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Home , History of Ireland, Kildare Poems, Old Irish, The Pale

In: Folia Linguistica Historica (14), 1993, 213-38.

The beginnings of Irish English

Raymond Hickey, Essen University

The intention of the present contribution is to offer a description of Irish English in its earliest stages. Before delving into the details of the matter a word or two of a general nature is called for. Apart from the philological documentation of a variety of medieval English (in itself rather mundane) one has to do here with a linguistic situation in which language contact and its various consequences play a central role. The linguistic situation of medieval Irish English is to say the least complex and can potentially throw light on the principles of interaction between different language groups. In this respect I will be interested in two basic matters: (i) the characterization of the situation in which medieval Irish English arose and (ii) the attempt to trace in this early variety of the language features which later became characteristic of Irish English as a whole.

1 Remarks on external language history

Initial settlement In 1169 on the request of a local lord in the south east of a group of adventurers from landed near Wexford. This historical fact marks the beginning of the political association of England with Ireland. The initial foray to Ireland was nothing like a systematic invasion; in a way it resembled the first Germanic raids on Britain some 700 years earlier: a series of sorties across the se§1a to a neighbouring country without any noticeable degree of coordination. Given our desire for dates, we latch onto a year to mark the beginning of what with the compression typical of distant historical hindsight looks like coherent and planned settlement. The first adventurers to arrive on Irish soil appear to have been quite a motley bunch. They came from Pembrokeshire in West (Moody and Martin (eds.) 1967: 127ff.); we know from historical records that there were at least three languages represented in this early group. Anglo- Norman, a variety of medieval English and to some degree Flemish. Much as the presence of the latter may serve to spice the demographic picture of medieval Ireland, for the further linguistic development of both Irish and English, Flemish is of no relevance. A few loan-words have survived in the archaic dialect of Forth and Bargy (more on which below) but that is about all. No traces of a Flemish influence are to be seen in Irish. Welsh was in all probability also among the languages of the first invaders; however traces of Welsh are not to be seen anywhere. This leaves us with French and English which will presently be the topic of comment.

Spread of English The development of English in Ireland since the 12th century has not been continuous. This fact is due to the settlement of the island by the English and to the political conditions in England itself. Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 2 of 21

Only the east and south-east coast of Ireland were settled in the late , above all the cities of Wexford, , and . At this point in time Dublin had already gained the status of capital of the country. Like other cities in Ireland, Dublin owes its origins to a Viking settlement before the turn of the millenium (Moore 1965: 10). Because of its favourable position in the middle of the east coast and with the central plain as its hinterland, Dublin was able to assert itself over other urban settlements in Ireland on river estuaries. As far as English is concerned, this fact is of some importance. The city was quickly occupied by the English after its conquest; in 1171 Henry II came to Ireland and issued the Charter of Dublin in 1172 (Dooley 1972: 68ff.). From this time onwards English has existed continuously in Dublin, indeed within a semi-circular area around the town. This region has been termed . Within the boundaries of the Pale the political influence of England has never ceased to exist. This is basically the reason for the continuous existence of English in Dublin: in the English has maintained the strongest influence in those areas where its political influence has been mostly keenly felt. Viewed as a whole, however, only a small part of the country was colonized with English. After the 12th century settlements spread to other cities, e.g. in the south () and in the west ( and ). The impact on rural Ireland was virtually non-existent. This is of central importance when considering the linguistic status of English vis à vis Irish in the . There can be no talk of English being a superstrate at this stage (as it was to become in the early modern period). Indeed English competed with Anglo-Norman in medieval Ireland and both these languages definitely interacted with Irish. Beyond the Pale in the centuries after the initial settlement on the east coast an ever increasing of the original English by the native Irish set in. This assimilation had two main reasons. For one the English settlers of this early, pre- period were of course Catholic and for another the connections with England were in fact quite loose. Those adventurers who saught land and political influence in Ireland evinced only nominal allegiance to the English crown. They had become to a large extent independent in Ireland (Moody and Martin (eds.) 1967: 133ff.). Indeed one can interpret the visits of English kings in Ireland such as that of Henry in Dublin in the 12th century as a scarcely concealed attempt to assert the influence of the English court in a colony which did not lay undue emphasis on crown loyalty. In later centuries other monarchs were to follow suit. Thus John came to Ireland in 1210 and Richard II twice (in 1394 and 1399). Each of these visits was intended to serve the purpose of constraining the power of the ostensibly English nobility. With the severing of ties with England the original English naturally drew closer to the native Irish. This development explains the decline of English in Ireland in the late 14th and 15th centuries. Especially after the adoption of by the English , initiated by the ‘Reformation Parliament’ (1529-1536) of Henry VIII, the English settlers in Ireland felt cut off and naturally identified themselves increasingly with the native Catholic population. The lowest point in the spread of English is to be found in the first half of the 16th century. English really only existed with any resilience in Dublin (more broadly, within the Pale) and in the south-east corner of the country. The resurgent Gaelicism of the 16th century lead by necessity to the of English influence (Moody and Martin (eds.) 1967: 158ff.). Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 3 of 21

The linguistic situation in medieval Ireland The history of English in Ireland is not that of a simple substitution of Irish by English. One must consider in this connection both the linguistic situation and the diachronic distribution of English in the country. At the time of the first English incursions the linguistic situation in Ireland was quite homogeneous. In the 9th century Ireland was ravaged by Scandinavians just like the rest of Britain. The latter, however, settled down in the following three centuries. The decisive battle against the Scandinavians (Clontarf, 1014) on the one hand represented the final break with Denmark and and on the other resulted in the complete assimilation of the remaining Scandinavians with the native Irish population much as it did in other countries, such as England and . For the period of the initial invasions one can assume, in contradistinction to various older authors such as Curtis (1919: 234), that the heterogeneity which existed was more demographic than linguistic. Scandinavian had indeed a profound effect on Irish, particularly in the field of lexis (see Sommerfelt in O’Cuív (ed.) 1975) but there can be no assuming that a bilingual situation obtained in the Ireland of the 12th century. Among the invaders from the middle of the 12th century there were not only Flemish and English speakers but also Anglo-. What cannot be reconstructed any more is the extent to which the English-speakers were different from those of Anglo-Norman. It is probable that during later waves of immigration, when more educated and aristocratic English came to Ireland, Anglo-Norman was introduced and established itself in the towns. Evidence for this standpoint is offered by such works as the Entrenchment of New Ross in Anglo-Norman as well as contemporary references to spoken Anglo-Norman in court proceedings from Kilkenny (Cahill 1938: 160f.). Anglo-Norman seems to have been maintained in the cities well into the 14th century as the famous (Lydon 1973: 94ff.) show; these were composed in Anglo-Norman and admonished the native Irish population to speak English. The large number of Anglo-Norman loanwords in Irish (Risk 1971: 586ff.) which entered the language in the period after the invasion testifies to the existence of Anglo-Norman on Irish soil from the mid 12th century to the 14th century.

Renewed dominance of English For the history of English in Ireland, the 16th century represents a break in its development. Politically it was marked by increasing separatist activities on the part of the Irish (of native and/or original English stock) which ended in the final victory over the Irish by English forces in the battle of Kinsale in 1601. The subsequent departure from Ireland by native leaders (known somewhat romantically as the ) in 1607 left a political vacuum which was energetically filled by the English. As of the beginning of the 17th century English attained a dominant position in Ireland and has continued to enjoy this status as a superstrate vis à vis Irish since. The establishment of English in Ireland in the early modern period is due to the ‘Plantations’ (MacCurtain 1972: 89ff.). These forced settlements were carried out sporadically in the 16th century and then with great consistency in the 17th century. The first plantations originate in the time from 1549 to 1557 (Moody and Martin (eds.) 1967: 189ff.) as the two counties Leix and Offaly in the centre of the country were settled by force. The English who moved there were however quickly assimilated by the native population. The same is true of the later ‘Plantations’ in the province of Munster in 1586-1592 (Moody and Martin (eds.) 1967: 190) which did not lead to any change in the linguistic composition of the country. Only from the second half of the 17th century onwards, after Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 4 of 21 had been militarily victorious over Ireland and the Irish rebels were completely quashed, did settlements of English mercenaries on a large scale take place; these retained their language and passed it on to following generations. After the victory over the Catholic forces under James II by William III (, 1690) Catholics were then excluded from political power and from higher positions in society. At the same time thousands of immigrants settled in the north of the country. These came for the greater part from the Scottish lowlands and from the North Midlands of England (Adams 1958: 61ff.; 1967: 69ff.). The settlements formed the basis for the demographic split of the country (Heslinga 1962). Due to these immigrants the division of Ireland came to be as much linguistic as political and confessional.

2 Periods of Irish English and historical documents

The break in the development of English in Ireland justifies a division into a first and a second period. By this is meant the division of the history of Irish English into an earlier period from the middle of the 12th century to the late 16th century and into a second later period which has lasted from the 17th century to the present day. One of the main difficulties for the historical linguist is in establishing a link between the varieties spoken in these periods. To begin with allow me to offer a characterisation of the more conservative types of Irish English and their historical attestations.

Medieval period Irish English of the late Middle Ages is recorded in two sources. The first is the Kildare Poems and the second the so-called Loscombe Manuscript. The term Kildare Poems is used as a cover term for 16 poems which are scattered among and Old French items of poetry in the Harley 913 manuscript. Their Irish source is evident both from their theme and their language. The term ‘Kildare’ may in fact not be appropriate, there are suggestions that the verse was produced in Waterford; the case for Kildare is based on the explicit mention of one Michael of Kildare as author of a poem. The series was critically edited by Wilhelm Heuser in 1904 in the Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik. The Loscombe Manuscript contains two poems (“On blood-letting” and “The virtue of herbs”) which according to the analyses of Heuser (1904: 71-75), Irwin (1933) and Zettersten (1967) are to considered without a doubt as Irish. Irish English of the 14th century is recorded briefly in two other sources. The first is an account book of the Priory of Holy Trinity Chapel in Dublin, where the poem “Pride of Life” was discovered. The manuscript was prepared around 1340 (Heuser 1904: 66). The second source is formed by the “Acts and Statutes of the City of Waterford” from 1365. Although there is no critical edition of these, there are remarks on their language in Henry (1958: 66). There are a few further manuscripts which are either positively Irish or which can be assumed with reasonable certainty to be so. These are listed in McIntosh and Samuels (1968).

Early Modern Period The paucity of documents from the medieval period is a major handicap in the linguistic analysis of this variety; the difficulty with the early modern period, however, is deciding how to evaluate what. There are basically three types of record involved here. The first consists of a series of literary documents (mostly dramas) in which Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 5 of 21

Irish English is parodied in the form of comical figures in a largely English setting. The validity of using literary dialect for a linguistic analysis is more than questionable, as Sullivan (1980) in his analysis has confirmed. Such texts can only serve as general guidelines for the more salient features of Irish English; they cover several centuries and are available from the beginning of the 17th century. In essence the difficulty is that one must rely on eye dialect; the of English is not necessarily suitable for rendering the idiosyncrasies of Irish English and indeed one cannot assume that a non-native speaker’s attempt to caricature Irish English will be satisfying and accurate. The second type of record is the word list. This is very restricted in the type of information it provides but is obviously more accurate than the literary parody. For lexical items and restricted phonological analysis word lists serve a certain purpose. In the early modern period there are word lists available for the archaic dialect of Forth and Bargy, notably that collected by one Captain Charles Vallencey in 1788 and that by Jacob Poole which was later published by William Barnes in 1867. The third record consists of incidental remarks on Irish English made by an author involved in another matter. A case in point is Sheridan in his of English (late 18th century) in which he notes certain Irish English pronunciations (typical of Dublin); in the present century Hogan’s Outline of English philology provides a further example of this type. Neither the instances of literary parody nor early Dublin English are to be considered here as they represent a dialect of too late a date. This is not however the case with the glossaries for Forth and Bargy. The records we have represent the dialect before its final demise at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. However in language, the dialect is very archaic and far more deviant from any variety of mainland English than the language of the Kildare Poems, written some four hundred years earlier (see Hickey, 1987). One can speculate on the reasons for this. To begin with the glossaries of Forth and Bargy illustrate native language forms of the inhabitants of this corner of Ireland. However, the Kildare Poems were probably written by native speakers of Irish trying their hand at the literary language English. Indeed if one stops to consider the dominance of Irish over English in 14th century Ireland and the (later) references in historical records to the incomprehensible type of English spoken by the Irish (see Stanihurst, 1577 as a noted example) then the Kildare Poems are somewhat surprising in their standardness. But this is only an apparent paradox. Going on the legitimate assumption that the authors of these poems were native speakers of Irish then they would have found themselves in a kind of diglossic situation in which English (or Anglo-Norman as many of the items in the Kildare Poems attest) represented a H-variety which was kept separate from the L-variety Irish. In the Wexford baronies of Forth and Bargy there were monoglot speakers of English as Stanihurst and others state. Here there was no standardising effect of a H-variety and, into the bargain, there was considerable contact with native-speaking Irish in surrounding areas.

3 A phonological description of the Kildare Poems

For the reconstruction of Irish English in the late Middle Ages there is very little available material. The only documents of any linguistic value are the above-mentioned Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript. Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 6 of 21

It is difficult to say to what extent these works can be viewed as a true representation of Irish English in the 14th century. They appear to be fairly close to the orthographic practices of general Middle English. Nonetheless one can refer to the recurring deviations from mainland Middle English and can evaluate them on the one hand in the light of dialects of west and south-west England, which formed the initial input of English in Ireland, and on the other in respect of contact Irish English today with a view to reconstructing a reasonably reliable picture of medieval Irish English. A third factor should be considered if one were dealing with the . This is the extent to which the forms found in medieval Irish English might have been hybrid compromise forms preferred in a community the speakers of which had a heterogenous dialectal background on mainland Britain (a view proposed by Samuels 1972: 108). In the following sections mention is made of the possibility rather than the fact of interference from Irish. This caution is required in the case of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript as nearly all deviations have at least one possible explanation. Where there are differences between the individual items of the Kildare Poems or of the Loscombe manuscript these will then be enumerated. The morphology of the current literary documents is not to be considered here as it lies outside the framework of the present study. Interested readers are advised to consult Heuser (1904: 35ff.) on the Kildare Poems and Zettersten (1967: 36) on the Loscombe manuscript.

3.1 Coronal and

A striking features of present-day Irish English is the substitution of English ambi-dental fricatives by dental stops.

(1) a. /3/ F [t] b. /2/ F [d]

In the orthography this shift is not apparent. Indeed it would not be possible to indicate it as English does not possess any written option for distinguishing a dental stop from an alveolar one. The fortition of /2/ and /3/ to homorganic stops is attested for present-day contact English. The general fortition of the supraregional standard of the can be viewed as an established transfer phenomenon especially in view of the fact that the realisations of the coronal stop in Irish, /t/ and /d/ are themselves dental, i.e. [t] and [d]. In the Kildare Poems written forms are attested in which instead of t the occurs in the ending of the third person singular of the present with verbs.

(2) a. fallyt (= fallyp) ‘falls’ b. growit (= growip) ‘grows’ c. sayt (= sayp) ‘says’

These forms are normally just registered but not commented on (see Zettersten 1967: 15; Heuser 1904: 31). It is however probable that the written t was intended to Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 7 of 21 indicate the fortition of the /2/ sound to [t]. In support of this one can quote the fact that in some cases exchanges of t and th are to be found.

(3) a. lythe ‘lit’ b. sith ‘sit’ c. nogth ‘nought’

These forms which originate in the poem The virtue of herbs are only briefly commented on by Zettersten (1967: 15); he maintains that they perhaps represent an ‘aspirated due to the influence of Irish’. By the term ‘aspirated consonant’ he probably means a lenited consonsant (Zettersten’s terminology stems from Pedersen (1897) where the term ‘aspiration’ stands for ‘’). This is however more of a guess than an explanation. If the orthography in the forms (3a-c) were intended to represent a lenited consonsant of Irish then this was still in /2/. Later the glottal /h/ corresponded to the unlenited /t/. The appearence of a lenited (fricativised) /t/ in these words and in this position is quite unlikely. The initial mutations of Irish are only triggered in certain morphological environments in Irish. Already by the time of Middle Irish the lenited forms had been denaturalised by their morphological functionalisation. In present-day contact English there are not represented at all, a situation which is inkeeping with their lack of phonetic conditioning. Two further interpretations of the th forms in (3a-c) are possible. The first is the simpler. As the /2/ sound of English had apparently being fortified to /t/ under the influence of the consonant system of Irish, the digraph th may have been used as the representation of this dental stop in medieval Irish English. This is also the case in present-day Irish English. In the latter the digraph th is interpreted as either [t] or [d]. With the second phonetic interpretation the assumption is made that the digraph th represented neither the ambi-dental fricatives /2/ or /3/ nor the dental stops [t] or [d] but rather the particular of /t/, an apico-alveolar fricative which is characteristic of southern Irish English in general. This sound will be indicated by the transcription introduced in Hickey (1984), viz. [8]. Here we are dealing with an allophone of /t/ which occurs after a and before another vowel or a pause (i.e. in an environment of phonetic weakening). This allophone is to be found in the entire Republic of Ireland (with the exception of the north) as the realisation of /t/ in the positions just described (/d/ has a similar allophone, [8]). Because of the inadequacy of the orthography its origin in the history of Irish English cannot be traced with any certainty. If the interpretation of the deviant orthography of the dialect of Forth and Bargy (see Hickey, 1987) is correct then it already existed for this early variant of Irish English. If one wishes to assume that the [8] sound already existed in medieval Irish English then one can only appeal to written forms such as those in (3a-c). Because of the few attestations in the Loscombe manuscript and their ambiguity the question of the existence of [8] in the Irish English of the late Middle Ages must be left unanswered. The assumption of the sound for the dialect of Forth and Bargy does not of necessity imply its existence for the language of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript as more than four centuries lie between the earlier and later varieties of Irish English. Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 8 of 21

3.2 Labial fricatives and

The area of labial fricatives and approximants in the Irish English of the late Middle Ages is more complex than in modern Irish English. Two factors play a dominant role here. The first concerns the varieties of English which were imported into Ireland initially and which would seem to have different realisations in the area of labial sounds vis à vis the East Midland dialect of Middle English; the second factor has to do with contact with Irish and the phonetic substitutions which resulted from this. It is obvious that the language of the Kildare Poems in its English base should resemble that of the south-west of England in the Middle English period. There are both language external and internal reasons for this. Among the former is the fact that the original immigrants to Ireland came in all probability from the south of present-day Wales and the south-west of England (the adjoining non-Celtic area) (Hogan 1927: 15; Curtis 1919: 234ff.). Among the language-internal reasons are certain phonological features which are characteristic of the south/south-west of England. The most prominent of these features is initial voicing of fricatives. Due to the different orthographic representation of voiced and voiceless labial and alveolar fricatives in English the initial voicing is quite evident in these texts.

(4) a. uadir (= father) b. uoxe (= fox) c. velle (= fell)

As the grapheme u in Middle English could represent both the vowel /u/ and the consonant /v/ one can assume the initial segment /v/ for (1a+b). The orthographic d symbolised the consonant /d/. This is not an irregularity in Middle English as the ambi-dental fricative of the present-day form is a later development (Jespersen 1909: 210; Hickey 1989). The etymological comparison of the forms in (1a-c) suggests that the initial forms for these words in east Middle English had /f/. If one now looks at forms which etymologically have /v/ one finds that a substitution has taken place. Consider the items in (2a+b).

(5) a. wysage (= visage) b. trawalle (= travail)

In order to explain the substitution one must first of all interpret the orthography. In English the grapheme w indicates the labio-velar /w/. Going on the basis of the situation in present-day contact English one can suspect that the w in (2a+b) does not represent this approximant but the bilabial fricative /ß/. This sound in Irish is the realisation of the non-palatal /v/ in front of (but not before ). The sound has been assumed for the period as well (Thurneysen 1946: 76) so that the same assumption for the late Middle Ages (around 1300) would seem to be justified. In present-day contact English the /ß/ sound does not occur for all instances of English /v/. Before front vowels one finds [v] which is the realisation of the palatal phoneme /vø/ of Irish. In view of this fact one would require an explanation for the form in (2a). It would appear that the realisation [v] for /v”/ is an innovation of Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 9 of 21

Connemara Irish which is also to be found in other dialects. In this connection a comparison with Donegal Irish may be revealing. This dialect of Irish is the most conservative of all present-day varieties of Irish (in the segmental area) (Sommerfelt 1952: 205; O’Baoill 1979: 92). It still shows the phonetic realisation [ß] and [ß"] for /v/ and /v"/ (Quiggin 1906: 111; Wagner 1979: 13f.) which correspond to the assumed values for Old Irish (Thurneysen 1946: 21f.). The symbol [ß"] represents a bilabial fricative articulated with tense and spread lips. For Donegal Irish Quiggin (loc. cit.) notes that [ß"] is being replaced by [v] more and more by younger speakers. The conclusion from these considerations is that the assumption of a bilabial articulation of the palatal phoneme /vø/ in the late Middle Irish period is justified. Thus both labial fricatives were articulated bilabially. The representation of these fricatives in the Kildare Poems poems with the grapheme w is thus not surprising. This grapheme w is not only used for bilabial fricatives in word initial and medial position but also to be found word finally.

(6) a. abowe b. hawe c. fywe

In all instances where a written Middle English v is substituted by w a final e is also to be found. This corresponds with the Middle English practice, which has been continued into Modern English in the case of the forms in (3a-c). However the vowel could represent the off-glide [.] which is present after the bilabial sounds [ß] and [ß"]. For these sounds labial approximation is required; after articulation the lips fall back into a neutral position. As both sounds are voiced a short [.] results after the friction. The final [ß] of Modern Irish can be transcribed narrowly as [ß.] as in:

(7) snámh [sn<:ß.q] ‘swim’

According to this phonetic reading, the form in (3a) above would be [q/buß.q]. The assumption of phonetic motivation for the written final e is more convincing if one considers the situation with other words. The final e, which according to many linguists (Jespersen 1909: 186f.; Prins 1974: 176) was pronounced until the 14th century, was apparently silent in the language of the Kildare Poems. Evidence for this is to be seen in spellings without the final e in the Loscombe manuscript, for example (Zettersten 1967: 15):

(8) a. tak b. mak c. those

Reverse spellings are also attested in which a non-etymological e appears finally.

(9) a. welle b. grasshe c. schalle Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 10 of 21

These spellings are just as firm evidence as are late Middle English written forms with igh for /i:/ in forms without an etymological /x/, this then showing the loss of the /x/ sound:

(10) wright for write (Wyld 1936: 305)

3.3 Loss of nasals

A general Middle English development which one can observe in the language of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript as well is the loss of a final nasal with verb forms.

(11) a. haue ‘have’ b. come ‘come’ (Zettersten 1967: 15f.)

Possessive pronoun forms are also normally realised without a nasal in medieval Irish English, with a nasal only appearing in an intervocalic position (as a nasal) in order to avoid the contact of two vowels and to provide a consonantal onset for a stressed , e.g. min, åin (Heuser 1904: 33). What is characteristic for medieval Irish English is the loss of nasals in the position immediately before coronal stops.

(12) a. fowden (= founden) ‘found’ b. powde (= pounde) ‘pound’ c. mouthes (= months) ‘months’ (Zettersten, loc.cit.)

It is furthermore to be found in a few pre-velar instances.

(13) a. fowge (= fong) ‘catch’ b. gowge (= gong) ‘young’ (Zettersten, loc.cit.)

If one regards this case of nasal loss as parallel to the more frequent loss before coronal plosives then one can establish a connection with a process in Irish and a further one in medieval Irish English. To begin with one should note that in Irish the word final sequence /nd/ does not occur. Already by the Old Irish period clusters of dental nasal plus homorganic voiced stop were simplified to a single nasal.

(14) a. clann E cland ‘children’ b. linn E lind ‘liquid’ (Thurneysen 1946: 93)

The phonotactics of Middle Irish thus prohibited a final, post-nasal /d/. It would seem legitimate to view the loss of post-nasal stops in medieval Irish English in connection with this sequential restriction in the Irish of the time.

(15) stowne ‘stand’ (Heuser 1904: 74)

The reverse spelling ferdful (for ‘fearful’, Heuser 1904: 74; Zettersten 1967: 15) Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 11 of 21 would seem to speak in favour of this interpretation although there is just a slight possibility that that /d/ in the form just quoted is epenthetic (and so phonetically real). One apparent example of this is prisund for prisun (= ‘prison’) (Heuser 1904: 31 regards this as being due to the demands of rhythm), though the same explanation, namely reverse spelling, could be postulated here.

3.4 Loss of /h/

Both in the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript one finds that an etymologically justified /h/ is often dropped. With the neutral pronoun hit ~ hyt the dropping of /h/ and with gif that of /j/ are general Middle English developments.

(16) a. is (= his) ‘his’ b. abbip (= habbip) ‘has’ c. ad (= had) ‘had’ (Heuser 1904: 31f.)

These forms could be accounted for as allegro phenomena. With the possessive pronoun of the 3rd person singular is would be a simplification of the fuller form his which has established itself in the lento style of this period (the basis of the orthography for this variety). The examples in (1b+c) are forms of the verb ‘have’. The deletion of /h/ can be regarded here as analogy. In the first person singular in the language of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript the form of the was ich /it$/. This form coalesced with the corresponding form of the verb ‘have’ and resulted in /it$qm/, a form in which the /h/ was lost after the affricate. For the Kildare Poems this would be a not unlikely explanation. But for later attestations of Irish English this is not sufficient. In the Dublin Book from the second half of the 15th century there are a number of words which show an additional /h/:

(17) a. hable (= able) b. hoke (= oak) c. hold (= old) (Henry 1958: 67)

Even the later Early Merchant Guild documents have a non- etymological /h/ as in the following forms.

(18) a. hour (= our) b. hall (= all) c. hat (= at) (Henry, loc.cit.)

If Irish English of this period (before 1600) did not have a word initial /h/ (as some dialects of present-day mainland English, e.g. London English, Wells 1982: 322) then forms such as those in (2a-c) and (3a-c) could be explained by orthographic insecurity. But present-day Irish English does not offer any evidence of a putative loss of etymological /h/ nor of a possible epenthetic /h/ in any word forms. Looking, however, at Irish one can find a tentative explanation for the appearence of /h/ in the above attestations. In Irish there is a morphologically controlled process which places a /h/ before vowel-initial words under certain grammatical conditions. The /h/ appears for instance in the third person singular feminine of the possessive pronoun in the of nouns. Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 12 of 21

(19) a. a híníon /q hin"i:n/ ‘her daughter’ b. na heaglaisí /nq haglis"i:/ ‘the churches’

As the addition of /h/ in English is certainly not grammatically motivated a degree of confusion may have arisen among contact speakers with vowel-initial forms so that /h/ was prefixed sporadically to such words.

3.5 Consonant doubling

Among the peculiarities of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript is the doubling of in a word-internal position. This doubling is assumed in the relevant literature to be a sign of vowel shortness (Zettersten 1967: 15f.; Heuser 1904: 34; Henry 1958: 65).

(20) a. delle (= deal) b. hoppe (= hope) c. nosse (= nose) d. hotte (= hot) e. bitte (= bit) f. didde (= did)

The doubling appears in words which have a short vowel in Middle English in general (1d-f). In forms such as those in (1b+c) this consonant doubling also indicates that in the language of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript there was probably no lengthening of vowels in open . However a definite decision on this is difficult to make. There may well be a case for a differential application of open syllable lengthening such that only the low vowel /a/ was lengthened if one is correct in assuming that a single consonant after a stressed vowel indicates that the latter was long, cf. forms of the verb make such as makid ‘made’. Two difficulties arise here, however. The first is that the assumption that single consonants indicate preceding long stressed vowels implies a very consistent use of orthography which simply may not have held. The second difficulty concerns the nature of the phenomenon which is termed ‘open syllable lengthening’ in the traditional literature. If it is the case, as Minkova (1982) has demonstrated with considerable conviction, that the vowel lengthening was due to loss of the schwa in forms analogous to those in (1b+c) then a form like makid should at best only show lengthening by analogy with the uninflected form of the infinitive as there is no alteration in the quantity of the preterite form until the internal /k/ is deleted. Of assistance in deciding on the present matter may be variant spellings in the Kildare Poems. One of these, Pers of Birmingham, has monosyllabic words with reflexes of /a/ and a final -e, e.g. make, take. If Minkova’s thesis that the loss of schwa led to vowel lengthening as a kind of quantity compensation is valid then one can assume a long /a:/ in nam ‘name’ and indeed in make as this has the variant mak. If the -e was phonetic then it is most unlikely to be dropped in repeated occurrences of the same word in the same short text. Furthermore the form mak rhymes with the form sake in Pers of Birmingham which is another indication of a purely orthographic -e. If the rhyming evidence holds then one can safely assume general lengthening of the low vowel /a/ as nam(e) rhymes with game and mak(e) with take. A further question which arises with the orthography in (1a-f) whether there was a phonetic basis for this doubling, i.e. whether geminates still existed in this Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 13 of 21 variety of Middle English. It is safe to assume that at this period consonant quantity differences had already been lost (Jespersen 1909: 146; Jordan/Crook 1974: 152; Kurath 1956: 441). But in Irish the phonological distinction between long and short consonants in this position still existed at this time and indeed is retained in Donegal Irish (Wagner 1979: 16; O’Baoill 1979: 88). While the possibility that the length difference was maintained in this variety of English because of preservative interference from Irish cannot be dismissed entirely, the orthographic evidence suggests that the consonant doubling had the purpose of indicating vowel shortness because the forms which exhibit such doubling do not necessarily have to be reflexes of older forms with geminates in Old English. In the non-literary texts of Irish English in the 14th and above all in the 15th century such consonant doubling is frequent with words where the only interpretation is as an indicator of vowel shortness.

(21) a. lyff (= life) b. wrytt (= write) c. gottes (= goats) d. strettes (= streets) (Henry 1958: 65)

3.6 The interpretation of the sequences ‘sch’ and ‘ss’

In Middle English texts there are a plethora of orthographical devices for representing the sound /$/. Those which were used at the beginning of the Middle English period are: s and ss (Mossé 1969: 35). Later on sch was used (Scragg 1974: 46) as were sh and ssh (Berndt 1960: 10). In the Kildare Poems the final two options are not attested (Heuser 1904: 29f.). In the Harley 913 manuscript, which contains the Kildare Poems, the sequences sch and ss occur along side simple s. The interpretation of the sequence sch as a representation of the palatal-alveolar fricative /$/ receives support from both the orthographic practice in other dialect areas on mainland England in the Middle English period and the etymological comparison with modern forms which show /$/.

(22) a. scholder ‘shoulder’ b. schame ‘shame’ c. schores ‘shores’ (Heuser 1904: 29)

The digraph ss also points to the /$/ sound. It does not occur in all the poems and excludes the option of sch.

(23) a. flesse (= flesh) b. uerisse (= fresh) (Heuser 1904: 30)

Due to the complementary distribution of sch and ss in the poems one can assume that both spellings represent the same /$/ sound. A degree of confusion is caused in some forms by the simple grapheme s. Normally it represents /s/ in the Kildare Poems; in some cases one is forced on etymological grounds to assume that it stands for /$/.

(24) a. sal (= shall) Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 14 of 21

b. sul (= should) (Heuser, loc. cit.)

Both these words are irrelevant with regard to the question of an Irish influence as etymologically they already contain /$/. There are however forms in which the orthography would seem to suggest a /$/ sound rather than /s/.

(25) a. grasshe (= grass) b. hasshe (= has) (Heuser 1904: 74; Zettersten 1967: 15)

In the Loscombe manuscript from which the forms are derived the sequence ssh is used to represent /$/. These forms are interesting in connection with the substitution of /s/ by /$/ in present-day contact English. They show /$/ after a low vowel and before a pause. In this position, however, /$/ is not attested for /s/ in contact English. The substitution in the latter variety occurs immediately preceding or following plosives and after /r/. But in this position one does not find it in the medieval manuscripts although there are ample attestations for this position which triggers the substitution in present-day contact English.

(26) a. speche b. mystere c. forst (Zettersten 1967: 16)

3.7 Phonological processes

3.7.1 Vowel raising

When compared with general East Midland Middle English texts many examples from the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript show a raising of short vowels. Above all the raising affects the vowel /e/, written e. Raising of /a/ a to /o/ o is also to be found. The first of these instances is the one which deserves particular interest as it is not usually present in other dialects of Middle English (unless as a reflex of Old English /e:/ before velars). The raising of /e/ to /i/ is to be found most frequently in syllables with secondary . It would appear to be conditioned as it only occurs before alveolars. The sounds, which triggered this raising, are usually /t/ and /s/ as well as nasals, the latter causing a more general type of raising. In post-stress position the raising is most common with plural endings.

(27) a. namis b. herbis c. synnis d. enemys (Zettersten 1967: 14)

The letters i and y probably represented the same sound as there are no grounds for assuming that a front high rounded vowel existed at any time in Irish English. This assumption would seem to be correct although the vowel /y/ had maintained itself longest in the south west varieties of Middle English. In the latter dialect /y/ was indicated orthographically by u (Fisiak 1968: 39) and largely confined to stressed syllables. In the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript i and y are free Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 15 of 21 orthographic variants of each other. For instance with the ending of the third person singular i and y ~ yth are attested without any apparent conditioning.

(29) a. fallip b. commip c. semyp (Zettersten 1967: 14f.)

Even if a /y/ sound had existed in the speech of the first settlers it would not have received any support through Irish as there are no front rounded vowels in the latter language (nor were there at any stage). The high vowel /—/ always appears in positions of secondary stress especially when these are plural forms ending in a nasal. In the Kildare Poems the two most common plural endings of Middle English, -s and -n are represented. Although the nasal plural was recessive in later Middle English (Fisiak 1968: 79) there are sufficient examples for it in both the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript.

(30) a. wortyn ‘warts’ b. wykyn ‘weeks’ c. kine ‘cows’ d. been ‘bees’ (Zettersten 1967: 16)

The raising of /e/ to /i/ is not well attested in positions other than before nasals. One example which does occur frequently shows the raising before /l/.

(31) silf ‘self’

In the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript this word is only attested with raising. The raising before nasals results in diphthongisation in those forms in which a stressed vowel is present. It also involves cluster simplification and allophonic shift.

(32) a. streinp b. leinp (Heuser 1904: 35)

In these forms the medial stop /k/ in the cluster has been simplified out. The nasal has been shifted from a presumably velar to a dental point of articulation. In this respect these forms are exactly parallel to their realisations in present-day contact English. In Middle English the vowel in both the words just quoted is /î/. Because of a raising tendency associated with the following nasal the /î/ is diphthongised. The end element of the new corresponds to the vowel found in the forms with monophthongal raising. Parallel to the vowel raising in unstressed position there is in the Kildare Poems and above all in the Loscombe manuscript a vowel shift in post-stress position before /r/. The shift is not identical with the lowering of vowels before /r/ which is attested in present-day contact English (and in the history of English). Nonetheless it would seem to be a contact phenomenon. The shift is to a high back vowel /u/ as is attested in the following forms:

(33) a. wondur b. sommur (Zettersten 1967: 15)

The orthography is in accord with the Old and Middle Irish practice of indicating a velar sound by a preceding /u/ (Greene 1973: 127). What is interesting in this connection is the fact that the velarisation with /r/ would appear to have been Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 16 of 21 particularly marked (cf. Thurneysen (1946: 97) who speaks of ‘r-quality’ (= velarisation) for instance with Old Irish fiur ‘man’ (dative singular) from fer (nominative singular)). The velarisation of /r/ in (6a+b) was probably strengthened by the /u/ of the first, stressed syllable of the above forms and thus lead to this orthographic representation.

3.7.2 Metathesis

In the history of Irish metathesis is well attested. It is already to be seen in the many orthographic variants of words in Old Irish (Thurneysen 1946: 113). In the Middle Irish period metathesis is frequent with loan-words from Anglo-Norman and Latin. Here it is necessary to distinguish different types of metathesis. On the basis of the exchanged segments one can offer a provisional classification: (i) metathesis in which /s/ and a alter their sequence and (ii) metathesis in which either two sonorants or an /r/ and a (short) vowel change in sequence. The first type is to be seen with loan-words, but it is not attested in the Kildare Poems.

(34) a. coláiste /-$t"-/ E college /-dg-/ b. páiste /-$t"-/ E page /-dg-/

The second type is to be found in the Kildare Poems and in the Loscombe manuscript in as much as a short vowel and /r/ are involved.

(35) a. fryst E first b. forst E frost c. Gradener E Gardener d. prog E porg (Zettersten 1967: 16)

This metathesis only takes place with short vowels; this restriction is in keeping with that which applies to present-day Irish English. It is difficult to interpret this metathesis as a transfer phenomenon. For one thing the first type of metathesis is to be found neither in the Kildare Poems nor in later Irish English. For another one should not attach undue importance to the occurrence of metathesis involving a short vowel and /r/ as it is almost universal in dialects of mainland Britain. It is already quite common in Old English (Campbell 1959: 184f.). It continues in the Middle English period and indeed reverses many instances of earlier metathesis.

(36) a. gærs F grass b. cerse F cress c. brinnen F burn (Luick 1940: 917)

In Old English the form in (2b) is actually recorded. Thus one could just as well postulate that the metathised form was imported with the original settlers rather than arising on Irish soil. The continuation of /r/ ~ short vowel metathesis in Irish English should be Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 17 of 21 seen not so much in the light of an instance of direct transfer phenomenon but rather as a type of linguistic behaviour which gained support due to similar phenomema in Irish.

3.7.3 Epenthesis

Epenthesis is a phonological process which is quite extensive in Irish (just as is metathesis). It is not just quantitatively common, the number of cluster types which are susceptible to epenthesis is quite high. In present-day contact English epenthesis is to be found as a transfer phenomenon. It occurs in Irish English as well, albeit not with quite the distribution as in Irish. Epenthesis is a general process which is attested for many languages and varieties. Here, as with other phonological processes, one can maintain that the significance of a process, which is attested in the contact language, diminuishes with the degree that the process in question is one which is of a general nature. The difficulty with ascertaining whether epenthesis is recorded in a written text lies in the fact that it is not usually orthographically represented. In the documents under consideration here there are however a number of cases of epenthesis which are evident in writing. If one is to draw conclusions from the forms one has in a given text about the language as a whole then one must ask to what extent standardisation played a role. For instance in the written documents for the dialect of Forth and Bargy there are a whole series of forms with epenthesis. In the Kildare Poems on the other hand there are far fewer instances. Nonetheless these are interesting due to the phonotactic environment of the epenthesis in question. When viewing epenthesis one finds that depending on its extent in a language or variety it is liable to occur most frequently in medial or final position and, given that, in initial position. The language of the Kildare Poems shows epenthesis in word initial position, thus implying that it had maximal epenthesis; consider the following forms with epenthetic vowels medially and initially.

(37) a. Auerill (= April) b. uerisse (= fresh) (Heuser 1904: 29)

The form in (1b) in which the epenthesis occurs in a word initial cluster is a hapax legomenon in the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript (the form would seem to be attested isolatedly in mainland dialects of Middle English as well). (1a) is recorded several times, once in the poem ‘Pers of Birmingham’ (one of the Kildare Poems) and twice in the poem ‘Virtue of Herbs’ in the Loscombe manuscript; there is a slight possibility that (1a) was imported with epenthesis already contained in the word form as it is also recorded in other Middle English dialects, e.g. in Scottish English (Onions 1966: 46). For the existence of epenthesis in the language of the Kildare Poems and the Loscombe manuscript two further facts can be cited. The first is that epenthesis is recorded in the dialect of Forth and Bargy extensively, a dialect which, as has been noted above, is closely connected with the language of the Kildare Poems (see Heuser 1904: 56ff.; Zettersten 1967: 13f.; Henry 1958: 75ff.). The second fact refers to language internal arguments, the main one being that is not attested in the Kildare Poems. If one considers forms with internal unstressed vowels between segments which together would represent a legal syllable onset then one still does not find syncope: Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 18 of 21

(38) a. wonderis / wondris b. breeren / breren c. noreren / norren

Now there is a causal connection between epenthesis and syncope. In those languages in which epenthesis is extensively recorded syncope is hardly known (for instance in Dutch, see Hickey, 1985). Thus the lack of syncope in the language of the Kildare Poems would offer supportive evidence for the view that it also showed epenthesis.

3.7.4 Final devoicing and fortition after sonorants

Apart from changes in place of articulation (fricative to plosive) there are other alterations in the area of coronal . What I am alluding to here is final devoicing which is well attested in the language of the Kildare Poems.

(39) a. callit ‘called’ b. ihelpyt ‘helped’ c. purget ‘purged’ d. delet ‘dealed’ (Heuser 1904: 31; Zettersten 1967: 15)

Despite these forms one cannot speak of general final devoicing. There is for instance no such devoicing for labials and velars; it would appear to be restricted to alveolars and dentals. This fact is connected with an aspect of final devoicing in medieval Irish English. It only occurs when the sounds affected are in unstressed syllables. As there are no attestations of voiced final labial or velar stops in unstressed syllables in the Kildare Poems alveolar stops remain the only sounds which are affected by this process. Final devoicing is viewed here as a phonological process which is phonetically motivated: in anticipation of the pause after a word a stop becomes voiceless when it is also in an unstressed syllable, i.e. when the decline in phonation within the word has already begun in the unstressed syllable. There is a further process which when viewed phonetically can have the same effect as final devoicing, but which is differently motivated. In a position after a , above all after /n/, a plosive in medieval Irish English shows a tendency to be devoiced. A condition on this process is that the stop in question be homorganic with the preceding sonorant.

(40) a. fent ‘fend’ b. spent ‘spend’ c. trent ‘separated’ (Heuser 1904: 31)

In order to distinguish between the two kinds of voiceless final stops the terms ‘final devoicing’ and ‘fortition after sonorants’ are used here. Although fortition after sonorants is quite well attested for present-day contact English and in general Irish English, the significance of the forms in (2a-c) in terms of interference is slight as fortition after /n/ is common in mainland varieties of Middle English. Especially in late Middle English many instances of a preterite in /d/ after /n/ changing to /t/ with simultaneous loss of the preterite ending are frequently recorded. Raymond Hickey The Beginnings of Irish English Page 19 of 21

3.8 Concluding remarks

Reviewing the selection of features of medieval Irish English I have presented here one can maintain that the language in the form in which it has been passed down to us shows both the influence of Irish (contact) and traces of the mainland dialects from which English in Ireland is derived. The deviations are on the whole minor and not as numerous and as striking as one would perhaps imagine given that the authors of the Kildare Poems were obviously native speakers of Irish or at the very least good bilinguals. If one compares the language to that of the dialect of Forth and Bargy of the early modern period then one sees that the latter is far more deviant from any variety of mainland English than the language of the Kildare Poems, written some four hundred years earlier. But as suggested above, the relative standardness of the English used could be a consequence of the desire of the authors to use an acceptable written form of the language rather than to offer a genuine reflection of the spoken English of their period.

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