The Development of oa Spellings in Early Modern English

Abstract

T HE LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH Spelling system, as exemplified in the many Chaucer manuscripts and a host of other contemporary texts, had two egregious inadequacies, namely the lack of a consistent manner of distinguishing between the mid and low tense vowels in both the front and back series. For example, the front vowels of OE hela 'heel' and htelan 'heal' preserved in Middle English a distinction in height not significantly different from that which they had in Old English. Yet they were spelled in exactly the same way, either as heel(e) or as hele. The orthographic practice that assigned an ee to the first of these paired words and an ea to the second did not develop until the early Modern English period, at a time when the Middle English mid and low vowels had become high and mid, respectively. In the case of the back vowels, the situation was strikingly similar. Words that had the mid vowel 6 in Old English, such as fad and g6d, generally retained the same vowel in Middle English but were spelled food(e), fode, and good(e), gode. Precisely the same vowel spellings were employed for such Old English words as bdt and brad, the vowel of which had undergone rounding to [;:] in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, except in the Northern dialect. South of the Humber these words were spelled boot(e), bote, and brood(e), brode. And again the spelling oa, comparable to ea in the front series, is a feature of early Modern English, also serving to distinguish what by that time had become the mid-back vowels from the high-back. The principal difference between the two groups is that eventually the front series underwent a phonemic merger, so that heel and heal are today pronounced in identical fashion, whereas boot 'remedy' and boat are not.