Review of:

Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.) 2004. Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang. Pb. 405 pp. ISBN 3-03910-362-8.

(August 2006, HSL/SHL 6)

This volume contains a selection of thirteen papers presented at the newly fledged International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD) hosted by the University of Bergamo in September 2003. Following an introduction by the two editors, Marina Dossena and Roger Lass, the papers are divided into two thematic sections: Methods (comprising six papers) and Data (seven papers). The volume also closes with a transcript of a debate on methodological issues concerning the future study of English historical dialectology. In this review I shall provide a summary of all the papers before looking in greater detail at a number of topics and issues raised by some of the contributors.

The first paper, by Roger Lass, draws attention to the fact that so many medieval texts have been tampered with by modern editors. Such texts are often quite useless for linguistic study. Lass puts it rather polemically: “The creation of conflated texts that are passed off as ‘the works of x’ is fantasy or fraud” (Dossena and Lass 2004:39). Lass remarks that for years he quoted Chaucer when actually he was quoting “Benson”. The editing methodology of recreating an archetype text marks a rift between the ideals of linguists and literary philologists. Lass endorses a new alternative which may soon be available: the Protean Corpus, under development at the University of Edinburgh, which will allow linguists and like-minded philologists to access medieval texts electronically that have not been doctored to suit editors’ literary preferences.

Margaret Laing’s paper investigates the scribal transmission of medieval texts. Using illustrative textual examples, Laing differentiates and describes the work of three archetypal scribes: the copier, who provides an exact copy of an original text; the translator, who generally translates texts into his own dialect; and the mixer, who has occasion to copy and translate during scribal work. Clearly, cognizance of the scribal nature of a medieval text has implications for the assessment of its dialect, and these implications hold not just for English but for medieval manuscript transmission in general.

The topic of Keith Williamson’s study is chronicity and space in historical dialectology. Williamson discusses how the linguistic foundation set by Ferdinand de Saussure can be viewed in conjunction with the important work being carried out in Edinburgh: the medieval atlas projects and the associated corpora of tagged texts referred to in Lass’s paper. The only qualm I had with this paper was the brainwave of Williamson (Dossena and Lass 2004:131–134) that a projection algorithm may be able to provide lost linguistic information, e.g. to fill lacunae in existing dialect assemblages – an idea that reminded me of some of the warnings issued in Lass’s paper.

Mieko Ogura and William Wang argue that linguistic selection and language games are important mechanisms in language evolution. They discuss (amongst other things) the Great Vowel Shift, word-order change from OV to VO in Old English, and various simplifications of inflectional endings in nouns and verbs. I was not convinced by all the proposals suggested by the two authors, but their arguments are nonetheless thought-provoking, and the cross-disciplinary scientific approach they take is a welcome change.

Anneli Meurman-Solin’s paper presents a very detailed discussion of methodological considerations to be observed when compiling and tagging corpora; in particular, the author draws from her present experiences of tagging the manuscript-based Corpus of Scottish Correspondence 1542–1708 (approx. 255,000 words). Meurman-Solin looks specifically at how such a corpus should be designed so that it can be manipulated in order to reconstruct a typology of clausal connectives.

Raymond Hickey asks whether the absence of a feature from historical corpora is sufficient to conclude that it did not exist in the speech community whose language is represented in the corpora, and especially when the corpus includes texts which were intended to portray, for instance, vernacular speech. In this explorative essay Hickey looks at the origins of two linguistic features – the second person plural youse and non-standard habitual marking strategies – which have often been associated with Irish English, but are considered to have spread from Irish English into other English varieties in Britain and elsewhere.

Peter Kitson questions the methods and results of previous scholars in localizing Old English dialects from the vantage point of his own research, which pays particular attention to Old English land charters. Kitson argues for a number of revisions in the placement of several Old English texts. He also rekindles (as does Richard Hogg in this volume) the tiresome debate about the localization of Harawuda where Farman, the scribe of Rushworth 1, was a priest. We shall all gain a better insight into Kitson’s view of Old English dialectology with the publication of his two forthcoming books referred to in this and previous articles.

Richard Hogg disputes the linguistic evidence for the traditional distinction in Old English studies of North Northumbrian (principally the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual) versus South Northumbrian (the Northumbrian portion of the Rushworth Gospels). To this end, Hogg investigates what he views as the three most salient features: 1. development of diphthongs or Diphthong Height Harmony; 2. Palatal Diphthongization; 3. w-rounding. Hogg argues that these textual variations seem to be quite trivial and could just as easily be explained away as orthographic variation/scribal preferences, concluding that “there is in fact very little reason for assuming that the scribes of the late Northumbrian texts originated from markedly different parts of the country” (Dossena and Lass 2004:253).

Merja Stenroos’s paper comes as a result of her work on the Middle English transmission of orthography and phonology as part of the Middle English Grammar project now underway at the Universities of Glasgow and Stavanger. At the time of this paper’s composition, we are told that the project team are working on and refining a large database which uses data from LALME and the ongoing LAEME project. Stenroos’s paper also presents a pilot study for a single orthographic feature: variable (th), i.e. the different representations of the voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives in Middle English. The observation that there was a difference between northern and southern Middle English usage was remarked upon in Jordan’s Handbook of Middle English Grammar (1974:185) and later became part of a thorough investigation by Michael Benskin (1977, 1982). Stenroos is able to add further support to Benskin’s already convincing analysis and makes additional observations on how interdental fricatives are rendered in southern documents according to text genre.

Cuesta and Ledesma’s paper is “part of an ongoing research project on Northern dialects, which aims to describe to what extent Northern features are represented in writing after the fifteenth century” (Dossena and Lass 2004:287). The paper is divided into three sections: spelling, morphology and syntax, and lexis. While the sections on orthography and lexis do not yield a great deal of dialectal information (Survey of English Dialects [= SED] informants interviewed in the 1950’s provide a richer quarry on this score), a great many interesting features are reviewed in the morphosyntax section. In particular, the two authors give a good number of examples of the zero-genitive construction, e.g. My brother Christofer children (Dossena and Lass 2004:297), and the Northern Subject Rule, e.g. Also I gyf(f) and bequethes (Dossena and Lass 2004:298). It should be noted that the zero-genitive and the Northern Subject Rule were both moribund at the time of the SED. The research carried out by these two authors is very much welcomed and is bound to shed more light on the earlier linguistic situation of northern dialects.

Jeremy Smith offers a very useful and insightful essay on the development of the long vowels in medieval Scotland and northern England. In addition, Smith is able to review some parts of Aitken’s recently edited posthumous work of 2002, while dealing with the northern vowels from his own original and systemic perspective. According to Smith, Norse had a dramatic influence on the evolution of the Northumbrian vowels and, in effect, on Northumbrian phonology in general.

Joan Beal promotes the use of eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries as a resource for information about dialect pronunciations and contemporaneous attitudes towards these. Referring to works by Thomas Sheridan, John Walker and others, Beal discusses an array of features including the foot–strut split, h-dropping and the Northumberland burr. I think it is fair to say that not a great deal of new information can be obtained regarding the geographical spread of these features from the eighteenth-century works used by Beal. Indeed most if not all the features discussed by Beal are attested already in the seventeenth century or earlier. But what Beal does demonstrate successfully is how the eighteenth-century accounts chronicle the attitudes towards provincial pronunciations, and these are often quite enlightening. It is also surprising to observe how many provincial pronunciations persisted amongst some of the upper classes of the time.

The final paper, by Susan Fitzmaurice, examines how literary practices and printing practices affected the language of individuals and that of printed genres. In this study, Fitzmaurice surveys a number of linguistic features in personal letters and published essays of a group of over a dozen writers who were contemporaries, friends or collaborators of the essayist Joseph Addison. The linguistic features under investigation mainly concern orthography: ’em vs. them, tis vs. its; don’t, can’t etc. vs. do not, cannot; tho’ vs. though; the archaic third person singular present indicative doth, hath vs. does, has; and congruence you was vs. you were. The most significant conclusion to be drawn from this corpus study is that the representation of language in printed texts is varied but that the variation can be put down to different house styles and practices of publishers rather than preferences of individual authors. From an editorial perspective, the features under discussion in this paper are, in the reviewer’s opinion, pretty crude. A search for more subtle linguistic features, such as clausal connectives (see Meurman-Solin’s paper), would no doubt have given us a greater insight into the stylistic preferences of the individual authors.

With such a variety of linguistic topics spread over so many centuries, this volume should find a large readership and stimulate much future research. In the remaining paragraphs I shall single out just a few of the many issues and topics raised by some of the contributors. As I have mentioned, Ogura and Wang’s paper proposes solutions to some of the classic developments of the English language, such as the enigmatic origin of the 3rd person singular present indicative ending -s (Dossena and Lass 2004:157–159). Ogura/Wang argue, plausibly I think at first, that although the ending was already present in tenth-century Northumbrian texts, it was slow to catch on elsewhere, and was therefore probably a trait not spread by socially influential people. Because the change started in the North, Ogura/Wang conclude that “the -s form is an adoption from ON in face-to-face interactions of ordinary English people with their Danish counterpart” (Dossena and Lass 2004:158). Due to immigration from the East Midlands to London during the second half of the fourteenth century, Ogura/Wang argue that the -s form then diffused considerably (Dossena and Lass 2004:158). Although the gist of this scenario is conceivable – parallels can be drawn with Samuels’ proposal (1989:111-112) – the Norse data is problematic.

Ogura and Wang note that the “ON third person singular present indicative ends with -ar and it is plausible that English speakers replaced the unfamiliar ON ending -ar with -es(-as)” (Dossena and Lass 2004:158). The intention for the English to replace ON -ar with -es seems to stem from the fact that OE speakers noticed that in several other inflectional categories ON -r corresponded to OE -s (Dossena and Lass 2004:158–159). As a consequence, “English speakers replaced the unfamiliar ON ending -ar with -es(-as)” (Dossena and Lass 2004:158). But I doubt whether English speakers were so linguistically acute as to posit such an “educated” analogy based on the few sundry correspondences listed by Ogura and Wang. Another reason for the replacement of third person singular -s is also given, namely that “the replacement of the ON r originated from Germanic z and the sound was probably close to /z/” (Dossena and Lang 2004:159). Although the phoneme in question was probably close to [z] in Germanic, this observation has little to do with the linguistic situation in ninth-century Northumbria where in Viking Norse its reflex is thought to have been a voiceless or palatal /r/ (often represented as r). Whether r, too, could have been interpreted as /s/ by Northumbrian Old English speakers is another question, but it should at least have been observed that r, whatever its precise phonetic quality, was never rendered or interpreted as an /s/ in Old Norse loans found in Old English, but always as r. These and other problems ought to have been addressed, such as why the -s does not spread to the plural in southern dialects, as it did in the third person, unlike the north where -s occurred in the plural already in the Old English period. And how does the development of the third person singular -s ending tie in chronologically with the development of the Northern Subject Rule? I hope the authors will tackle these grey areas in a future analysis.

One of the linguistic features discussed in Hickey’s paper is the origin of the second person plural form youse. Although there are a large number of devices available to differentiate StE you pl. from StE you sg., e.g. y’all, y’uns, ye, you lot, and Caribbean unu, the variant youse/yez [ju(:)z], [jiz], [jez], [jiz] is often assumed to be of Irish English origin, though today it is also found in colloquial American, Australian, New Zealand and South African English (Dossena and Lass 2004:200). The Irish English use of youse is thought to have been borne from a strategy of Irish speakers who were wont to distinguish the second person plural pronoun, as it exits in Irish sibh [ʃɪv]. The curiosity which Hickey addresses is the fact that such a form youse/yez is completely absent from eighteenth-century Irish English literature, including over fifty plays; Hickey also points out that the variant is absent from Maria Edgeworth’s (1767–1849) novel Castle Rackrent (1800), which attempts to display the speech of the native Irish realistically. Hickey goes on to note that the first attestation given by the OED is from Samuel Lover’s novel Handy Andy: A tale of Irish life (1842), which accords with Hickey’s Corpus of Irish English, where no attestations are to be found before the mid-nineteenth century. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century the form is common enough and is found in the works of John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan (Dossena and Lass 2004:201).

On the whole, Hickey does seem to agree that the historical data, though somewhat tight, could nevertheless support the view of Irish influence on Southern Hemisphere and US English, as there was probably still enough mid-century Irish immigration to provide the necessary impetus for youse to catch on. One further fact that seems to support Irish origin of youse is that the form is found in only those areas of Britain where there was a proportionally considerable Irish influence. In this regard, Hickey cites Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow, adding that the form has spread from Glasgow into central Scotland.

It should be pointed out that the form youse, often pronounced [ju:z] or [jəz], is at least as common on Teesside where substantial nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish immigration is also on record. In an abstract for a recent conference (NWAV 34) Barbara Fennell and Carmen Llamas tell us that “From the 1870’s onwards, Irish-born economic migrants accounted for one in five inhabitants in Middlesbrough, making the relative size of the Irish-born population second only to that of Liverpool in nineteenth century Britain” (see also Chase 1995).[1] It has often been noticed how Middlesbrough English, with several other unusual linguistic features, such as intonation patterns, nurse-vowel fronting to [ε:] and affrication of stops t > ts and k > kx/x, is often perceived as Scouse (see Kerswill and Williams 2000), and it will be instructive to see how many of these linguistic features can or cannot be accounted for by Irish influence in ongoing research.

I find it telling that youse, nurse-fronting, stop-frication and many other linguistic features are foreign to the now-neighbouring[2] traditional Yorkshire North Riding dialects such as in rural Cleveland where I grew up, in contrast to the conurbation on Teesside (e.g. Middlesbrough, Eston, South Bank, Grangetown, and Ormesby). Nevertheless, I can recall quite clearly from a very young age how a friend of mine used (and still uses) youse as a second person plural pronoun, which was new and foreign to me at the time (though never worth commenting upon). He cannot have acquired youse from the “woolybacks” of rural East Cleveland, rather it is an imported form learned from his parents who moved from urban Teesside.

Stenroos, in discussing the Middle English Grammar Project, makes an observation which I think is of great moment: “Scottish texts are left out [of the project – SL], on the assumption that the history of spelling in medieval Scotland is essentially a different story from that of England” (Dossena and Lass 2004:260). To me, this assumption is most confusing because Stenroos goes on to argue that the development of the spelling of the voiceless and voiced interdental fricative th in medieval northern England was essentially “a different story” from that of southern England, too.

Were Scottish spelling part of the project, then what is now just an “assumption” may in future have been put on firmer ground, and indeed it would have been advantageous to study the differences in traditions to see inevitable reciprocal influences, especially with regard to Scots and northern Middle English. It would have been interesting, for instance, to learn about the situation of variable th in Scots too! (The reader is advised to trudge to the library and consult Benskin 1982, where Scottish scribal forms have not been exonerated from the discussion. And why should they be?) Thus, a survey of Scotland and England may have yielded significant results. (Witness how the SED stops at the Scottish border – how valuable it would have been, had the questionnaire been applied to at least southern Lowland Scots dialects, too. Not all the linguistic features treated in the SED were surveyed in the Survey of Scottish Dialects and vice-versa.) As Stenroos’s paper illustrates, in the early Middle English period there are clear indications of differences between northern and southern spelling traditions as well. The northern English spelling tradition, especially in the earliest period, shows a great affinity with Scottish spelling, not least because in the older medieval period the phonology of the two regions was closer than anywhere else.

Smith attributes two of the most salient developments of the northern long vowels to Scandinavian influence. The developments in question are: the raising of OE ā to long /æ/ and the fronting of OE ō > long /ø/ (the precise phonetic nature of the latter ME vowel is still open to debate). With regard to the latter change, Smith writes: “it seems likely that the change in quality of Vowel 7 [i.e. OE ō – SL] relates to Norse; this is indicated inter alia by its present day geographical distribution” (Dossena and Lass 2004:317). Smith does not go into much detail on the Norse data, but refers to Samuels (1989). As anybody who has read this article will know, Samuels is extremely vague in his analysis of the Scandinavian data and unforthcoming with references to secondary literature to support his unconventional view of Norse phonology.

It has still not been demonstrated how and why Norse speakers should have fronted ō. The fact that ō-fronting occurred in the North, and that there was Norse settlement in the North as well, is obvious enough, but it is the job of the historical dialectologist to scrutinize the data in a more scientific way before making any inferences, and this has not been done by Smith or Samuels. In the discussion which closes the volume Michael Benskin reflects upon an observation made by Anthonij Dees several years ago that English dialectologists, due to an over-keen interest in settlement history, “have been fixated with boundaries, in a way that French dialectologists just never have” (Dossena and Lass 2004:386). Judging by the papers discussed in this review, Dees’s observation does not apply to the volume as a whole. Yet Smith’s article, in places at least, does seem to illustrate a case in point. 

Stephen Laker, English Department/LUCL, University of Leiden(Contact the reviewer.) 

References:

Aitken, A.J. 2002. The Older Scots vowels: a history of the stressed vowels of Older Scots from the beginnings to the eighteenth century. Edited by Caroline Macafee. Edinburgh: The Scottish Text Society.

Benskin, Michael. 1977. “Local Archives and Middle English Dialects”. Journal of the Society of Archivists 5, 500–514.

Benskin, Michael. 1982. “The letters <þ> and <y> in Later Middle English, and Some Related Matters”. Journal of the Society of Archivists 7, 13–30.

Chase, M. 1995. “The Teesside Irish in the Nineteenth Century”. Cleveland History 69, 3–34.

Jordan, Richard. 1974. Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology. Translated and revised by Eugene J. Crook. The Hague: Mouton.

Kerswill, Paul and Williams, Ann. 2002. “Dialect recognition and speech community focusing in new and old towns in England: the effects of dialect levelling, demography and social networks”. In: Daniel Long and Dennis Preston (eds.), A handbook of perceptual dialectology, Vol. 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 178–207.

Samuels, M.L. 1989. “The Great Scandinavian Belt”. In: Margaret Laing (ed.), Middle English Dialectology. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 106–115 [reprinted from Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem F. Koopman and Frederike van der Leek (eds.). 1985. Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 269–281].