Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T14:39:45.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The <quh->–<wh-> switch: an empirical account of the anglicisation of a Scots variant in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2019

SARAH VAN EYNDHOVEN  and
LYNN CLARK
SARAH VAN EYNDHOVEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealandsarah.ve@outlook.com, lynn.clark@canterbury.ac.nz
LYNN CLARK*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealandsarah.ve@outlook.com, lynn.clark@canterbury.ac.nz
*
*sarah.ve@outlook.com, lynn.clark@canterbury.ac.nz
*sarah.ve@outlook.com, lynn.clark@canterbury.ac.nz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters <quh-> and <wh-> found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

Keywords

historical Scotsanglicisationquantitative corpus analysisstatistical modelling
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 211 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article has benefited considerably from the comments made by two anonymous ELL reviewers and by the editor Patrick Honeybone. We are very grateful to them for their time and positive feedback, which has improved this article considerably. We also received useful feedback from the presentation at the 2015 New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference in Dunedin, New Zealand. Furthermore, we would like to thank Vicky Watson and Liam Walsh for their feedback, helpful comments and support. All remaining errors and shortcomings are very much our own.

References

Aitken, Adam Jack. 1979. Scottish speech: A historical view with special reference to the Standard English of Scotland. In Aitken & McArthur (eds.), 85–120.Google Scholar
Aitken, Adam Jack. 1984. Scots and English in Scotland. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 517–532. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aitken, Adam Jack. 1997. The pioneers of anglicised speech in Scotland: A second look. Scottish Language 16, 1–36.Google Scholar
Aitken, Adam Jack & McArthur, Tom (eds.). 1979. Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: W&R Chambers.Google Scholar
Akaike, Hirotugo. 1974. A new look at the statistical model identification. Transactions on Automatic Control 19(6), 716–723.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anthony, Lawrence. 2015. AntConc (version 3.5.0) [computer software]. Tokyo: Waseda University. www.laurenceanthony.netGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Davidson, Douglas J. & Bates, Douglas M.. 2008. Mixed-effects modelling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59(4), 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bald, Marjory. 1926. The anglicisation of Scottish printing. The Scottish Historical Review 23(90), 107–115.Google Scholar
Bald, Marjory. 1927. The pioneers of anglicised speech in Scotland. The Scottish Historical Review 24(95), 179–193.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Mächler, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1), 1–48. doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beal, Joan. 1997. Syntax and morphology. In Jones (ed.), 335–77.Google Scholar
Blake, Norman F. 1992. Translation and the history of English. In Rissanen et al. (eds.), 3–24.Google Scholar
Bugaj, Joanna. 2004. Middle Scots as an emerging standard and why it did not make it. Scottish Language 23, 19–34.Google Scholar
Bugaj, Joanna. 2005. Middle Scots burgh court records: The influence of the text type on its linguistic features. In Nikolaus Ritt & Herbert Schendl (eds.), Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and literary approaches, 75–88. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Clark, Lynn & Watson, Kevin. 2016. Phonological levelling, diffusion, and divergence: /t/lenition in Liverpool and its hinterland. Language Variation and Change 28(1), 31–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruickshank, Janet. 2013. The role of communities of practice in the emergence of Scottish Standard English. In Joanna Kopaczyk & Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Communities of practice in the history of English, 19–45. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devitt, Amy. 1989. Standardising written English: Diffusion in the case of Scotland, 1520–1659. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dictionary of the Scots Language / Dictionair o the Scots Leid. 2004. Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd. www.dsl.ac.uk (accessed 16 August 2015).Google Scholar
Douglas, Sheila. 2001. Scots language and the song tradition. In John Monfries Kirk & Dónall Ó. Baoill (eds.), Language links: The languages of Scotland and Ireland, 233–236. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie & Hay, Jennifer B.. 2012. Exploiting random intercepts: Two case studies in sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 24, 59–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1996. And is it English? English World-Wide 17(2), 153–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1998. Text types and the hstory of Scots. In Even more Englishes: Studies 1996–1997 (Varieties of English around the World G22), 55–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2016. Quantitative corpus linguistics with R, 2nd rev. and ext. edn. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stephan Th. & Hilpert, Martin. 2008. The identification of stages in diachronic data: Variability-based neighbor clustering. Corpora 3(1), 59–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stephan Th. & Hilpert, Martin. 2010. Modelling diachronic change in the third person singular: A multifactorial, verb and author-specific exploratory approach. English Language and Linguistics 14(3), 293–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stephan Th. & Hilpert, Martin. 2012. Variability-based neighbour clustering: A bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguistics. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook on the history of English, 134–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer B., Pierrehumbert, Janet B., Walker, Abby J. & LaShell, Patrick. 2015. Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change. Cognition 139, 83–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinneburg, Alexander, Mannila, Heikki, Kaislaniemi, Samuli, Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2007. How to handle small samples: Bootstrap and Bayesian methods in the analysis of linguistic change. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(2), 137–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jack, Ronald D. S. 1997. The language of literary materials: Origins to 1700. In Jones (ed.), 213–63.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1), 359–383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Charles. 1997a. Introduction. In Jones (ed.), 1–5.Google Scholar
Jones, Charles (ed.). 1997b. The Edinburgh history of Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
King, Anne. 1997. The Inflectional Morphology of Older Scots. In Jones (ed.), 156–83.Google Scholar
Kniezsa, Veronika. 1997. The origins of Scots orthography. In Jones (ed.), 24–46.Google Scholar
Kopaczyk, Joanna. 2012. Communication gaps in seventeenth century Britain: Explaining legal Scots to English practitioners. In Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (ed.), Intercultural miscommunication past and present (Warsaw Studies in English Language and Literature), 217–243. Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kopaczyk, Joanna. 2013. How a community of practice creates a text community: Middle Scots legal and administrative discourse. In Joanna Kopaczyk & Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Communities of practice in the history of English, 225–247. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laing, Margaret & Lass, Roger. Forthcoming. Old and Middle English spellings for OE hw-, with special reference to the ‘qu-’ type: In celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE. In Rhona Alcorn, Bettelou Los, Joanna Kopaczyk & Benjamin Molineaux (eds.), Historical dialectology in the digital age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger & Laing, Margaret. 2016. Q is for what, when, where? The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-. Folia Linguistica Historica 37, 61–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawson, Robert. 2014. Sociolinguistics in Scotland. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacQueen, Lilian Edith Cochrane. 1957. The last stages of the older literary language of Scotland: A study of the surviving Scottish elements in Scottish prose, 1700-1750, especially of the records, national and local. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/7316Google Scholar
MacQueen, Lilian Edith Cochrane. 1983. English was to them a foreign tongue. Scottish Language 2, 49–51.Google Scholar
McClure, J. D. 1983. Scotland and the Lowland tongue. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1989a. The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. In Meurman-Solin (ed.), 218–26.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1989b. Variation analysis and diachronic studies of lexical borrowing. In Graham D. Caie (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies, 1, 87–98. Copenhagen: Department of English, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1989c. Variation and variety in Middle Scots reconsidered: A test study of the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. In Meurman-Solin (ed.), 236–46.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1992. On the morphology of verbs in Middle Scots: Present and present perfect indicative. In Rissanen et al. (eds.), 611–23.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1993. Variation and change in early Scottish prose: Studies based on the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1994. On the evolution of prose genres in Older Scots. Nowele 23, 91–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1995. The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HCOS/ (accessed 23 March 2015).Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1997. Differentiation and standardisation in Early Scots. In Jones (ed.), 3–23.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 2003. Corpus-based study of Older Scots grammar and lexis. In Jeremy Corbett, J. D. McClure & Jane Stuart-Smith (eds.), The Edinburgh companion to Scots, 170–196. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Millar, Robert McColl. 2005. Language, nation and power: An introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murison, David. 1979. The historical background. In Aitken & McArthur (eds.), 1–13.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Historical sociolinguistics and language change. In Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds.), The handbook of the history of English, 558–582. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nurmi, Arja, Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan & Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, tagged version. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York: University of York and Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive.Google Scholar
Pollner, Clausdirk. 2000. Shibboleths galore: The treatment of Irish and Scottish English in histories of the English language. In Dieter Kastovsky & Arthur Mettinger (eds.), The history of English in a social context: A contribution to historical sociolinguistics, 363–376. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Powell, M. J. 2009. The BOBYQA algorithm for bound constrained optimization without derivatives. Cambridge NA Report NA2009/06, 26–46. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti, Kytö, Merja, Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena, Kilpiö, Matti, Nevanlinna, Saara, Taavitsainen, Irma, Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti, Ihalainen, Ossi, Nevalainen, Terttu & Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.). 1992. History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-historical linguistics: Its status and methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, D. 1975. VARBRUL 2. Unpublished program and documentation.Google Scholar
Schwarz, G. 1978. Estimating the dimension of a model. The Annals of Statistics 6(2), 461–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Daisy. Forthcoming. The predictability of {S} abbreviation in Older Scots manuscripts. In Rhona Alcorn, Bettelou Los, Joanna Kopaczyk & Benjamin Molineaux (eds.), Historical dialectology in the digital age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Tulloch, Graham. 1997. Lexis. In Jones (ed.), 378–435.Google Scholar