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Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 305–324

<U> or <o>: A dilemma of the Middle English scribal practice

The paper discusses the spread of the spelling variation 〈 u: o〉 in Middle English in all localized texts from the Innsbruck Corpus (Markus 2008). The present author’s aim is to determine the distribution of the replacement of 〈u〉 by 〈o〉 in the Corpus texts in order to reveal a temporal and regional conditioning of the change. The study covers eight high-frequency items (HUNDRED, HUNGER, HONEY, NUN, SOME, SUMMER, SUN, SON), five of which have restored the original grapheme 〈u〉. The examination of the above corpus has revealed the lack of a consistent universal rule governing the replacement of 〈u〉 by 〈o〉 in the graphically obscure contexts of the postvocalic graphemes 〈m, n〉. The earliest 〈o〉 spellings in the prose corpus belong to the westerly areas of England (Hali Meidenhad, Hali Maidhad, Ancrene Riwle), but the later selection of either traditional 〈u〉 (HUNDRED, HUNGER) or innovative 〈o〉 (HONEY, SON) appears to have been determined by the East Midland and London usage.
Published online: 11 September 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.15wel
References (15)
Data
Markus, Manfred. 2008. Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose Texts (Full version 2.3). Innsbruck: ICAMET.Google Scholar
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Hotta, Ryuichi & Yoko Iyeiri
2022. Chapter 8. The taking off and catching on of etymological spellings in Early Modern English. In English Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 359], ► pp. 144 ff. DOI logo

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