Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

Potential Scottish Origin of Long Vowels.

Over the last few chapters, I have taken the dialect of Cumbrian spoken in the 19th and 20th centuries and attempted to trace that dialect backwards through time. A modern understanding of historical linguistics makes this possible. However, this is to say little of the wider cultural situation of the dialect. Legal indentures from Cumbria in the 1400s, one of which is reproduced in the selected readings at the end of this book, resemble later Cumbrian in terms of vocabulary and spelling.

However, aspects of the orthography of these documents, while not necessarily standing in opposition to my ideas about prevowel-shift Cumbrian, do not directly support them either.

To give an example: in the chapter on the long vowels, I argued that the vowel in the home lexical set was probably /ɛː/ before the great vowel shift, on the basis of the comparative method and some sometimes-dismissed spelling evidence from Chaucer. In Cumbria, the vowel in this set is usually spelled with <a>. This spelling is actually consistent with some spellings from Agnes Wheeler’s Dialogues, written in the late 1700s; sake is rendered as saak, and presumably would have been *sak or *sake in Cumbrian Middle English. If Wheeler’s dialect represents a particularly conservative version of Cumbrian, the vowel quality in this lexical set may have been something like /ɐː/ before, during and after the great vowel shift, at least in certain words.

This may have been the case throughout most of Cumbria.

I still maintain that the modern forms are unlikely to have come from /ɐː/, and are likely to be directly related to modern Scots pronunciations of home as /heːm/. If this is true, where was this /ɛː/ realisation used, and where did it undergo the initial change to a centering diphthong?

My strong suspicion is that the bulk of the pre-vowel-shift changes in the long vowels occurred in southern Scotland, and that these values were picked up by Cumbrians, as well as people in other parts of northern England, at some point in the 1600s. I think that this idea works on a number of levels, and it 84