^ Copyright by Thomas Scott Donahue 1969 the PRESENT STATE of MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECT STUDIES
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This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-4875 DONAHUE, Thomas Scott, 1940- THE PRESENT STATE OF MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECT STUDIES. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, linguistics University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan ^ Copyright by Thomas Scott Donahue 1969 THE PRESENT STATE OF MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECT STUDIES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Thomas Scott Donahue, B.A., M.A. ****** The Ohio State University 1968 Approved by /-At- 'Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Professor F . Utley for guidance, and to K. J. Davis for encouragement. VITA August 29, 1940 Born — Youngstown, Ohio 1962 B.A. with Honors, Denison University, Granville, Ohio 1962-1965 NDEA Fellow, Miami University- Ohio State University 1964 M.A., Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 1965-1968 Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Field of Specialization Middle English Language and Literature. Professor Francis Lee Utley TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments ii Vita iii X Introduction: The Background of the Moore, Meech, and Whitehall Monograph 1 II Dialect Theory since the Neogrammarians 39 III Phonology, Onomastics, and Graphology: Practical Results on Middle English Studies of Modern Dialect Theory 80 IV Perspectives and Conclusions 144 Bibliography 198 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION THE BACKGROUND OF THE MOORE, MEECH, AND WHITEHALL MONOGRAPH My aim in this dissertation is to give an expository and evaluative account of the present state of Middle English dialect studies, starting with the University of Michigan monograph in 1935 of Samuel Moore, Sanford B. Meech, and Harold Whitehall,^ and continuing through the succeeding variety of theoretical and practical approaches to Middle English dialect research to the present day. I intend in this first chapter to show what the scope and significance of Moore, Meech, and Whitehall's essay was, together with its preceding and ancestral essays on the subject of linguistic geography in England, and its influence on the subsequent and more modern methods of mapping phonemes and morphemes from past stages of the language. In later chapters I will treat the dialect theory of the last thirty years more extensively, stressing the fact that the notions behind dialect geography form but one of many concepts of the nature of dialect; further, I will review the practical applications which have evolved in recent scholarship 1 2 from the various dialect theories. Finally, I will offer in the last chapter a criticism of these dialect theories and methods, with the hope of establishing a scholarly perspective on them, along with some recommendations of the most productive combination of dialect concept and technique for future researchers in this field. It was not long after Matteo Bartoli, Gaston Paris, Antoine Thomas and others2 developed the principles of dialect geography that an interest in that discipline arose in England. According to Sever Pop's account in La Dialectologie,3 Reverend W. W. Skeat founded the English Dialect Society in 1873, in an attempt to organize and coordinate the collection of lexical materials in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland for the English Dialect Dictionary. Also in 1873, a certain emphasis was given to the interest in the geographical distribution of dialects when Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte gave his collection of dialect words and maps to the Society. After gatlaBsing vast amounts of data over several years, Prince Louis had plotted on a map of England the geographical boundaries identifying and separating the varieties of usage among the English peasantry into thirteen dialects: Eastern, South Eastern, South Western, Devonshire, Cornish, Western, Shropshire, Worth Western, Midland, East Midland, North Eastern, North Midland, and Northern.4 Prince Louis' stress on plotting dialect boundaries on maps was to have \ 3 a long range influence on the field of English dialect study; for the moment, however, while other European scholars were producing maps of the modern dialect dis tribution in their respective nations, the researchers in the English Dialect Society were directing their efforts toward the publication, not of linguistic atlases, but of the Society's journal, the English Dialect Dictionary, and the English Dialect Grammar.5 Meanwhile,. Alexander J. Ellis was also collecting material on contemporary English dialects as the fifth part of his work in the Extra Series of the Early English Text Society, On Early English Pronunciation. Ellis wrote as follows of his task: The object of this treatise is to determine with considerable accuracy the different forms now, or within thet last hundred years, assumed Ey~the descendants of the same original word in passing through the mouths of uneducated people, speaking an inherited language, in all parts of Great Britain where English' is the ordinary medium of commnnicatibn between peasant and peasant.5 To achieve this, Ellis chose 971 words for comparative pronunciation purposes, an$l arranged them in a questionnaire containing fifteen sentences, with an additional seven sentences to be used in an investigation of lexical differ ences. Then, during a period of fourteen years, he relied upon over 800 informants from 1145 locations throughout England to provide him with an enormous amount of data from that questionnaire. From all this information, be was able 4 to draw "Ten Transverse Lines"7 from east to west across England, dividing the country into the six dialect regions of Southern, Western, Eastern, Midland, Northern, and Lowland.& Then, as Ellis plotted his material on a map, he found England to be divided into 42 dialect districts, with a total of 86 additional sub-varities or "parts of districts separately consideredamong the 42 dialects. Although Ellis' informants were laymen, and thus were not professional phoneticians, there is nevertheless a high degree of accuracy in this study: in later years, after he had time to compare his dialect divisions with the results of historical phonology, he found that "the districts thus obtained correspond very fairly with those which history, grammar, and vocabulary prescribe."10 Not long after the work of Ellis and the English Dialect Society, other scholars began to shift their attention from collecting material on contemporary English dialects to locating boundaries for the dialect phonology of the past. The interest in historical phonology as a philological discipline, of course, had been developing for d e c a d e s ; but soon after the study of pl&ce names was incorporated in dialect research, scholars began to investi gate past dialect boundaries with the same analytical rigor that Ellis had applied to dialect boundaries in the present. The field of onomastics had coexisted from the beginning 5 with a scholarly interest in describing exact phonolggical regions: in 1883, Henry Bradley, seeking a "source of evidence respecting the territorial limits of English dialects prior to the Norman Conquest," found that "dialect distinction" occurred in "our local nomenclature," and he concluded specifically that "the present southern boundary of Yorkshire constituted an actual dialectal frontier" in Anglo-Saxon times.12 In 1901, Alois Pogatscher followed Bradley's example and used place names to determine "Die Englische ae/5 Grenze,"13 and although Otto Ritter later quarreled with the validity of Pogatscher's source materials, 14 he nevertheless strongly approved of using onomastic methods to establish accurate boundaries. By this time, place name techniques had received the unofficial sanction of philologists in Germany and England, so that in the same year appeared Eilert Ekwall's essay on the strengths, weaknesses, and practical problems of place name methodology, in which he treated, among others, the changes in Old English a, jr, and the rounding of a in medieval Lancashire, 15 and Henry Cecil Wyld's classic studies of "The Treatment of OE y in the Dialects of the Midland and South-East counties in Middle English," and of "Old English in the Dialects of the South and Southwestern Counties in Middle English."16 Pogatscher and Wyld in particular were concerned with locating dialect boundaries as precisely as possible. 17 Then, in 1915, Alois Brandi reexamined the 6 results of Pogatscher, Ekwall, and Wyld with additional and more reliable place name sources in his Zur Geographie der altengllscheri Dialekte. 18 As place name study found more practitioners, there was a constant accumulation and transfer of phonological information between onomatologists and other specialized students of history and of historical phonology. A most important article, combining the philological knowledge of Lorenz Morsbach with an interest in the methods of Pogatcher, was written by Richard Jordan in 1910; 19 in his succinct, region by region discussion of which literary texts best demonstrate what dialect features, Jordan provided an extremely helpful guide for later dialect scholars in the selection both of important sources and salient phonological features. He doubtless influenced the later investigations of Henry C. Wyld, Mary S. Serjeantson, and J. P. Oakden, all three of whom maintained an extremely high level of systematic research on Middle English dialects. In an exmination of the "South-Eastern and South-East Midland Dialects in Middle English”