal (juu) seemed to make it an overmatch for the simple (uu), and partly that the poet was not content un- less the rhyme satisfied not only the ear, but the eye, so far as the imperfectly settled orthography could satisfy it, just as Racine or Corneille will not make moi rhyme with vols or voix. 150 But is the And now to return to the question whether late introduction thc sound of (s) as represented by the short into our Ian- ^f ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ existcd in spoken English in guage? Almost _ identical with (B). Chauccr's time. The sound was probably rare then, for the grammarians, who carry us back as far as 1530, give no hint of it; yet I am not prepared to admit its non-existence. Clearly it exists now : it has come into the language at some time : the question is whether it is yet 500 years of age. It is obvious that it might be in occasional use just as we hear at times i^ft^^ called (sat), and put, foot, and many more such pronounced with (a) in pro- vincial dialects perhaps only in a few words, perhaps only among unfashionable and inexact speakers and not among "the better learned" (though any man then who could write as the Ellesmere or the Vernon MS. is written must have been among the educated men) ; and so it may have been rarer then than now : but did it exist at all in Chau- cer's time ? In the first place I claim for (9) all the arguments already adduced for a final (e), for the two sounds are so close to one another that it is doubtful whether they ought to be distinguished ; they have almost one and the same sound appearing now in an open syllable, and now in a close one, and liable therefore to be modified by the consonant fol- lowing. I shall henceforth use only (b). 151 1 his sound ex- I have above hinted that such forms as .sted in Early l^ys^,,(^yJ^^ (bolsmuf ur^d >) and rostud in Ha* Knglish ; some- y \ / > times written . offcudude \vi L., criiid \n Dr. Morris's Old Eng- In the next few paragraphs and in the specimens which follow I use E. for the Ellesmere MS., //<. for the Ilengwrt, Ca. for the Cambridge, Co. for the Corpus, P. for the Pctworth, L. for the Lansdowne, the six M.SS. used for the Six-Text Chaucer ; and Ha. for the Harleian, edited by Mr. Wriglit. 112 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 52 lish Miscellany, &c. look as if the u stood for the indistinct sound of (b) ; but this cannot be insisted on. These termi- nations may be archaic forms straight in lineal descent from the A.S. -ode and -od (as in lufode and gelufod), with the (o) turned into the kindred (u). But O.E. MSS. give us other forms not so easily disposed of : iimgus, aungelns, soiilus, synnus, as plurals ; godiis, domiis (i.e. doom's), worldus, as genitives ; ainongus^ o\ure, broudun, for amanges, o\ere, brouden ; are readily found in glancing over a few pages of the Old English Miscellany. In my edition of the Castle of Love such forms are nume- rous : goodschupe, o\ur, bro^ur, sugge ( = say), undur, aftiir, i-riid ( = advised), \2incheih ( = seemeth), hondrut, &c. These examples are enough, though the list might easily be lengthened. My argument with regard to all these words is that etymology will not account for the sound of (u), the change of (e) into (u) cannot be shown to be probable, but its change into the indistinct (b) is natural and simple to the English mouth, as hundreds (or shall I say thousands i*) of English words bear witness. 152 ^^""'""^^ ^^^ But the sound may have existed without was written with . . 1 i -it a. bemg always written with , which certainly has no special fitness for representing it. In many instances it seems to have been written with a, as so often in modern English.* The Latin y^milia shows what was the original vowel of the second syllable of Emily ; but in Chaucer the name is commonly Ernciie (em'ebi), and the second syllable having become less sharp Evialy (em'slsij results. Such is the form in Ca. continually ; and few probably will suppose that the written a was there the symbol of the broad (a) rather than the simple (b) which we still hear constantly in the mouths of careless speakers. The change in that case has been from (/) to (b), which we also have in dcstaiiy, L. and P., for destiny. So (o) may become (b), as when " o]i * E.g. toufnatnent and many more in -atiieni, privacy and others in -a(\\ spectacle and others in -acle, probable and all other hyperdis.syllabic words in -able, diaper, separate, /antamoiint, ragamn/fin, barbarous, Jerusalem, Isabella, JClizabeth, &c. &c. ; and see above \^ 128. 153] THE SOUXD OF (b). II3 Goddes name" becomes '^ a Goddes name;" (e) may be- come (t3), as when the Dutch taffeta/ gives us not only tafcta, L., but taffata, E., He., Ca., &c., and the A.S. gemang, gelang, gelie, &c. become in later times, among, along, alike, &c. ; (aa), as when all (aaI) and ofie (oon) make alone (Bloon); (u), as when Ca. gives us loisdam for wisdom, Ha. martirdam, and the Castell off Loue gives wisdatn, ^euzve- dam, and wrecchcddam, the termination -dom being akin to the Ger. -timm ; (Ju), as when Esciilapius appears in Co., P., and L., as Escalapius ; and (ce), as when sodein gives us so- danly, L., barein, bar an, L.,pnrtraitm'e,piirtrature, L. and P. 153 Reasons against j^ ^iiay naturally be asked, Why may not taking this short ' a as (a). a in all these words have stood for (a) ? I reply that there is only one sound into which all these are likely to have changed in careless speech. Cur language, like the French,* has a thousand instances of changes of more clear and definite sounds into iv): it is the vowel which is produced with least effort, and into which any of the others will degenerate through mere indolence of tongue. There is thus a sufficient reason why other vowels should become (i3), none why they should all become (a). Nor are other indications wanting that some indistinct vowel was in use then as now. Such indications are found in the various ways in which one and the same word was written. When we find marbcl, marble, marbil, marbnl ; vila}iyc, vilonye ; maladyc, maledic ; proper, proprc, propnr ; tempel, tempul, temple ; hauler, hamyr, hamnre, liamiir: the reasonable conclusion is, not that the English did then, any more than their descendants do now, pronounce malady with the first two syllables as distinct as a h^renchman does in complaining of his mal a la tete, nor that so common a material as marble, or so common a tool as a hammer, was provided with four sej)arate forms to its name ; but that as neither had any one of the five vowel-symbols, nor * Qiicm, (|uam, (jiuid, quid, &c. liavo hciome (\\w ; il-le, il-hini, il-lud, all /< ; c-1^0, ]< > aino, anial, aiuom, anu-t. all <:/n/r : clcmciitia, /.'wiv/cv , anitna, uwc,- asiiuis, (i)u, iSic. ; and i^cncrally, the -um i)|- -em of accusatives, and the -us and -a of adjectixes, have all undergone the same c'lan^e. I 114 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 54 any combination of them, yet been appropriated to this sluggish sound, and orthography was as yet quite unsettled, one man chose to write the word one way, and another another. Mr. Ellis virtually acknowledges this, to the extent at least of writing the terminations -ble, -pie, &c. as (b'l), (p'l), &c. : I prefer (bnl), (pel), and so on. This argument based on variety of spelling may, I think, 154 In Anglo-Saxon faij-jy ^g urged as to Anglo-Saxon also ; for there also (E) was ^ ,^ . , , found. too, especially before liquids, the same word is found with different written vowels. Examples are hamar, hamer, hainor ; wcorpan, wiirpan, wyrpan ; wcorc, were, wore, wiirce-a7i, ivyrc-an ; regel, regol, regid ; nd^or, nd^er, nd^cBV, naii^7^ ; niirht, viyrJv^, viurJv^;* &c. But as to Anglo-Saxon we have not sufficient materials for forming a very confident judgment. Some of these differ- ences may, it is obvious, be but dialectic varieties ; but is there any reason why dialectic variety should specially affect vowels followed by / or r ? It seems much more probable that these were only, or at least most commonly, different modes of writing the same spoken word. 155 t)i words. There remains yet one diphthong to be briefly discussed that which we have in noise, boy, oil, &c. There exists in Chaucer a small class of such words, written as now with oi or oy : were they then sounded as now .* Mr. Ellis takes this oi or oy to have been always (ui) that is the French oui in Chaucer's time ; which is the more remarkable as he supposes Englishmen of that period to have had no (i) or (ii) in their language, but only (/) or {ii).\ As to the first element, there is some reason to think it was (u) ; namely, the authority of Gil (1621), who writes thus : " u [ = (uu)] antecedit i, in 'Miint ioint iunctura ; in briiil broilc torreo ; biiil boile coquo ; in bi'ii boy index anchorarius," &c. * If I am right in supposing these three forms to have been all (nTCrth) or (mJth), we can easily suppose that the adjective which is now merry, but formerly very commonly written with u, mto-ie, liail the same vowel ; and then Chaucer's rhyme of Mcrmrif and Diur'h' is clear, each word ending in {^xi). f So that 7i'/t' would be sounded not as we now sound Tv ,;?, but as -win is sounded when jir-olonged in singing. 156] 'Ol' WORDS. 115 There are indeed two objections to this view. The first is found in certain statements of grammarians which are 156 The o in 01 apparently adverse to that of Gil. Butler (1633) probably = (u). ^^^^ . .. Q- j^^ ^^^, ^^.^ sound, as the French do, woe; bois,soit,droict,as bwoes, swoet, drwoet ;" and similarly Erasmus directs the Greek ot to be sounded like the French oi in ifioi, tot, soi,foi, loi, rot; while Meigret, Pelletier, Livet, all make the first sound in the French oi to be o. Hart, Smith, and Salcsbury, all seem to mean the same, making the diphthong nearly or quite {oi). These authorities are mostly quoted by Mr. Ellis, pp. 130 to 133. The conclusion to which they seem to point is, that the sound was a diph- thong hard to analyse, the first element of which was either (o) or (wo) or (u), and the second was cither (/) or (e). Secondly, w-e may appeal to the orthography of the MSS. of Chaucer. O sounded as (uu) is found, I think, exclu- sively in words purely English ; but it seems to stand for the short (u) in some words of French derivation, in which, ho v\ ever, it often varies in writing into 21, such as cortcis or airtcis, doscyn or duszcin, norysdie or nuryscJic, coiitrcc or cniitrcc ; and in most if not all of these the traditional pro- nunciation is with (a), which no doubt lias passed through an (u) stage. Ikit in all the oi words that I can find in our seven MSS., I find only a single instance out of hundreds where one of tlicsc oi words has //, and then it is not ni or uy : the word is puiiyant in L. alcMic, Vxo\. 352. All tlic other \vords oil, oiuiincnt, hoi I, broil t\ cloister, oyster, 7-oyal, royally, moist, point, broided, joyuant, qiiirboily, joy, noise, eJioiee, voice, &c. are spelt with oi or oy (except occa- sional by-forms such as ;rc?/ and brcided). On the other hand two considerations, when added to Gil's distinct and positive assertion, seem to overbear these objections. First, a rh\-me sucli as coy, Loy (Cant. Ta. Prol. 11. 119, 120), needs explanation; for the first syllabic of Loy in almost every form which the word has assumed Ludioig, Liidovicus, Louis, Leieis, &c. apparently contains the sound of (u) : indeed if wc ct)uld behove tliat the Il6 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. [ 1 57 modern French pronunciation of Louis is precisely what it was 500 years ago, and that the true French sound was precisely reproduced by English lips when such words were, 500 years ago, borrowed into our language, we must then conclude that Chaucer sounded his Loy with the oy ^ the modern (not oui after all, but) oii'i ; and we cannot but be- lieve that the sound approximated to this. Secondly, in several of these words a written ic remains even now, as in hnile, /mitre, nuire, boiiillir, broiiiller, gargoiiille, &c. Con- firming this, traces of the LaLin original with ?/ appear here and there in the old forms, 3.i,j2iindj-e irovajinigere, pui'jidre irova pnngere, &c. On the whole I cannot believe the sound to have been 157 The true sound exactly cithcr that of the French oui or that probably (u;) or -ri u l r -J (u4 01 our modern 01. i he balance of evidence seems to be in favour of [ui) or (ur). The second element must be (z) or (e) rather than the thinner, finer (i), for two reasons : the first, that the repeated comparison of the English sound with the French by Palsgrave and the other grammarians must be interpreted by the aid of Meigret's oe as more accurately representing the French oi, and (/') or (e) is nearer to e than {i) is ; and the second, that it can scarcely be supposed to be the long (ii), and the short (i) occurs in English in no close syllables, while both (/) and {ee) are common in final open syllables, as in sit (sit), hill (h/1), pin (pm), Jiappy (Haep'z), manly (ma^n'l/), may {mee), say (see). Perhaps also, for the first element, the true sound had the close 0. But all this is little more than conjecture, and it seems impossible to arrive at certainty. I have now touched on the principal points on which I 158 Conclusion. decHnc to accept, or care to dispute, Mr. Ellis's views : a few words in conclusion and my task is done. I fear some expressions in the preceding pages may seem to indicate a degree of confidence in the conclusions arrived at which I do not in reality entertain. On many points I certainly do feel confident : on others I am much more firmly convinced that Mr. P211is's views are unsound than that my own are unassailable. The probability cer- 158] CONCLUSION. 117 tainly is that as we are, I believe, the first explorers in this hitherto untrodden country, we both have strayed here and there into bogs and quagmires, and have neither of us fully succeeded in finding the precious nuggets and opening up the rich veins of ore which our ambition has sought. We both have been writing on Early English; yet so tempting have been the adjacent fields in which discovery seemed possible that we have ventured far beyond. And for myself the further I have ventured, the less firm the ground has seemed under my feet. I can readily imagine that the progressiv^e study of the Early German dialects may show what at present seems to me incredible that a thousand years ago the whole population would speak of (miin wiin), and then some portions only of the population came somehow to say (moin wain), while other portions, without any apparent difference of internal instinct or ten- dcnc\% or of external influence of any kind, stuck to the old sounds. In like manner I can conceive that further investigation, and in ])articular the systematic course of incjuir)- on which the ICnglish Dialect Society has entered, may show my conclusions on at least some points of A.S. pronunciation to be either doubtful or certainly incor- rect.* Possibly too even the tendency-theory, which at pre- sent I look at with grave suspicion, may be so dressed up that it cannot but be accepted. Ikit coming down to later times, where the evidence is at once so abimdant and so varied, 1 am scMiicwhat more sanguine as to the general acceptance 1)\- scIv,)K;rs of most of the \'ii.:\\-; here propounded. * I earnestly liojie our stiuleiits of ,/t.i.'cr/s will al-o l)e stiulents of iiiii.'iv/iis, and invc^tiLjale witli eare the nature not only uf ilie prcniibea from wliich they draw theii' eonelusions, hut also of the coiinexinn between llie [ireniises and the e(ineliision< iliawn. If for instance any inve>li!^ator of dialects wlin is also a strong; heliever in thi' tendency-tiieoiy shouM lii;!!! ii[)on some pruniineiation which seenrs to him to ha\c been developed from >ome other supposed eailier l)ronuncialion, let him not rush ton inconsiderately to conclusions as to ( 'haucer's I'aitjli-h or as to An;.do- Saxon. \\'h;Ue\er really can he proved, let it he jiroved by evidence adduced: let it not merely be asserted. It is very ea-y to say " Here we lia\e in the patois of iIks vi !>!i;c, a di.ilect in the \cry act of transition;" but it is not so t'a^y to f-iw.- that llie ancestor-, of tixise same \illages spoke otherwise two hundred or five hundied year, a;^o. .\nd if the Il8 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. In any case it must be allowed that Mr. Ellis's voluminous work, as an immense repertory of a certain class of facts, will always be of great value to the students of the subjects of which it treats. fact of a changed pronunciation can be really proved (as no doubt it can in some instances), there yet remains the question, What is the degree of rapidity and how can you prove the degree of rapidity with which the change has taken place ? Has it taken place in a few generations of mankind, or has it required a quasi-geological period to complete it ? While I have positive evidence that 240 years ago, as now, the word Thavus was sounded Terns, and Thomas, Tomas, and disdeigii, reign, Jlegmc, sigiie, did not sound the g so Butler (1633) informs us ; that 300 years ago the distinc- tion of the surd and sonant th was, in every word that Hart gives, exactly the same as at present; that 400 years ago hard, corrck, falmvship, frez'aly, deligent, were written forms to represent the Scotch sounds then, as they do very accurately now, of heard, correct, fello7uship, privily, diligent see above, p. 8 ; that 500 years ago England was (at least sometimes) called Ingland see below, note on 1. 16; that 800 or 1000 years ago ineny, many, mony = viulti, were forms (I speak of the first syllable) that existed side by side see Bosworth ^just as in England, Ireland, and Scotland they do now ; I cannot but look with suspicion on any theory which represents our language, or any language, as in such a furious state of ebullition and fermentation that, could our great grandfathers start up from their graves, we and they would scarcely be able to understand one another's speech. That language does undergo changes no man in his senses can doubt ; but, so far as the eiddence goes, the change, in my judgment, resembles, not some violent chemical action, but rather the gradual and slow disintegration of the limestone or the granite of the everlasting hills. APPENDIX, 119 APPENDIX, It seems desirable to add a passage or two from the Canterbury Tales, by way of specimen of the manner in which I suppose the English of Chaucer to have been pronounced. But besides the general inquiry what sound or sounds were usually represented by each letter in Early English, this whole investigation is, as elsewhere remarked, to a great extent the study of individual words ; and it will therefore be necessary to inquire with some degree of minuteness concerning a good many words whence they came, what various forms they have possessed in our lan- guage and in others, and what sounds writers later than Chaucer have assigned to them, thus to determine, if pos- sible, how each one was sounded both by itself and in contact with others (a distinction of which Mr. Ellis has quite lost sight): this I have attempted to do in the foot notes. I20 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury. YY/ han that Aprilk with hise schourcs soote I. It is not for the sake of differing that I differ from Mr. EUis on no fewer than twelve points in this first line ! whsen : A. S. hwivnne. There was also tlie form with a thinner vowel, hivene, but none with a. dhset : A. S. \a;t or ^cet. There is no form with a. As to the initial th, A. S. does not help us. Indeed if only one A. S. form existed, I should base no argument upon it, believing that \i and <5 were not distinguished as in Ice- landic, but only different forms of the same letter, some scribes preferring one and some the other. In Orm. we have only \>, in the Hatton MS. of Greg. Past, only i5. In this word, and in w/'dh, I follow tradition, finding no safer guide. But we can go back with certainty for three centuries at least, for Hart (1569) distinguishes the sonant th from the surd, and the distinction is, I think, without exception throughout his book precisely the same as in this 19th cen- tury : at least I have not noticed a single word that he writes with that if every <' was sounrafte laft, ymaked tiakcde. 2. dhB : compare top of p. 64 with \ 130. Palsgrave, a little more than a century after Chaucer's time, assigns to the vowel in the the sound of the Italian i (Lesclar., pp. 3 and 6). That sound it preserves to this day when the word stands alone or before a vowel ; but we sound it (dins) before a con- sonant, and this usage had probably already set in at the period when Rome (see p. 96) could be made to rhyme with to 7ne. A difficulty is presented by the fact that Hart always writes the as ^e, making no distinction whether a vowel followed or a consonant ; but the single form ^instruments is sufficient to show that the sharp (ii) might in his time even before a vowel be pronounced so obscurely that it could easily be elided, and that obscure sound will be (b). drokwht : it seems necessary to add a few remarks to what has been said in the preceding pages ( 132) on the words. Besides the two classes of o words in Chaucer dealt with in 46 to 56, there are several others, which it may be worth while to specify in detail. They are 1st, those that in Chaucer sometimes are spelt with 0, sometimes with u, as scholde, scholdre, tonge, corteis. Sec. ; 2nd, those that always have in Chaucer, but are now always pronounced with (a), as iohet, bokeler, month, yon.:;. Sec. ; 3rd, those that begin with zoo, now (wu), as 700//', ivolde, &c. ; 4th, those that begin with wo, now (wa), loonne, -worthy, &c. ; 5th, those that have in Chaucer, and have {00) now, as open, spoken, &c. ; 6th, those that have {0) now, as holt, holpen, &c. , the in these words being followed by /; 7th, those that in A. S. had a (or 0), as hond, lond, strong, &c., the in these being followed by nd or ng; 8th, those that had o in A. S., which the Orm. shows to have been short, and which is still (0) ; 9th, others with from the O.N. or French, as dog, mortel, morsel, &c. We have, however, a simpler but important division into those which can be shown in any stage to have contained an tt sound, and those which cannot. Believing that in many words stood for a long (uu), I can have no diffi- culty in believing it to have stood at times for a short (u), and that in probably all words which at any time liad (u). On the otlier hand, where tliere is no distinct evidence that a word at any time had (u), the fair conclusion is tliat Chaucer sounded it with some o sound. Now Mr. Ellis teaches that Chaucer knew only two such sounds, (o) and (00) ; and he may be right ; yet it is singular that neither of these is at present a recognized Englisli sound at all, the former being, according to Mr. Ellis's Key to Palaeotype, exemplified in the Frencli ht^mme, the second in the Italian u^mo. (It is always with the greatest reluctance and with a feeling akin to SPECIMENS. 123 dhT3 drokwht t:v maJtsh HtCth pers'ed tu dhiJ ruut, trepidation that I venture to differ from Mr. Ellis on a point of pure phonetics, for I certainly know no one whose accuracy of ear equals or approaclies his. ]{ut when on p. 226 in the sentence on which my already-printed 132 is based he claims the sound of (o) for cross and gone, this seems to me a sentence written /t^r o-^dX/ia. To my ear those words are (Kros) or (KrAs) and (gon) or (gAn), and the true Italian o aperto, either long or short, has no existence in our language.) Undoubtedly (c) or {00) is now our long English 0, as in the ordinary pronunciation of go home {'go Woova) ; and it does not follow because the early orthoepists may have ilmYAy failed to notice the differ- ence between this {o) or (00) and the French (o) or (00), as in rol>e and role, notre and notre, that there was no such difference. The sound may have been the common English sound 500 years ago, as it is at present ; and there being no evidence to the contrary, I must believe it was so. Then there is another sound of a]>pears before the of. Dv : Hurt bears witness tliat Un- more tlian tlirce centuries tlie/' in of has been (v). The word by it>elf wouhl probably be pionouiiced ("'v) ; hut jienple 124 O^ EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. And bathed euery veyne | in svvich licour Of which vcrtu | engendred is the flour Whan Zephirus eek | with his swete breeth 5 Inspired hath | in euery holt and heeth The tendre croppes | and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram | his half [e] cours yronne 500 years ago were no more likely to make a special effort to keep the open vowel on a mere particle requiring no emphasis, and with no pause before it, than we do now. We must not forget that the English of Chaucer's time was the language employed in all the familiar intercourse and rapid speech of daily life. Haeth : Mr. Ellis gives (Hath), which may be heard in the West of Eng- land ; but the A. S. hizf^ points to the still prevailing sound as also the most ancient, and therefore likely to have been the common one in Chaucer's time. 3. and : perhaps (asnd) as at present, for Bosworth gives an A. S. form cvnde, as well as the more usual and. baeaedh'ed: in Orm. we find the e of the past participle was apparently distinct and short (see 127), and such is the prevailing pronunciation at the present day; therefore also probably throughout the intervening centuries. ever^': Mr. Ellis writes evrn; but the termination seems to be the same as in the A. S. ceghwilc, in which the vowel was most probably short. bkaur: here also Mr. Ellis writes kV, but with the well marked accent on the second syllable it is far more likely according to our English mode of pro- nunciation that the first syllable would be shortened. The final r Mr. Ellis takes to have been fully trilled. That orthoepists earlier than Ben Jonson failed to notice or describe the non-vibrant r, is no proof that the sound did not exist : the art of phonologic observation was not, and could not be, per- fected all at once. National usage too, and even local usage, continues un- changed for centuries in France; for both Palsgrave and (I think, speaking from memory) Erasmus bear witness to the peculiar sound of the Parisian ;-. why must we, on mere negative evidence, assume great changes to have taken place in our Englisli pronunciation ? Vtvn : the final c elided. As to metre tliis line has a tribrach for the second foot, with the ictus on the second syllable as in Latin and Greek iambics : / . . . '. www . . .'. . . . '. . . . '. . . . '. Compare from Shakespeare, The arm'd | rhinoc'e \ ros or the Ilyrcan tiger; and from Milton, Celes I tial spir'its \ in bondage, nor th' abyss; and this with two tribrachs, Nay if \ the dei'il \ hath giv'cii \ th^-e proofs for sin Shak:spearc. 4. ve.it.iyy: there can be little doubt that the 11 tion of i/'//v from t!ic the O.N. i^^^i/') arc from the SPECIMENS. 125 and biEosdh'ed ever/ veen m sw/tsh l/kauJ", 3v wh/tsii vcJtJyy endzheirdtud h dhc flauJ ; whicn zef'/rus iik w/dh Hi'z swiifv brceth. 5 /nspair'ed Hseth m even H<7lt and heeth dhH ten'drB krop'ez, and dhn Juq"B sun Haeth in dh^ ram H/z HAlf kauus /run, French : the question therefore is virtually, was the soft ^ in Early French sounded as we now sound it in Englisli ? I believe in Early French both cA and y and the soft^ were sounded, not as (sh) and (zh) as now, but as (tsli) and (dzh), as we sound them in c/iair anil ginger. In addition to what Mr. Ellis has written (pp. 314, 315), I may refer to the Mediaeval Greek bfiar^iov for homage, and II\arftai. endzhen "du-id : for the -dred iite note on chanibi-cs, 1. 28. iz : the s in is has been sounded as z for at least three centuries teste Hart's /;. 5. On eek and si.vde as (ii) words see \\ 97 and 99; and on breeth and heeth, 1. 6, as (ee) words see 84 and lOi to 105. Of breeth Ca. gives the form breth, indicating possibly, even when that MS. was written, a tendency to shorten the vowel as it is shortened now : see top of p. 76. Breeth, as it stands, seems to represent just tlie same sounil as we now give to the word but with the vowel a little prolonged. swiifu: the linal vowel sounded because of the determinative his pre- ceding. As to the quality of the vowel as an adjective termination, the fact that it is so commonly elided before a vowel following, and, as there is reason to believe (see note on soote, 1. l), often drojiped altogether, makes ii almost certain that it could not have been a clear, sharjily-pronounced vowel. 6. Holt : A. S. holt, and the word in no stage is written with u. On nega- tive evidence tlie existing pronunciation seems likely to have been the ancient one. 7. ten'drc : all of the MS.S. here have tlie final <', which needs to be pro- nounced after tlie determiiiati\ e ///(. the word is, in fact, contracteil from tendere. Were it undeclined, it would probably be pronounced (tend'u.i) : see note on cJiaiubres, 1. 28. kr.TiJ'ez : the double/ indicates a short vowel, which before the explosive mute is most probably the same as we now sound in the word. Juq'i; : the adjective ha{ rouman, ^ic. S. ram f)r r.em : A.S. riim, roitini : yet ihe change wliicli the weird lias underijone mav have been effected bv Chaucei's lime. 126 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. And smale foweles | maken melodye That slepen al the nyght | with open eye lo So priketh hem nature in hir corages Thanne longen folk | to goon on pilgrimage [s] And Palmeres | for to seken straunge strondes To feme halvves | kowthe in sondry londes And specially | from euery shires ende 15 HAlf : Gil's /^a//" proves that at least two centuries and a half ago the a in this word was sounded as the a or aw in -walk (I give his spelling), ivdl, fdl, Idu, drd, stra, &c. ; as Butler also (1633) and Cooper (1685) teach. P. has halfe. From E Mr. Furnivall gives half[e], but the other four MSS. have no e, and I have followed their lead. If half is the true reading, it follows that Chaucer in this line allows a pause instead of the short syllable of the fourth foot, and does not always keep the final e after a detemiinative. z'run': A. S. iD-tten, Ger. geronnen. The ii points to the sound of (u) which the rhyme demands. 9. smAAl'e or smceaehe: see 73 and 75. fau'alez : the word is trisyllabic in E. and He., so that the second foot of this line is a tribrach, as in 1. 3. mel "odai : see 17 and 90. ID. aaI: see \ 73. n//^ht: the vowel is short in the Orm., where the form is nihJit: when it became long, as at present sounded, I have failed to discover. Probably when the guttural went out of use. (7^p"en: almost all our pure English words that now have a long {00) had a in A. S. : this word is one of the very few exceptions, the earliest form being like the present one open. From the A. S. spelling I conclude that it was sounded (op -en), as it still is in the West of England. Orm. shows that both sotmds existed in his time, writing tlie adjective as openn and the verb as oppnenn. 11. Hi3r: I follow here the reading of Ca., Co., P., L., and I/a. in prefer- ence to that of E. and He. whicli give hir. For tlie sound, see note on 1. 32. kurzesedzh 'ez : it admits of doubt whether the -age m this class of words has a short a, so that they would rhyme with the modern badge and Madge, or a long one, as I have assumed in 75. On the whole, as the vowel is always sounded long in the French courage, &c. , and these words in Chaucer's time had not been very long in the language, it is more likely that the syllable was long in English also. kurjeasdzh'ez : j\Ir. Ellis writes (koo). But it is the general rule of our language to shorten every syllable except the accented one ; indeed exceptions, such as almighty (AAlmoitz), are not numerous. Moreover in the French, if we appeal to the modern pronunciation, we find that the stress of the voice is on the con, but yet it is pronounced short (ku). This is most likely to have been (u), as in French the form cu7-age was the more ancient. 12. dhKn'e: A.S. \>iTnHe, an old accusative singular. This form in /,". and He. gives us an anapaest in the first-foot, admissible also in Greek iambics. SPECIMENS. 127 and smAAl'K fau'elez masaek'en melvdai, dha^t sliip"en aaI dhiJ mAht w/dh oop'en 9i 10 soo prik'eth Hem natjyyr' m htjj kuraca^dzh'ez-- ; dhaen'TJ bq'en f^lk tu goon on p/Igr/mseasdzh'ez, and pal'miirez foj tu siik'en strAAndzh'B strAnd'ez, tu fer'nn Hal;wez kauth m sund'r/ lAnd'ez ; and spes'iAloi from ev.en shair'ez iind 15 folk : tliere seems to be no evidence of the antiquity of the custom of not sounding the /in this word, though Butler (1633) tells us that in his time the / was dropped in ca//, halj, salve, calves, walk, talk, Halkin, Malkin, alms, alviond, and many other words. As all the best MSS. exhibit the /, it was most probably sounded. p/lgr/ma?a;dzh"ez : E. has the singular ///5'r/w(7f'i'. 13. pal'miirez: palniere is the modern Fr. paiimia-, and all such words (see 92, in which this word ought to have been mentioned) rhyme with here, not with there (see p. 67). Co. spells the word palmeris, and this by no means infre- quent form of the plural termination makes it clear that though the original -as became thinned down into -es and -is, it did not commonly change the vowel into the obscure (c). See ^^ 153. siik'en: sec 97. Independently of the rhymes which this word forms, that the e is long may be safely concluded from its being doubled in the three MSS., He., L., and Ha. strAAndzh'TJ: Mr. Ellis for this (aa) writes (au), which he would pro- nounce as in the Ger. //aits ; but where does the (u) element come from? See l)el()w on Catmtiirbury, 1. 16. (On p. 144, when quoting .Sir Thomas .Smith, Mr. Ellis seems quite to misunderstand Smith's protest against the then pre- vailing mode of sounding ai>5da> : what Smith objected to was the Modern Greek pronunciation of ai''5da; as afihaw. ) 14. nal'wez : jjossibly TUvrwez; but no derivative of hali;^ with a short iv a])pears in A. S. The Orni. docs not help beyond showing that the vowel is short, the form l)eing hallynn. sun'dr/: that the A. S. word had u in the first syllable, and that the modern form is sundry, seeni to be sufilcient reasons for reading the o as (u), as \\\ yoir^c so>t>u', 1. 7. On the (/) see on hooly, 1. 17. 15. spesVAl.Ti. : that the .r in such words was not sounded as sh up to the i6th century may perhaps be inferred from its not l)eing mentioned; but the strongest argument seems to me to be one which Mr. Ellis has overlooked, namely that Hart had a special symbol for (sh) and does not use it in writing cl'sci-uasiou, derivasion, nasiou, <.Vc. spes'/Alai: for the pronunciation of adjectives in -al down to the seven- teenth century, see \ I20, foot note t 3, p. S9. - spcs'/Al.""! : for the -ly, sec note on shortly, 1. 30. shoir'ez, ]ierliaps shiir'ez : the word .?///>( undoubtedly has an exceptional pronunciation as (sliii.i), and as in Chaucer it nowhere ends a line exce]it in 1. 356, rhyming with sue wliich doc-, lui!, 1 b(,lie\e, oci.iir elsewhere, the a?gu- nicnt of \^ 109 will not a]i]i]y to it. 128 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION'. Of Engelond | to Caunturbury they wende The hooly blisful martir for to seke That hem hath holpen | whan Jiat they were seeke Mifil that I in that seson on a day iind'TJ, and wiind'B 1. i6: in the worA Jiend wq preserve the sound which I he\\Q\Q friend (which habitually rhymes with it in Chaucer) to have formerly possessed. But ende in Chaucer repeatedly rhymes with friend; in the Orm. it has a long vowel (endenn) ; and Cooper, 1685, expressly records eend as belonging to the "barbara dialectus," which doubtless means an old and now unfashionable pronunciation. In like manner wcnde continually rhymes with end;! in Chaucer, and this too has e in Orm. (wendenn), except in the past tense (wennde), where the e is short as in the modern went. 16. ^q'gelAnd: possibly the (iq') should be (eq") as written. But both Co. and L. write Ing-, and this is certainly an ancient pronunciation of the word. Jones (1704) so sounds England, English, Eiighfdd, and Bullokar (1580) writes Inglish. Our two MSS. however are yet higher authority. And their evidence is corroborated by that of the MS. of Lawrence Minot, assigned by Mr. Wright "to the earlier part of the 15th cent., probably to the reign of Henry V." In this MS. the common forms a.'CQ Ingland and Ingliss. (See Wright's Political Poems and Songs, vol. i. pp. 64, 70, 78, &c.) Where there are such exceptional pronunciations, evidences of their longevity abound on every hand. /q "gel And : the hard _^ was most probably sounded in Angle (as we still sound it in that word, and in jangle, wrangle, tangle not ang-l, &c. as in the Ger. Angel); and therefore also in Engelond. kAAnfmbrn: 1st syllable. Here five of our MSS. write Caiint-, only L. and Ha. have Cant-. In 1. 801 Co. and P. also have Cant-. This syllable Mr. Ellis sounds (kaunt) distinctly introducing an (u) sound. Not only is the spelling Cant-, opposed to this, but the question of necessity arises, Where did this (u) come from ? There seems to have been only a simple vowel when Caesar wrote the name CaJit'wvm, and when our A.S. forefathers wrote of the Caw/waras and their CrtAvaraburh in Cenfland or Ccntv\cQ, as it still is in Kent. Was tliere an "interregnum" between a.d. 1130, under which date the A.S. Chronicle mentions 6"(i'Avaral)uruh, or a.d. ioSS, where Cent is mentioned, and modern times when the simple (a) or (e) is alone known, in which an intrusive (u) came in, only to be thrust out again ? It is not easy to believe in such vagaries in spoken language. kA.\nfc.ibur/ : 2nd syllable. Mr. Ellis writes (er) ; but -tnr- is the spelling of E., Co. and Ila., and of Co. in 11. 793 and 801 ; and -tii - is found in P., 1. 22, and Ca., 1. 801. These varieties of spelling surely prove an obscure sound : I confidently believe this syllable t(j have been sounded just as at present. kAAnfu.ibur/: 3rd syllable. Again Mr. Ellis gives (be). But the word is spelt almost without exception with u in every MSS. in each place \\iiere it occurs: only once is it -er-. iVnd this agrees with the derivation from A.S. biirh, burge, byrig. The most probable conclusion seems to be that the origi- SPECIMENS. 129 ov zq'gelAnd tu kAAnfnjbBr/ dh^i? wiind dhB HooVi b]/s"ful maa't^J fAJ tu siik, dhjet Hem Haeth Hc'lpen whaen dhset dh(friss(i'i, chari^, twenntil, wurr^fVf,, &c., this last being the only word of this class that I have found at the end of a line in Chaucer, and there it rhymes with /. But a long syllable here so interferes with the rhythm of the verse, that it seems probable that the change of sound which the word has undoubtedly undergone was already partly eflecled in Chaucer's time. So probably with sondry (sun-dr/), 1. 14. maJ'tBj : the word is spelt niartir, martyr, and marter, so that the variety of spelling in the second syllable seems to indicate obscurity of sound. Moreover until I am shown to be wrong in believing (iir) or (iij) to be always written ere in Chaucer, I cannot believe the word to have ended in (iir). 18. ii^lpen: o m a. pure English word before / and another consonant, and therefore probably sounded (0), as in modern English. -siik: from A. .S. sei'ic : see ^^ 106, 107. 19. \'>ik-\' : the prejiosition /'/' or 3_>' (aided perha])S by the confusion which some supi)()sc between bi and ^c) bears also tlie form /)i; not only in Chaucer but even in A. S. In this line the Lansdowne MS. has ^-fel, and in 11. 42, 52, 215, 277, 445, 572, two or more of the six MSS. have /vginne, fcides, lidoxtt, &c. The conclusion is, that even though by was sounded like the Ger. bei, the vowel in compounds was often or regularly shortened. It is an obvious, but by no means a valid objection that (/) is the shortened sound not of (ai) but of (//) or (ii) ; but as (ai) is a diphthong, if it is to be shortened at all, it is the latter part alone which rapid pronunciation allows to survive. Bifel (baifel") most naturally and readily shortens into bifel (b/fel"), the sound which we still use. Compare the shortening oi ott (au) first into (u) and then into {p). s;vr"zun or seei'zun: the derivation of the word from the French saison makes it plain that the e is not (ii) : see lOi. S(Vzun : Mr. Ellis takes the second s as (s), the common surd sibilant. But among the multitudinous proofs of the tendency of spoken language to continue the same century after century is the rule (evidently overlooked by Mr. Ellis) given by Palsgrave for the sounding of s, being just the same as now holds after three centuries and a half: " If a syngle s come bytwene two vowelles in \.\vc meane syllables of a frenche worde by hymselfe, he shall in that place ever be sounded lykc an : [i.e. like :ui iziani, the old name of the letter], so that for disdnl, faisdnt, tiwsor, nsJr/, niaischi, they sounde dizatit, K 130 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. In South werk | at the Tabard as I lay 20 Redy | to wenden on my pilgrymage To Caunterbury | with ful deuout corage At nyght | were come | in to that hostelrye Wei nyne and twenty in a compaignye Of sondry folk | by aventure y-falle 25 In felaweschipe | and pilgrimes were they alle That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde faizant, trezor, rezort, maizon, and so of all suche lyke." Giles du Wes con- firms this : "An s, in the begynnynge of a worde hath his full sounde, as dothe appere by these wordes folowyng, sage, sauuage, sapient, etc. but in the myddes beynge eyther before a consonant or a uowell, shall be sounded lyke a 0, as in these words disoie, faisoie, brisoie, taisoie, etc. " WTiether the rule is the same in modern French when the j " in the myddes" comes before a con- sonant, I cannot say, as no word occurs to me in which such an s has not now disappeared, as in esgard, now igard ; for words with st of Latin derivation, like protester, are expressly excepted by du Wes in his next rule. s^f'zun ; if this word stood alone, or as a final, I hold that it would be sounded (s^^'zaun) : see \ 36. (Additional words that might have been cited in that section as representing the original French on by oun (aun) a.xt~bound, rebound, council, crown, ounce, pounce, count, counter and all its compounds, countenance, redound, roundelay, trounce (O.Fr. troncer), frounce, amount, paramount. ) But whether it would be so sounded when immediately followed by other words without any pause is obviously a different question. You rarely find in Chaucer perhaps never, but I have not searched our seven MSS. all through with this object, though I have turned over a good many pages to see words of French derivation in -on M'ritten with -oun, if not at the end of a line. This fact affords at least a presumption that the fuller sound was kept only where it was useful for the rhyme, but that in ordinary pronunciation these words had commenced the change they have undergone when sliding down from (aun) to (un) and thence to the present (t3n). This shortening of (3u) into (v.) or (a) we find in various English words, not only in unaccented syl- lables, as in ^evf-ton from New-town, Ald-wj- from Aid-house ; but even in spite of the accent, as when down gives us Z>-wich, soufA, south-am, (sadh-Bjn), &c. 20. sauth'werk: perhaps (sauth -wcTk). Co. hzs -work, xi : A. S. not at, but itt. tseb'TJid : it is true the word comes from O. Fr. tabar, or It. tabanv, or most probably the Sp. tabardo, none of which have (k) ; but the spelling Tabbard in P. shows the vowel was short, and the word is likely soon to have been completely anglicized. 21. reed": the Du. gereed, Ger. bereit, PI. Du. 7-eed, Orm. radig, leave no doubt that the first vowel is long. As to the second syllable, see on holy, 1. 17. wiind-en: see on w^^, 1. 15. 22. ful: the Du. vol, Ger. voll, and Orm. full, all indicate the sjiort vowel, with probably the very same sound in A..S. (where ihe form is the same, ///) as we give the word now. SPECIMENS. 131 m sauth'werk aet dliB taeb'HJd aez ai lee, 20 reed'/ tu wiind'en Dn mai p/i'gr/maeaedzh tu kAAnfEJb^r/ w/dh ful devout kuraeaedzh', set nz^ht wea kuum in tu dhaet Hcsfelrai wel noin and twenf/ in h kum'pT3n3i ov sundT/ folk bai aa'ventjyyr /fAAl" 25 in fel'Ashaip, and p/l'gr/mez weJ dh^f aaI dha;t tu"\vaJd kAAnftMbur/ wuld'en raid. devauf: this form can scarcely come direct from the Lat. dex'otus: the analogy of the words given in \ 36 though all of these have the ou followed by n makes it more probable that it comes from the O. Fr. devot, now dhiot. Hence also there is some degree of probability that the first syllable was never pronounced (dii) I am confident Mr. Ellis will agree with me there but (dee) or (div), and hence, when shortened through the accent falling on the last syllable, it would become (de). 23. weJ or wer : the final e was probably dropped, but its influence might still be felt in the trill of the r, especially l^efore a k immediately following. kuum : Orm. gives cuminii, testifying to the long vowel. 24. wel: the Scottish pronunciation 'luecl (will) is familiarly known, and that too is tlie pronunciation pointed at by Orm's spelling -wel. But Orm also writes -iodl, indicating a short vowel. And just as Orm's usage was unsettled, so in Chaucer wel rhymes both with (ii) words as kele, w/ule, fele (vb. ), and with (e) and (ee) words as ddc and those that end in -elle. The latter usage slightly predominates. Moreover in all the seven MSS. there is in this instance only one e, and in Ca. there are two //s. kum'ptJnai : the pronunciation of the fust syllable was probably with (u), as the word has that vowel occasionally in Old French; the MSS. of Chaucer sometimes so spell it ; and the modern sound of (kam) points in the same direction. kum'pTJnai. : E. and He. have coaipaignye, the other MSS. (ompanye. In O. Fr. the forms are cumpaignie, conpci^nie, coinpnignie (the most common), conpagtiie, coinpagnie, &c. The old spelling might still be preserved by some scribes even when the word had assumed in this syllable tiie obscure sound which the variety in the spelling in our MSS. seems to point to. 25. aa'venljyyr" : the final ;-bef(ire a vowel following would preserve its trill. 26. feTAshoiii : in Orm. we find the termination -shipc v\wA.\-i witli the long vowel, as in iiianns/npe, ii>Hrr\shipt\ iKic. That it was still h'u j; in Cliaucer's time is shown by the spelling in six MSS. out of the seven with a final ,-. Ca. alone has -ship. We might hope for assistance from rhymes, with pipe, ripe, &c., or with ///, lip, &c. ; but no line in Chaucer, I believe, ends in -ship. 27. tu'waid : I believe guard to preserve the old sound of the vowel in ward. In more modern times the w lias affected the sound of ^, miking it (aa). But this was not the case in Chaucer's time: sec \ 76. But as the accent was nj .|i,;icntly on the first syll.dile, the (waa.id, as we still sound it. 136 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. No cristen man so ofte of his degree 55 In Gernade | at the seege eek hadde he be Of Algezir | and riden in Belmarye At Lyeys was he | and at Satalye Whan they were wonne | and in the grete See At many a noble Armee | hadde he be 60 At mortal batailles | hadde he been fiftene And foughten for oure feith at Tramyssene In lystes thries | and ay slayn his foo This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also Somtyme | with the lord of Palatye 65 Agayn | another hethen in Turkye And eueremoore | he hadde a souereyn prys And though fat he were worthy he was wys And of his port | as meeke as is a mayde He neuere yet 1 no vileynye ne sayde 70 In al his lyf | vn to no maner wight He was a verray parfit gentil knyght ^ But for to tellen yow | of his array His hors [was] goode | but he was nat gay Of Fustian [ he wered a gypon 75 Al bismotered with his habergeon 57. AAl'dzheziir : the tendency to anglicize the pronunciation would cause this word to be sounded as if it were a compound of our all (aaI). See also note on (HAA'bBJdzhsun), 1. 76. AAl'dzheziir : all the evidence tends to show that 2 in E.E. was regularly sounded as we sound it now. See for instance the note on (s&'*zun), 1. 19; and, if there is independent reason to believe that our plural termination was (z), we may thence also conclude the sound of the written 2 from such plurals as auez from ave, which occurs frequently in Ancren Riwle. For an exceptional sound of 2, see note on (servAAnts), I..101. 61. bgetvdz : perhaps already shortened into (bsefelz). 64. ee : that fl>'c = ever and aj(r = yes were not sounded alike in the age of Queen Elizabeth may be shown by two arguments, first, it is only the latter that is commonly written /, like the pronoun ; and secondly, if they were sounded alike we should scarcely find Smith (and Gil half a century later) claiming for one of these words the same sound (Gil makes it almost the same "exiguum distat" which may mean no real difference at all) as that of the pronoun /, and not for the other. Chaucer's orthography agrees with tradition in sounding this adverb like the vowel of the next word, slayn. 66. anuudh'^Er : the frequent by-form oother for other shows that the vowel was long. 71. mEn"ii.i : in the termination -iere in modern French the / is almost alv sorbed in the predominant i following. That this i had a much fuller and stronger sound formerly is rendered probable, independently of Chaucer's SPECIMENS. 137 noo knsfen man soo oft dv H/z degrii". 55 aet gBJn'aeaed set dh^ siidzh iik Haed Hi bii DV AAl'dzheziir, and r/d'en in belm^rai. set laiVtfs wa;z Hii and jet saufBlai, wha^n dhee wer wun, and in dhB greefB sii aet maen7 b r\oo'hv\ arm'ii Haed Hi bii. 60 set niAJfAAl baetv^lz Haed in biin f/ffiin, and faukwhfen for auJ ieeih. aet tra'm"/siin, in h'st-ez thrai'es and ee sl^^'n Hiz ioo. dhz's r'lk'B wurdh^' kn//^ht Haed biin \\soo' sumtaim^'B w/dh dh^H \ooi6. ov paelBtai" 65 agij^n' anuudhBr Heedh'en in turkai*, and evBrmf^r" Hi Haed "b suuvBr^,?n prais. and dhaukwh dhtet Hi weJ wurdh*/ Hi waez waiz, and ov h/z p^f rt aez miik aez iz b meed : Hi nevBj jet noo v/li?n3i' ni s^^d 70 in aaI h/z loif untuu* noo maen'ii.i w/,^'ht : Hi wtez V. vcv'ee paJ'f/t dzhen't/1 kn/y&ht. but fAJ tu tel'en jau dv Hiz sivee, Hiz HDJs wa'z guud, but Hii w;i'z na't gee. Dv fus'tzBn Hi weer"ed b dzh/poun" 75 AaI b/smufBred w/dh Hiz HAA'b'Bjdzhaun', rhymes, by Lyndesay's rhyming such words as mateir and pUascir, for there is no evidence that the French plaisir (which Lyndesay's pleaseir is, scarcely altered) ever sounded the second syllable otherwise than with (iir). 75. dzh/poun" : it may be asked why if this word was pronounced with (aun), it was not also written with -oicn. The answer is that no educated man, such as Chaucer was, could be indifferent, if he borrowed foreign words, to the mode in which they were spelt in the language from which lie took them ; just as Rome, though it seems to have been commonly pronounced (ruum), has always been written in the manner familiar even to schoolboys as nearest to the Latin form. When such a word is used to rhyme with an English word of like sound, he might also vary the spelling, as lamcntacioun, tonii, Kn. Ta. 935, iioun, pcnotin, ib. 978 ; but when both words are from the French, motive to change is wanting. Ca. however has -oun iopoun, habU-ioun : in each of which words an / evidently stands for a J. 76. b/smut'Bred : the root of this word is evidently sritut, now (smot). " H.\A"bi3.i(lzh3un, 1st syllable : the spelling with hau- in //,'., as in 1. 2431 hauberk has au in all seven MSS., seems to indicate the sound here given. The derivation of the name of this neck-protector from lials and beorgan accounts for this sound, the / having so strong a tendency to modify the (a) in the direction sec 28 of (o). We have seen a new illustration of this of late years in the constant mispronunciation of (Jarihaldi's name by uneducated people as (ga;r"/b.\.\ld/). lUu more curious il is to note that the / here has disappeared even in Chaucer's time (for the A.S. form was halsbeorg) just as 138 ON EARr,Y ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. For he was late | ycome from his viage And wente | for to doon his pilgrymage V\ rith hym ther was his sone a yong Squier A louyere | and a lusty Bacheler 80 With lokkes cruUe | as they were leyd in presse Of twenty yeer of Age | he was I gesse Of his stature | he was of euene lengthe And wonderly delyuere | and of greet strengthe And he hadde been somtyme in chyuachie 85 In Flaundres | in Artoys and Pycardie And born hym weel ! as of so litel space In hope I to stonden in his lady grace Embrouded was he | as it were a meede Al ful of fresshe floures | whyte and reede 90 Syngynge he was | or floytynge al the day He was as fressh | as [is] the Monthe of May Short was his gowne | with sleues longe and wyde Wei koude he sitte on h^rs and faire ryde He koude songes make | and wel endite 95 luste and eek daunce ! and wecl purtreye and write we now always omit it in half, calf, &c. and walk, talk, chalk, &c. Compare also bawdry k, 1. 116, from O.K. G. balderich, connected with belt, O.N. belli, Lat. balteus, &c. ; and heraudes, 1. 2599, &c., without the radical /. HAA'VjTjadzhaun, 2nd syllable : the various spelling with -ber-, -bir-, -bur-, shows an indistinct sound. 78. wenfB : see note on ende, 1. 15. 79. suun : see below, note on 1. 336. 80. luuvjeea : the A.S. termination: seep. 67. bsetsh'eliii : the French termination : see p. 67. 82. jiii : see p. 67. 84. deh'vBr : French, but not in -ier or -ifrc. Cotgrave gives the form delivre, and according to the analogy of chambre, tendre, &c. (see note on 1. 28), the sound will be with (bj) or before a vowel (i3r). 87. wiil : this form and (wel) apparently coexisted in Chaucer's English, the latter being more common. In this passage Z. has 7velc : the other five MSS. have wel. See above on 1. 24. lai'tel : the M.G. leitils had apparently this sound in the first syllable. As to the quantity of the vowel in the A. S. lylel or litd, non liquet ; but Orm has the forms litell and litdll as well as litlleand littLss. In Chaucer the word is, I think, always written with one t. 88. IseKd'i or laed'z: the A.S. is hlccfdige, to which Grein assigns the long vowel. In this he is supported by Chaucer's orthography, the word being always written with one d, and by the modern traditional pronunciation. Orm on the other hand has laffdig (vol. ii. p. 632). SPECIMENS. 139 fAJ Hi wrez loeset zTcuum* from Hzz v3i,ae?edzh', and went' B fAJ tu duun h/z p/l'grzmseaedzh. w/dh H/m dheJ wsez Hzz suun tj juq skw3i,iir", B luuvjeeJ and b lust"/ bsetsh'eliu, 80 w/dh lok'ez krul fez dh^^ wer k^d /n pres : Dv twen"t/ jiiJ bv aewedzh Hi vvasz ai ges. ov Hiz stsetjyyr* Hi vvfez bv iiven leqth, and wun'dBJlsi deliver and dv greet streqth ; and Hii Ha'd biin sumtoim" m tsh/vBtshai 85 m flAAn'dBrz, m aaJ'tu/s, and p/k'BJdai, and hooJn Htm wiil aez ov stf(? lai'tel spseses, m Hoop tu stAnd'en m h/z lisajd'z grajses. embraud'ed wajz Hii sez /t weer v meed aaI ful 3v fresh'B flaur'ez, whait and reed. 90 s/q'/q Hi vvaiz AJ flu/f/q AAl dhB dro- and -brou-, the modern English -broi-, so tliat we seem to be throv.-n back on the spelling ; and on in Chaucer is almost always (du) in our traditional pronunciation. 91. llu/f/q: the derivation of Chaucer's word from the French Jluste, Jlutc, Jieiite, makes it tolerably certain that this oy contained an (u) sound. (Diez derives the verb Jiiiter from flatus through a supposed flatuer which has then by metathesis become flai/L'r. I venture to think the noun is not derived from the verb, but the verb from the noun ; and that the true derivation is still with metathesis irom fistula, {filiista), flustc, fliltc.) 92 : E. has 'as in the Monthe.' 93. sliivez : the connexion of this word with the Fris. slii'f a.x\(\ Swab. aiischlirfen and ausschliefcn (see Wedgwood), and apparently with no (e) word, seems to determine the sound. 94. {icx'v, or feer'u : ai commonly in Chaucer stands for (iv), but before r it is easier and doubtless was easier 500 years ago also to sound (ee). On the other hand in the West of Fnglaml the sound of (''.-''), or nearly that, is by no means uncommon in some words. .See p. 74 at tup. ftCT'B : the final -< is sounded to mark the adverb : see Mori is, p. xlv. 96. dzhuust : from (). Fr. jnst,>; foster, jotistt-r, joii.xter, sounded most pro- l)ably with a long vowel, which however passes through the ordinary process of shortening by the time it appears in the modern yW.fAV (dzhnstl). 97. n/X'hfV'.n.xx'l 2nd syll. : Mr. I'dlis gives (er) ; but if this ny^htt-r- is, as I believe, only the ICnglish form of the O. X. n.rtr -= noctis, pronounced nearly (naa/fr), it is not easy to see where the (e) comes from. I40 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. So hoote he louede | that by nyghtertale He slepte namoore than dooth a nyghtyngale Curteis he was | lowely | and seruysable And carf | biforn his fader at the table loo A Yeman hadde he | and seruantz namo At that tyme | for hym Hste ride soo And he was clad | in cote and hood of grene A sheef of pecok arwes | bright and kene Vnder his belt he bar ful thriftily 105 Wei koude he | dresse his takel yemanly Hise arwes drouped noght with fetheres lowe * * * * # Ful fetys was hir cloke | as I was war 157 Of smal coral I aboute hire Arm she bar 98. duuth or duth : in the Orm. the 2nd person singular of this verb had the short vowel sometimes, as dosst and dost both occur ; but in the 3rd person, do\i, the vowel is always long. The frequency of the double o in the MSS. of Chaucer indicates the long vowel as still in use, whether more commonly or not is not clear. 99. kuitc't's": the forms curteys, and coiirteys, as well as the modern pronun- ciation of (:cr/^jr;' as (ka.i'tez/), combine to prove that this word, even when written with cor-, as in P. and Z., was not sounded with (kar) or (kor). loi. jii'masn: Ben Jonson tells us that in his day ^t? was "found but in three words in our tongue, yeoman, people, jeopardy. " Which were truer written, ynnan, peple, Jepardy." And this /is elsewhere explained as the "sharp " e, which again he explains to mean "as in the French i." But the pronunciation oi yeoman seems to have been unsettled in Chaucer's time (therefore probably in Ben Jonson's also) for some of the MSS. have yoman and in 1. 106 yomanly. servAAnts": in E. and He. the word is written with -tz ; but in early English the s must have had the sharp sound of s when it followed a i, for the simple reason that the combination (tz) is unpronounceable. Occasionally the z was used for the two letters, being then sounded no doubt like the Germans; as \x\ I^ Morte Arthur, ed. Furnivall from Harl. MS. 22^2., porz somewhere occurs (I cannot now find it) where the z is evidently = ts, and must have been so sounded. rvimoo' : the word is namo in E., He, and Co., na mo in /'., nomoo in Ha., no moo in Ca. and L. I conclude that the long no [noo] had become short and indistinct, much as the same word in its fuller form )ioii or noon {x\ooi\) is now cut short into (nan). 104. sheef : later sheaf, see \ 84. pee'cok: \sl\.^x peacock, see \ 84. 105. bsexu or baaJ : see on waar, 1. 157. SPECIMENS. 141 soo Hoot Hi luuved dhait bai n/ihf^Jtaeael Hi slepfiJ namc^r" dha*n duuth b n/z^hf/qgaeael. kuJt^^s" Hi waez, loou'loi and seJ'visseseb'Bl, and kaaJv htioom h/z faeied'Br set dhn ta?aeb'Bl. 100 B jii'maen Hsed Hii, and servAAnts* nvmoo' set dhset taim, fAr H/m 1/sf b raid'B soo ; and Hii wsez klsed in koot and Huud bv griin. B sheef BV pee'cok aar-wez brz>^ht and kiin und'Br h/z belt Hi bseaer ful thr/ff/bi. 105 wel kaud Hi dres Hiz tseae'kBl jii'maenlai : h/z aar'wez drsup'ed nAkwht with feedh'Brez loou. ***** ful f^i?tv's wa?z HBJ klook sez ai wteg wietea* : 157 3v smAAl ktfrAAl" abaut HBr aa.im shi baiseJ 106. tseaek'Bl: now commonly tackle (tock'I), but in nautical mouths it is takle (t^ive as (zii z?v), and so on ; while in some printed books a z is used as a representative of this letter, as repeatedly in the Roxburghe Club Morte Arthur. a. The 3 in some of these words is akin to German words with j, as "^ong, h'r, in German Jung, Jahr. b. None of these words have congeners beginning with s or z. c. Very commonly in MSS. 3 and y are used interchangeably. In this passage for instance we ha.d ycman s.r\A yemanly in E., He., P., and JIa., while Ca., Co., and L. spell the words with 3. d. And in the MS. of the Morte Arthur just alhided to (Ilarl. 2252) the handwriting changes at 1. 1092 (of Mr. Furnivall's edition), and in the latter i)art of this MS., by the second scribe, the same words such as ''>are, ii'teyne are occasionally spelt with 3 at the beginning of words and syllables, as are elsewhere^and always in the first handwriting spelt with y. 107. n.\k7\ and the A.S. lybban, testifies to the short vowel ; though we must set against these the Ger. leben, the A. S. leofa^, and Orm's li/e)p)) and lifcnn. delaif : Chaucer seems to use this word in two forms, sometimes making it rhyme with white, sometimes with works in -ight, of course disregarding the guttural in this termination. Unfortunately I liave mislaid my references. wuun : the Ger. loohiicii. and Orm's -oMincim point to the long vowel. SPECIMENS. 143 V p^d?r Bv beed'ez gAAd'ed AaI w/dh griin ; and dher on Heq b br(?^tsh of goold ful shiin, 160 on whztsh dher waez feast vvr/t b kraun'ed aa, and aeffBr aam'AJ v/ns/t om'nia" * * * * * B fr8eqk'elossil)ly therefore j(T.' also as from sntKc, though the analogy is mani- festly imperfect. 347. J ill : see p. 67. 144 ON EARLY ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. After the sondry sesons | of the yeer So chaunged he | his mete and his sopere P'ul many a fat partrich | hadde he in Muwe And many a Breem | and many a luce in Stuwe 350 Wo was his Cook | but if his sauce were Poynaunt | and sharpe | and redy al his geere His table dormant in his halle alway Stood redy couered | al the longe day At sessions there was he lord and sire 355 Ful ofte tyme | he was knyght of the shire An Anlaas | and a gipser al of silk Heeng at his girdel | whit as morne Milk | A shirreue hadde he been and [a] Countour Was nowher | such a worthy Vauasour ***** A Somonour was ther with vs in that place That hadde | a fyr reed Cherubynnes face For sawcefleem he was with eyen narwe 625 As hoot he was | and lecherous as a sparwe With scaled browes blake and piled berd Of his visage | children were aferd 348. supiia", 1st syll.: from Fr. souper (or soupier?), which with the modern (a) of supper fixes the sound. supiiJ*, 2nd syll.: see top of p. 68. 349 and 350. mjyy and stjyy : see \ 144. 350. Ijyys : a French word. Cotgrave has lucel and lucet, Palsgrave has lus, and Littre gives luset as " nom de la truite en Bretagne." See \ 138. 352. pu/njAAnt : L. has piinyant, which together with the French form poignant s&eras to authorize the inserted (j). 354. stuud : still pronounced in the West of England with the long vowel which the spelling indicates. kuuVBjd : the French couvrir seems to show the vowel long. 356. shaiJ : see bottom of p. 127. 357. dzh/p'siir : Fr. gibeciere, a game-bag, in O. Fr. iX'io gibaci:T tlVlA gihecicr. 358. ga'd'cl or geJ'd^I : the MSS. vary, with ^tV-, gyr-, and_f:c'n (euroo"pa, teun) 3u usual E. ho?/se (nous) H E. he (Hii) i E. ^vent, Fr. fm?' (ivenf, fini) i E. r/ver, fmnr (r/v.i, f/n/) ii E. eve (iiv) ii E. happjK (iljep'zV) in singing iufE. f?/tility (fiutz'l'zt?) iuutE. ftile (fiuu'til) J E. ^et, Ger. 7a (jet, jaa) k\i Ger. s\e.ck (szii,^h) kroh Ger. raxch (aukii^h) o Ital. (' aperto, Fr. homme (om) E. om\i (ormV) E. on, odd (on, Dd) CE Fr. ]eune (zhoen) 00 Ital. uomo (uoo'mo) 00 E. home (Hoom) ceoe Fr. jeiine (zhceoen) oow usual E. knotw (noou) q E. si^'er, linger (s?qu, b'q'g-i) r E. ray {ree) X E. p^;'V(?rt, air (p.ivJf, eej) th E. thin (thm) tsh E. th (flyyt, !||>!|ii| L 006 058 651 8 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 000 092 478 7 ^T J ^ITY of CALIFOKNTa AT %"" LOS ANGELES ^ LIBRARY