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Boofi 6HEEH SIATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY I RUNIC EVIDENCE OF LAMINOALVEOLAR AFFRICATION IN OLD ENGLISH Tae-yong Pak A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1969 Approved by Doctoral Committee BOOfi 6HEEH SIATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY I 428620 Copyright hy Tae-yong Pak 1969 ii ABSTRACT Considered 'inconsistent' by leading runologists of this century, the new Old English runes in the palatovelar series, namely, gar, calc, and gar-modified (various modi­ fications of the old gifu and cën) have not been subjected to rigorous linguistic analysis, and their relevance to Old English phonology and the study of Old English poetry has remained unexplored. The present study seeks to determine the phonemic status of the new runes and elucidate their implications to alliteration. To this end the following methods were used: 1) The 60-odd extant Old English runic texts were examined. Only four monuments (Bewcastle, Ruthwell, Thornhill, and Urswick) were found to use the new runes definitely. 2) In the four texts the words containing the new and old palatovelar runes were isolated and tabulated according to their environments. The pattern of distribution was significant: gifu occurred thirteen times in front environments and twice in back environments; cen, eight times front and once back; gar, nine times back; calc, five times back and once front; and gar-modified, twice front. Although cen and gifu occurred predominantly in front environments, and calc and gar in back environments, their occurrences were not complementary. 3) To interpret the data minimal or near minimal pairs with the palatovelar consonants occurring in front or back environments were examined. They disclosed the existence in Old English of two sets of stop phonemes, voiced and voiceless, each set comprising front and back phonemes. The results showed that each of the five palatovelar runes had a phonemic role. Especially, the parallel presence in the Ruthwell Cross of gar-modified and calc, representing the allophones of the back phoneme and seemingly contradicting the phoneme principle (i.e. awareness or nonawareness of distinctiveness), could be explained by considering the binary contrast of each allophone with regard only to the front phoneme (represented by cen), without a ternary comparison of the back allophones themselves. This indicated a radically different phonetic quality in the front phoneme and, upon / iii exploration of the phonetic possibilities, the front phoneme was distinctive chiefly in its position of articulation, the most probable position being laminoalveolar. Since the aspirate or affricate release was present in the stop phoneme in all positions, a stop sound articulated at the alveolar ridge was found to resemble the New English affricate closely, if not exactly. This conclusion did not conflict with the evidence of alliteration, for it could be shown that the affricate and the stop alliterated, without the poet’s or listener's resorting to poetic tradition or •eye-rimes'. To sum up, the invention of the new palatovelar runes arose from a phonemic necessity and the laminoalveolar affricate (or near-affricate) has existed in English since at least the eighth century. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION............ .......... 1 CHAPTER II. ENVIRONMENTS OF NEW VELAR RUNES... 26 ...................... ............ 28 2. cen..... ............................... 35 3. gar..... ............................... 43 4. calc................................ 45 5. gar-modified..... ...................... 48 CHAPTER III. PHONEMICS.*............... ....... 50 1. Phonemes represented by gifu and gar.... 76 2. Phonemes represented by cen, calc, and gar-modified................. 93 APPENDIX I. RUNIC MONUMENTS CONTAINING NEW VELAR RUNES..................... 109 APPENDIX II. RUNIC TEXTS NOT CONTAINING NEW VELAR RUNES............... 124 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................ 164 I V LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1. Runic Transliteration.................. 25 Table 2. Distribution of Palatovelar Runes......... 27 I CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION The Old English invention of new runes in the palatovelar 1 series has provoked the attention of scholars investigating the development of the English affricate /?/ and /§/ from Proto- 2 Germanic /k/ and /g/. ^That is, the invention of gar $4, calc and gar-modified 5$ on the model of gifu and cSn . The clumsy designation ' gar- modified' is used throughout here, because no extant MS fufjorc or alphabet names it. Note that there are other runes, i.e. ior , eoh J* , and hae gl , which appear with various palatovelar values (see below Chapter III, 79-80), but their phonemic status is not the direct concern of the present study. 2 For the New English /2/ and /§/ see below Chapter III, pp. 104-5, and for Proto-Germanic /k/ and /g/, Chapter III, pp. 76-8 and 93. The phonotaxonomy used in the present study is based on the matrices of phonetic features in Charles F. Hockett, A Manual of Phonology: International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol.XXI, No. 4 (1955), figs. 9-10 on pp. 32-3 for vowels and fig. 11 on p. 37 for consonants. These matrices employ conventional notations according to the place and manner of articulation and may be readily correlated with the International Phonetic Alphabet. To avoid ambiguity, however, a verbal description is provided to accompany a phonetic or phonemic notation, e.g. palatal stop [kg], glide /j/. The 'binary distinctive feature system', proposed in Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar M. Fant, and Morris Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (Cambridge-Mass., 1963) and Jakobson and Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), is not adopted, because the gain in economy (the principal motive of the proposal, cf. Halle, "In Defense of the Number Two," Studies presented to Joshua Whatmough (The Hague, 1957), 65-72) is not apparent in the discussion of the present problem. The positions of articulation from the velum to the alveoli are therefore represented as a continuous scale with quinquenary or more oppositions (back dorsovelar, front dorsovelar, centrodomal, laminodomal, apicodomal, larainoalveolar, apicoalveolar, apicodental, etc.). This traditional method seems to have more phonetic realism and explains the phenomenon of affrication more satisfactorily than the binary representation of velars and 2 Among the early scholars Victor showed the distribution of the new and old runes in ’palatal' and ’guttural' environments but 3 - did not interpret its significance. BUlbring considered the cen-rune to represent the palatal sound [kxj but did not think that it signified the laminoalveolar affricate (_£_!• Wyld, relying on the findings of Victor's work, .contended however that cen stood for a front palatal stop.Kluge, on the other hand, believed the palatalization of Germanic velars to have begun in the continental period of Anglo- Frisian 'Dialektkontinuitat' and presented the new velar runes in the inscriptions of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses as his primary evidence for 'vollzogene Palatalisierung' or laminoalveolar affrication. dentals (or alveolars) as 'optimal' opposites: compact and grave, on the one hand, and diffuse and acute, on the other, for which see Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries, pp. 10 and 43. For an objective appraisal of the binary method see Pavle Ivid, "Roman Jakobson and the Growth of Phonology," Linguistics: An International Review, XIII (The Hague, 1965), 35-78. Ivid notes especially (on 63): "The close relations and frequent mutual substitution between velars and dentals, alongside their consistent differentiation from labials, does not confirm an analysis which presumes definite connections between labials and velars (grave) and between labials and dentals (diffuse) but none between dentals (acute, diffuse) and velars (grave, compact)." 3 Wilhelm Viator, Die northumbrischen Runensteine (Marburg, 1895), 31-2. Karl D. BUlbring, "Review of Die northumbrischen Runensteine by W. ViBtor," Anglia Beiblatt, IX (1898), 74-5. ^Henry C. Wyld, "Contributions to the History of the Guttural Sounds in English," Transactions of the Philological Society of London (1898), 137-8. ^Friedrich Kluge, "Geschichte der englischen Sprache," Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, ed. Hermann Paul, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Strassburg, 1901), 989-90 and 996. 3 Penzl, however, aided by a more refined awareness than his precedessors had displayed of the discrepancies that can exist between writing and speech, pointed out that: "Orthographic evidence in support of either [tS] or [tj] for Old English is inconclusive . because orthography never lends itself to detailed phonetic interpretation." Avoiding ’phonetic’ speculation, he concluded on the evidence of the Old English back runes, palatal diacritics, and other orthographic data that there was a ’phonemic’ split of Germanic /k/ in Old English.? However, he did not study runic evidence in sufficient detail and failed to specify the distinctive features of the g newly formed phonemes. More recently, Moulton has made an exhaustive investigation of Germanic palatovelars but in considering the palatal and velar allophones of /k/ and /g/, which "came to stand in contrast ^Herbert Penzl, "The Phonemic Split of Germanic k in Old English," Language, XXIII (1947), 35 and 41. 8 Penzl would thus appear to subscribe to the ’fictionalist view’ of the phoneme, for which see W. Freeman Twaddell, "On Defining the Phoneme," Language Monograph No. 16 (1935), reprinted
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