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Old English <cg> and its sound correspondences in Old English and Middle English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2019

GJERTRUD F. STENBRENDEN Open the ORCID record for GJERTRUD F. STENBRENDEN [Opens in a new window]
GJERTRUD F. STENBRENDEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages, University of Oslo, PO Box 1003, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g. midgern <micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc *g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It is also argued that the development of the voiced (pre-)affricate was later than that of its voiceless counterpart, as voiced fricative phonemes are a late, and infrequent, development in Gmc. Moreover, it is likely that the development of /dʒ/ was affected by the high number of French loans with /dʒ/ which entered the English lexicon after 1066. Thus, the English system of consonant phonemes may not have acquired /dʒ/ until the thirteenth century at the earliest.

Keywords

phonologyOld Englishdigraph affricatesME spellings
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 687 - 718
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

Early versions of this article were read at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University, 11–14 May 2017) and the 10th International Conference on Middle English (University of Stavanger, 31 May – 2 June 2017). I wish to thank members of the audience for useful feedback. I am also grateful to Michael Benskin, Donka Minkova, Patrick Stiles, the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for reading draft versions of this article and for providing numerous insightful comments and suggestions for improvement. The remaining shortcomings, and views, are entirely my own responsibility.

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