"Monster on the Hell or Early Middle English dialect features recovered from place-name data"
Handout attached in pdf; slides attached in pdf or ppt.
Abstract:
My talk is about dialect features of early Middle English (eME 1100-1300) in the south-east Midlands (north and east of London). This area/period is interesting to investigate because -- for the first time in English history -- we get enough data to attempt a reconstruction of a dialect continuum of the area.
The data I collected comes from the spelling of English place names found in the 12th and 13th century documents written mostly in Latin (some in French and English), for example
stone + bridge can appear as stanbrig(e), staunbregg(e) or stonbrig (and many more),
old + bury as aldebere, -bur, aldebir, -biri, -byr, and
minster on the hill can be written down as monster on the hell!
I will discuss the background to my research, the process of data gathering, presentation on maps and analysis of results. I will present the distribution of variants for three dialect discriminating features
(Old English) OE /y/ > eME ???
OE /a:/ > eME ???
OE /ae:/ > eME ???
A closer look at the data reveals interesting patterns and refines some generalisations presented in standard handbooks of History of English.