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Open Syllable Lengthening before /t/ and /k/ in the language of Cursor Mundi--the evidence from rhyme vowels.

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ABSTRACT

Since Open Syllable Lengthening was a Middle English change, there is nothing particularly surprising in the fact that the results of its operation are visible in Cursor Mundi, itself a Middle English text. This paper argues, however, that it may have been possible for certain vowels to "opt out" of the process, provided they found themselves immediately before an alveolar or a velar fortis stop. That those vowels were Middle English /e/ and /a/, follows from the evidence offered by the rhymes.

0. Introduction

When compared with other well-known Middle English poems, Cursor Mundi seems to have been somewhat neglected by historical linguists, especially when it comes to the phonological aspects of its language. As a product of the time so abundant in various sound changes, the poem constitutes a rich source of scientific material for this type of research. That is why the present paper analyses the language of Cursor Mundi with respect to the course and the outcome of the Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (henceforth MEOSL), bringing into focus the development of vowels immediately preceding an alveolar or a velar voiceless plosive, for, as a preliminary study has shown, the behaviour of vocalic nuclei in this environment did not fully comply with the standard descriptions.

With a view to gathering the necessary data, the British Museum Cotton Vespasian A. iii manuscript of the poem has been used, the choice of the corpus (nearly 30 000 lines) being motivated by a relatively low number of gaps in the text. During the investigation, particular attention has been devoted to rhyme vowels as to those that provide the most reliable information. It is the rhymes and the spelling that have been used as the criteria for establishing vowel length.

1. The Cotton MS. spelling conventions

The spelling in the Cotton Vespasian MS. of Cursor Mundi, irregular as it is, exhibits certain characteristic features, four of which have been especially important in the process of analysing the material and determining vowel quantity. One of those features is a typically Northern practice of using digraphs and for Middle English /e:/ and /a:/, respectively (see Kniezsa 1983: 45), where the second element of the digraph serves as a length indicator. Another two popular devices for designating vowel length used by the scribe are the doubling of a vocalic allograph, as in saand 'messenger' (OE sand) or faand 'to test' (OE fandian), and the use of the weak word-final with the reference to the preceding open syllable nucleus (Mosse 1952 [1991]: 12). The shortness of a stressed vocalic segment is, in turn, commonly marked with the application of yet another scribal tool, namely a doubled consonantal grapheme placed immediately after a vowel the quantity of which it signifies.

Nevertheless, Cursor Mundi is a Middle English poem and as such it shows considerable confusion as far as orthography is concerned. Many lexical items appear in parallel forms, e.g., gete/gette (ON, cf. OI geta) or tald/taald (OE tolde, pret. of tellan), even though both variants represent...