ESPECÍFICOS:

A significant distributional difference was identified in 6.1, namely that many Late British consonants do not take part in a length contrast. This observation is particularly relevant for a number of plosive consonants. The Late British voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ did not contrast for length intervocalically as in (Pre-)Old English. Rather, in Late British these consonants are known to have been phonetically long only, and the same holds true for the bilabial nasal /m/ and the sibilant /s/. As for the voiced plosives, a contrast in length existed for Pre-Old English /d/; but the same cannot really be said for the voiced labial and voiced velars, since here we find a

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Whether the cester-names, which are prominent in the central and western Midlands (see Map 7), could in part be explained by early Vulgar Latin influence must be left to future researchers to decide. The old notion that these names result from Anglo-Norman spelling pronunciations was dismissed as too simplistic by Clark (1991).

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contrast of fricative and plosive: /-β-/ vs. /-bb-/ and /-ɣ-/ vs. /-ɡɡ-/ (see Table 12). The medial voiced stops of Late British /b, d, ɡ/ derive from lenited PCl. /p, t, k/ as well as from rare long stops (4.2.2.1), though it is thought that the original long voiced plosives were no longer phonetically long in Late British and Old British. Thus, the disparities between both sound systems may well have brought about interference errors in a situation of language shift. It should be noted, however, that a length-type contrast did exist elsewhere in the Late British phonological system, i.e. for /n, l, r/, and so the linguistic phenomenon of length contrast would therefore not have been entirely outlandish for Britons. Crucially, it must be noted that during the Late British period the Brittonic quantitative system came into a state of collapse in a way similar to Vulgar Latin and, much later, in Middle English. However, the first signs of a breakdown in quantity in English are found in the Northumbrian Old English witnesses.

A remarkable feature of late Northumbrian Old English is the curious doubling of consonant graphs in words where, for etymological reasons, no geminate is expected, e.g. Lindisfarne Gospels: eatta ‘eat’, rioppas ‘rip’, breccane ‘break’, forcumman ‘be rejected’, cottum dat.pl. ‘closets’, scippes ‘ship’s’; Rushworth Gospels: foett ‘feet’, lyttel ‘little’. The first and only detailed examination of the problem was made by Luick (1899, especially pages 58–71). Luick’s article provides a survey of etyma attesting non-etymological geminates in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Northumbrian section of the Rushworth Gospels; a thorough analysis of the Durham Ritual was never completed, though similar unexpected double consonants were signalled by Lindelöf (1890: 70–1), e.g. spreccanne ‘speak’, frummcend ‘firstborn’, vlittes ‘face’. In his article of 1899, Luick notes that while some instances of unexpected geminates may be explained away as analogical or as scribal errors, enough examples remain which defy such explanations. He noticed, however, that double graphs were mainly restricted to certain consonants (usually in intervocalic position), principally /p, t, k, m/ and sometimes /s/ and /d/ (1899: 59, 62, 67, 68), concluding that the non-etymological double graphs were early indications of the breakdown of the inherited Germanic phonological system which distinguished vowel and consonant quantity (1899: 63, 66, 69).

Although Luick believed that the Old English system of quantitative phonology was collapsing in Late Northumbrian, he thought that the quantity distinction in consonants, i.e. long vs. short consonants, was stable. He drew this conclusion from the fact that etymological geminates were written consistently with two graphs, exceptions being restricted to absolute final position and in intervocalic positions in unstressed words, as in West Saxon (ibid. 1899: 58). Since etymological geminates were regularly rendered by double consonants, Luick concluded that the non-etymological double consonants (in contrast to the etymological ones) did not represent long consonants but indicated variation in phonetic length of preceding vowels. As part of a general process which he referred to as Quantitätsregulierung ‘regularisation of quantity’, he held that short vowels had already begun to lengthen somewhat in open syllables, i.e. before singleton consonants – a change usually associated with Middle English. Yet he did not think that these lengthened short vowels had attained the same length as long vowels, and so he spoke of these lengthened vowels having half-length (ibid. 63–4). In a nutshell, Luick thought that

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double consonant graphs did double duty: they signified etymological geminate consonants and they indicated that a preceding vowel was not half-long but short. Following on from these conclusions, Luick (ibid. 68) argued that lengthening of short vowels to half-long vowels in open syllables did not regularly take place before certain consonants, especially /p, t, k, m/ (in contrast to /r, l, n, d, f, þ, s, g/).93 Accordingly, scribes wrote /p, t, k, m/ (and more rarely /s/ and /d/) with double graphs in order to signal a phonetically shorter preceding vowel, i.e. a vowel which had not become half-long. In other words, a half-long vowel was simply a phonetic variant of a short vowel, and this contrasted with an original long vowel in open syllables. For all the apparent ingenuity of Luick’s thesis, it is difficult to infer any motivation on the part of the scribe to indicate that a vowel was short rather than half-long: orthographic systems tend to represent the phonology of a language, not its phonetics. From a modern phonological perspective, the notion that double graphs were used to indicate that a vowel in an open syllable had not become half- long makes no sense. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Luick (1914–40: 400, 886–7) distanced himself from these ideas in later publications; but despite these criticisms, Luick’s initial observation that unexpected consonant doubling was restricted to certain consonants remains valid.

Greater clarity can be achieved if we assume that double consonants were used not to indicate a contrast in consonantal length, as is assumed for the inherited West Germanic phonological system, but to indicate contrasts in syllable contact. This situation has been argued already for twelfth-century East Midlands English based on current interpretations of the orthographical system employed in a well-known early Middle English manuscript, namely the Ormulum (see especially Fulk 1996, Mailhammer 2007, 2009); but the same has also been argued for in Old English (Fulk 1996: 498f.), and this argument seems especially applicable to late Northumbrian Old English (Fulk 1996: 499–500). Accordingly, the main purpose of medial geminates was to indicate whether a preceding short vowel was closed by a tautosyllabic consonant, and so did not stand in an open syllable. Double consonants therefore signalled syllable boundaries. As a result of this restructuring, consonantal length could have remained only as a secondary phonetic feature that was ultimately replaced by ambisyllabicity, perhaps already in Old English in some dialects.94 As a result of this and other quantitative restructuring, the relevant opposition became not one of quantity but rather of syllable contact. In brief, we can talk of close consonantal contact (also abrupt cut) and loose consonantal contact (or smooth cut), see further Vennemann (2000b: 252–4). The crucial difference of especially Northumbrian Old English is the tendency for etymologically singleton, non-tautosyllabic consonants /p, t, k, m/ and sometimes /s/ and /d/ to behave as if they were historical geminates, by favouring close contact with preceding vowels (i.e. abrupt syllable cut) and ultimately becoming ambisyllabic.

93 _{In intervocalic position, 〈f, þ, s, g〉 were voiced fricatives in Old English, i.e. [v, ð, z, ɣ].} 94

The phonological system outlined here finds close parallels in varieties of Modern Welsh and Modern Icelandic, see Morris-Jones (1913: 30–1, 65–74) and Orešnik & Pétursson (1977, cited in Fulk 1996: 500) respectively.

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The process is characterised diagrammatically in Figure 3 (‘C̣’ signifies an ambisyllabic consonant):

-V.CV- -V.CV-

-VC.CV- -VC̣V-

Figure 3. Development of Old English etyma with intervocalic /p, t, k, m/ (unexpected development indicated by dotted arrow)

Two questions now present themselves: Why did /p, t, k, m/ and, sometimes, /s/ and /d/ behave in a seemingly aberrant fashion by becoming tautosyllabic consonants, especially in Northumbrian English? Could contact with Late British in some way have effectuated such a development?

In the literature a number of explanations have been offered to explain why /p, t, k/ favour close syllable contact (abrupt cut), such as the fact that voiceless plosives are the least sonorous of consonants and appear to have a notable blocking effect on vowel lengthening in open syllables in the history of German (Vennemann 2000b: 263–4, 270). Apart from this, Kortlandt (1997) argues that voiceless plosives were preglottalised [Ɂp, Ɂt, Ɂk], as in some varieties of Modern English. Thus, late Northumbrian Old English scribes in particular seem to have had their difficulties in discerning whether or not a preglottalised intervocalic plosive was a simple or a geminate consonant (preglottalised geminate consonants were apparently easily discernable and so were consistently rendered by double graphs). What both of these theses lack is an explanation for the identical propensity of /m/ for doubling and, though more rarely, /s/ and /d/. A thesis which can also explain the aberrant developments of these consonants is therefore desirable.

Based on our understanding of Late British and later attested phonologies of Medieval Brittonic languages as well as Modern Welsh, it is clear that /p, t, k, m, s/ were phonetically long in intervocalic positions – yet they did not contrast with singleton consonants and so must be regarded as prosodic geminates rather than phonological geminates.95 The fact that these

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Modern Welsh and Modern Icelandic both have prosodic rather than phonological geminates (phonological geminates are found, for instance, in Modern Arabic and Modern Finnish). Prosodic geminates seem to have a tendency to lose phonetic length and then to contrast in terms of ambisyllabicity; this has happened in southern Icelandic dialects (Orešnik & Pétursson 1977: 157, 163). Morris-Jones (1913: 30–1) describes the difference between W canu /ca.nu/ ‘to sing’ and W cannu /can̩u/ ‘to whiten’; although the orthography – 〈n〉 vs. 〈nn〉 – appears to signal consonantal length, the alternation is one of syllable contact. The former has a short (phonetically a half-long) vowel /a/ in an open syllable; the latter has a short vowel /a/ in a closed

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consonants were long in Late British could have brought about a more widespread tendency for abrupt cut with these consonants.96 An appealing argument for this proposal is that in some instances etymologically simple consonants appear as double graphs even after vowels that were formerly long, e.g. let, little, slit, flit, heat (dialectal) (see also Luick 1899: 59–60). Ultimately, it would have been possible for speakers of Late British to acquire quantitative oppositions such as long vowels (smooth cut) before voiceless plosives, too, as happened in Welsh, namely through the gradual integration of English loanwords such as sêt ‘seat’, gât ‘gate’, plât ‘plate’.97 This explanation still leaves some examples of geminated /d/ unaccounted for. Possibly these may result from system pressure, namely that all other medial voiced plosives were written with digraphs in Old English. Furthermore, the doubling of 〈dd〉 is often restricted to certain words; in particular it is used to differentiate 〈godd〉 (< *ɣod-) ‘God’ from 〈god〉 (< *ɣōd-) ‘good’. Even so, more frequent and aberrant doubling is restricted to /p, t, k, m/, and these instances could receive an explanation based on the known mismatches between the Late British and Pre-Old English consonantal systems.