Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/06/2025
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
LG.09 – 40 George Sq.
Categories
PLEASE REGISTER TO ATTEND BEFORE 01 JUNE, USING THIS EVENTBRITE LINK.
We are delighted to invite the historical linguistics community to the first Margaret Laing Lecture, hosted by the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. This event is the continuation of the AMC Biennial Lectures, renamed as a tribute to our dear friend and colleague, Meg Laing, who passed away in early 2023. A brief tribute to Meg will be given by Dr Rhona Alcorn at the start of the event. A drinks reception will be offered after the lecture, right outside the lecture hall, in the lower ground floor of 40 George Square.
Our speaker will be
Prof. Gjertrud Stenbrenden
of the University of Inland Norway,
who will be talking to us about
English affricates, Caroline ‘g’ and uses of LAEME
ABSTRACT
English affricates, Caroline ‘g’ and uses of LAEME
This lecture addresses the question of dates for the emergence of affricates in English. The affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are reflexes of geminated and palatalized velars before *j in WGmc (Campbell 1959: §407; Stiles 2013: 15). Some handbooks date the emergence of phonemic affricates to very early Old English (Sievers 1895 [1968]; Campbell 1959; Hogg 1992; Lass 1994); others suggest a much later date (Sweet 1888; Luick 1914-40; Wright & Wright 1925; Minkova 2014).
For Middle English, Lass & Laing (2013: 103) claim that
Caroline ‘g’ in Middle English is characteristically used for [g] or [dʒ] (usually non-initial) while surviving insular ‘ᵹ’ and its later development ‘ȝ’ are deployed for [j] and dorsal fricatives. Any ‘g’ in LAEME CTT not combined in a ‘gh’ cluster most characteristically represents a stop, with its next most common use being for [dʒ].
That is, Caroline ‘g’ is interpreted as indicating a voiced affricate in and of itself. The lecture investigates this claim, and adduces evidence from alliteration and late ME sources, as well as from LAEME’s Corpus of Tagged Texts and Index of Sources (Laing 2024), to determine the dates at which affricates, phonetic and phonemic, must have been established in English.
References
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- Campbell, A. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Hogg, R.M. 1992. A Grammar of Old English, vol. 1: Phonology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Laing, M. 2024. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), 1150-1325 (Version 4.0, redesigned by Vasilis Karaiskos). Edinburgh: The Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. Available at http://amc.ppls.ed.ac.uk/laeme/.
- Lass, R. 1994. Old English. A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: CUP.
- Lass, R. & M. Laing. 2013. The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: unpacking the changes. Folia Linguistica Historica 34(1), 93–114.
- Luick, K. 1914-40. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, Vol. I, Parts 1 & 2. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Minkova, D. 2014. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: EUP.
- Sievers, E. 1968 [trans. and ed. by Albert S. Cook]. An Old English Grammar. New York: Greenwood Press.
- Stiles, P. 2013. The Pan-West Germanic Isoglosses and the Sub-Relationships of West Germanic to Other Branches. NOWELE 66(1), 5–38.
- Sweet, H. 1888. History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Wright, J. & E.M. Wright. 1925. Old English Grammar (3rd edn). Oxford: OUP.
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