Scribal Practice: Some Assumptions

Abstract

In a recent article in LANGUAGE,1 Charles F. Hockett has presented an analysis of the stressed syllabics of the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns.2 Hockett opposes the traditional view which interprets ea, eo, io, and ie as short diphthongs, and offers a solution of his own which within the limitations of one MS is in part convincing. In general, he equates each vowel letter or digraph with a phoneme. In agreement with us, with Moss6, and with Daunt, but in contradiction of the established tradition, he regards the digraphs ea, eo, io, and ie as spellings for monophthongs; he believes, however, that these short digraphs represent separate short vowel phonemes; we believe that in early OE they represented allophones of the front vowels /i/, /e/, and /ase/; we believe that eo, io, and ie represented allophones ONLY in the earlier period. These allophones later became phonemes, whereas the allophone represented by ea did not. Hockett's speculations about the motivations of the scribes who first selected these particular digraphs in these particular values are appealing. Especially ingenious is his theory about the origin of the letter y in OE, which he considers to have been originally a digraph (591-4). Although we agree to a limited extent with the conclusions of Hockett's article (which might better be entitled The Stressed Syllabics of the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns), we wish to reaffirm the stand taken in our monograph and our subsequent article,3 in particular with regard to me-ea, but also with regard to the structure of OE vowels in general. Concerning the long diphthongs and long vowels we are more nearly in agreement with the position Hockett took in the book that appeared before this article :4 'there were complex nuclei consisting of one or another of the eleven vowels [we do not think there were as many as eleven vowels] plus a glide element. The details are not clear.' There are, however, other basic, more axiomatic assumptions with which we do not agree at all. They are discussed below.