Abstract
The lexicon of English contains a number of words which developed emergent stops, mostly p, b, t, d. Some of these words have functioned as variants of forms without such stops (cf. OE endleofan ~ enlefan or gandra ~ ganra) but in most cases they prevail in Present-day English, as exemplified by OE nimol > ModE nimble, OE æmtig > ModE empty.The present study examines the process of labial stop epenthesis from the perspective of diachrony and diatopy. I searched for the words containing emergent labial stops in the texts collected in historical English corpora to identify their uses with and without parasitic consonants. This made it possible to establish a precise chronology of the process, which was at work from Old to Modern English, and the context in which such stops appeared.
Highlights
In the history of English, labial stops have been affected by a number of phonological changes, the most conspicuous of which have been deletion and epenthesis
This study aims at completing the list of words which have had emergent labial stops during the history of English, expanding it to cover those items that had a labial stop for a certain time but which lack the consonant in Present-day English (PDE)
It needs to be clarified that since the study is devoted to historical data, the discussion of epenthesis is based on attested spellings, i.e. it is assumed that the presence of a letter representing the labial stop ( or ) in a word reflected its pronunciation
Summary
In the history of English, labial stops have been affected by a number of phonological changes, the most conspicuous of which have been deletion and epenthesis. Emergent labial stops are found in several different contexts and seem to have developed at various moments of the history of English with the earliest examples attested already in the Old English period. For Old English, Hogg (1992: 298) claims that epenthesis is ‘[m]uch less frequent than the simplification of consonant clusters by deletion’ and that ‘[t]he most regular examples of epenthesis occur medially between a nasal or, less commonly still, the strident /s/ and a sonorant consonant, that is, a liquid or a nasal’. The list of words includes only those in which the epenthetic stop prevails in Modern English disregarding items that appeared with such a consonant only occasionally and temporarily.
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