Germanic Umlaut Anew

Abstract

1.1. A realistic reinterpretation of the Old English spellings ea, eo, io has been suggested by Charles F. Hockett, who approached the problem de novo by investigating the evidence in the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns (Anglian dialect of the first half of the 9th century) and by interpreting this evidence in the light of modern descriptive techniques.l Hockett finds that the three digraphs in question represented independent phonemes (not allophones of /ae/, /e/, /i/) at a time prior to the writing of the VP, although 'Sound change and dialect mixture had probably led to a state of affairs in which every form pronounced with io had a by-form pronounced with eo (though not conversely), and in which every form pronounced with ea had a by-form pronounced with a or with eo (though again not conversely). These conclusions account both for the spelling habits which the Vespasian Scribe inherited and for the particular way in which he modified and varied those habits' (590). In determining the phonetic values to be ascribed to ea, eo, io before the onset of the secondary modifications evident in VP, Hockett turns to the testimony of the Icelandic First Grammarian (ca. 1150). A bilingual person attempting to represent Old English sounds was faced with the paucity of vowel symbols in Latin. To find new symbols, the Old English vowels were analyzed with respect to the five Latin vowels, as was done for Icelandic by the First Grammarian. The latter, for instance, analyzed the sound represented by 0 as 'made up from the sounds of e and o, spoken with the mouth less open than for e and more than for o, and therefore [is] written with the cross-bar of e and the circle of o'2 Hockett suggests, therefore, that those who established the Old English orthography chose ea (older spellings aea aeo) to represent the height of /ae/ and the retracted tongue position of /a/, i.e. [a]; eo to represent the height and lip position of /e/ and the tongue position of /o/, i.e. [a]; and io (older iu) to represent the height and lip position of /i/ and the retracted tongue position of /u/ or /o/, i.e. [i]. He then makes a theoretic pronouncement of great import for the interpretation of mutation in Germanic: 'From the point of view of realism in phonetic change, particularly in assimilations, it is certainly as likely that a back-umlauting of front unrounded vowels should produce unrounded back vowels as it is that a front-mutating of back rounded vowels should produce front rounded vowels. The same applies to the modification of vowel color by a following consonant: breaking is a loaded term stemming from the habit of talking about letters instead of sounds, and prejudices reinterpretation' (595).3