Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves.
International audience Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final <cht>, <ch>, <tht> and <th> appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.
This paper presents key aspects of the data, methods and uses of the From Inglis to Scots Corpus (fits; Alcorn et al. [eds], 2021 –), complementing Kopaczyk et al. (2018) and focussing on the diachronic dimension of the resource. The corpus reconstructs sound values for individual Older Scots morphological root elements of Germanic origin as attested in the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (laos). This is done by triangulating the attested spelling, the sound values proposed in the literature for their etymological sources (dialects of Old English, Old Norse and Middle Dutch), and a series of plausible sound changes leading from the latter to the former (the Corpus of Changes). The challenges and possibilities of this approach are highlighted throughout, focussing on the diachronic mapping of Older Scots sounds to their origins and the intervening changes. An overview of the corpus's capabilities is provided in tandem with its limitations.
This paper provides novel evidence for the frequency and spatio--temporal distribution of the earliest instances of Scots L---vocalisation. This so---called "characteristic Scots change" (McClure 1994: 48) entails the loss of coda---/l/ following back vowels, with concomitant vocalic lengthening or diphthongisation (e.g. OE healf > OSc hawff; OE bolster > OSc bouster; OE full > OSc fow, cf. Johnston 1997: 90). Using data from the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), spanning 1380---1500, we reassess the claims for the emergence of L---vocalisation in the early 15 th century (Aitken & Macafee 2002: 101---4) and for its completion by the beginning of the 16 th (cf. Stuart---Smith et al. 2006, Bann & Corbett, 2015. Based on attestations of
This paper presents the new facilities provided in defoe, a parallel toolbox for querying a wealth of digitised newspapers and books at scale. defoe has been extended to work with further Natural Language Processing () tools such as the Edinburgh Geoparser, to store the preprocessed text in several storage facilities and to support different types of queries and analyses. We have also extended the collection of XML schemas supported by defoe, increasing the versatility of the tool for the analysis of digital historical textual data at scale. Finally, we have conducted several studies in which we worked with humanities and social science researchers who posed complex and interested questions to large-scale digital collections. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to conduct their studies and obtain results faster, while all the large-scale text mining complexity is automatically handled by defoe.
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