Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast

The history of Scots dental fricative spellings

Bibliographic Data

ID21695465
AuthorsBenjamin Molineaux (0000-0002-5649-7867, University of Edinburgh), Joanna Kopaczyk (0000-0001-5827-0925, University of Glasgow), RHONA ALCORN (University of Edinburgh), Warren Maguire (0000-0002-7339-6224, University of Edinburgh), VASILIS KARAISKOS (University of Edinburgh), Bettelou Los (0000-0003-4231-0560, University of Edinburgh)
Year2021
Volume25
Issue1
Pages91-119
Publication date2021-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Language and Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1360-6743 • E-ISSN: 1469-4379
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1360674319000479
OpenAlexW3031551226
LanguageEN
References cited20

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations ( , , and , among others) eventually settled on one digraph, , for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. vs and vs ) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by and /θ/ by (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for and via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes

Art · Fifteenth · Linguistics · Literature · Middle English · Old English · Scots · Spelling · Classics · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity

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