Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose - Unknown

(iii) Short vowels ă, ĕ, ŏ are lengthened in stressed open syllables (i.e., usually, when they are followed by a single consonant with a following vowel): tă|ke ≻ táke; mĕ|te ≻ méte 'meat'; brŏ|ken ≻ bróken. To what extent ĭ and ŭ were subject to the same lengthening in Northern districts is still disputed. Normally they remain short in South and S. Midlands, e.g. drĭuen pp.; lŏuen = lŭven 'to love'.

There are many minor rules and many exceptions due to analogy; but roughly it may be taken that ME. vowels are:

short when unstressed;

short before two consonants, except -ld, -nd, -rd, -rð, -mb;

long (except i (y), u) before a single medial consonant;

otherwise of the quantity shown in the Glossary for the OE. or ON. etymon.

(b) Vowel Quality. The ME. sound-changes are so many and so obscure that it will be possible to deal only with a few that contribute most to the diversity of dialects, and it happens that the particular changes noticed all took effect before the fourteenth century.

(i) OE. and ON. ā develop to long open ǭ (sounded as in broad), first in the South and S. Midlands, later in the N. Midlands. In the North ā (sounded approximately as in father) remains: e.g. bane 'bone' IV a 54, balde 'bold' IV a 51. The boundary seems to have been a line drawn west from the Humber, and this approximates to the dividing line in the modern dialects. There are of course instances of ǭ to the north and of ā to the south of the Humber, since border speakers would be familiar with both ā and ǭ, or would have intermediate pronunciations; and poets might use convenient rimes from neighbouring dialects.

(ii) OE. ȳ̆ (deriving from Germanic ū̆ followed by i) appears normally in E. Midlands and the North as ī̆ (ȳ̆): e.g. kȳn, hill (OE. cȳ, hyll). In the South-East, particularly Kent, it appears as ẹ̆̄: kēn, hell. In the South-West, and in W. Midlands, it commonly appears as u, ui (uy), with the sound of short or long ü. London was apparently at a meeting point of the u, i, and e boundaries, because all the forms appear in fourteenth-century London texts, though ṻ̆ and ē̆ gradually give place to ī̆. The extension of ṻ̆ forms to the North-West is shown by Gawayne, and a line drawn from London to Liverpool would give a rough idea of the boundary. But within this area unrounding of ṻ̆ to ī̆ seems to have been progressive during the century. N.B.—It is dangerous to jump to conclusions from isolated examples. Before r + consonant e is sometimes found in all dialects, e.g. schert II 230. Church, spelt with u, i, or e, had by etymology OE. i, not y. And in Northern texts there are a number of e-spellings in open syllables, both for OE. y and i.