Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

Development of the Long Vowels.

The development of the long vowels in northern English is a lot more complex, and has undergone various analyses over the last hundred-or-so years.

I’ll start with an issue that’s been brought up a few times by philologists when they have touched on northern Middle English literature, and that is the inconsistent spellings of words in the home lexical set in the Ellesmere manuscript of The Reeve’s Tale, one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Ellesmere manuscript was composed shortly after Chaucer’s death. Some of the so-called inconsistencies found in Ellesmere also occur in the Hengwrt manuscript, which may have been written by the same scribe.

Two of the characters from The Reeve’s Tale were said to be from ‘fer in the north; I kan nat tell where’ (‘far in the north; I can not tell where’), and Chaucer made a deliberate effort to show northern speech through both his spelling and his word choices. It is one of the earliest examples of somebody writing in a dialect other than their own, and is therefore valuable even in ways that a passage written by a native speaker of a northern dialect would not be. While Chaucer may employ contemporary stereotypes, these are invaluable in allowing us to determine how a southerner might have heard northern speech, interpreting it according to their own phonology.

The issue at hand is that the author of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts seems to go a step further in ‘northernising’ the dialogue of these two characters, and in doing so, he spells words of the home lexical set with the <ee> digraph.

For example, home is <heem>; gone is <geen>; none is <neen>.

This digraph is what a southern Middle English speaker would have used to spell the phoneme /ɛː/, suggesting pronunciations of [hɛːm], [stɛːn], [gɛːn], which are at odds with spellings from texts actually written in the north of England and employing native northern vocabulary.

Philologists have been quick to dismiss this as a fluke; Tolkien himself dismissed them as ‘ghost-forms’ or the product of scribal 56