The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English Spelling

Abstract

This chapter uses a new resource, the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), a corpus of 14th and 15th Century English texts, to answer an old question: it is possible to find traces of a systematic distinction between the reflexes of Old English e/ē and eo/ēo in Middle English? An investigation into the spelling variation found in 27 lexical items that contain a vowel representing Old English eo/ēo as well as the equivalent Old Norse element jó throws up a wide range of spellings, the vast majority of which show /. Spellings that might suggest a rounded pronunciation are also fairly robustly present, however, particularly , with the Southwest Midlands as its core area. The second part of the investigation retrieves all words that were spelled with the digraph . The vast majority of these turn out to be reflexes of Old English eo/ēo, and almost all of them are localized to the Southwest Midlands. They occur either as reflexes of OE y/ȳ, or in unstressed syllables, or in words where follows – three groups for which a rounded pronunciation would be plausible.