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Were they ‘dropping their aitches’? A quantitative study of h- loss in Middle English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2007

PAOLA CRISMA
PAOLA CRISMA
Affiliation:
DSGS, Università di Trieste, Via Tigor, 22, 34124 Trieste, [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article I present extensive quantitative evidence showing that it is possible to distinguish different Middle English varieties on the basis of the treatment of word-initial h-, and that it is necessary to postulate that, in some varieties, word-initial h- fails to surface in given contexts, though being present as a consonantal phoneme in the underlying representation. This casts a new light on the old problem of whether word-initial h- was lost in Middle English and restored at a later stage: the data presented here suggest that h- loss was never generalized, though h-less forms did surface as contextual variants of h-ful forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 51 - 80
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Donka Minkova for her encouragement and precious help throughout this work. I am also indebted to Birgit Alber, Bruce Hayes, Edward Keenan, Giovanna Marotta, and Kie Zuraw for useful comments and discussion, and to two anonymous referees for their observations and suggestions.