Old and Middle English Spellings for OE hw-, with Special Reference to the ‘qu-’ Type: In Celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE: In Memoriam Angus McIntosh

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the four main electronic resources created in the same tradition as A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediæval English (LALME), i.e. LAEME, LALME itself (and its electronic version eLALME), A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS) and A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Proto-Old English to Early Middle English and accompanying Corpus of Changes (CoNE) can be used in tandem to support an investigation into the initial wh-cluster in words such as when, where, what, who, which. No fewer than 57 different spellings are found for this cluster, from the earliest attested Old English to ca 1500. The authors show how LAEME, eLALME, and LAOS provide the data that allow this spelling variation to be analysed as reflecting various scribal choices, whether determined by orthographic variation (including traditional contextual rules for the use of or ), phonological variation, geographical variation, and/or diachronic variation. The final section showcases CoNE, and reconstructs a diachronic account on the basis of these spellings, revealing a coherent, if extremely complex, picture of lenitions, fortitions, and reversals.