Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster August 2015 Introducing FITS Rhona Alcorn Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics University of Edinburgh with Vasilis Karaiskos, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los, Warren Maguire, Benjamin Molineaux & Daisy Smith 1

From Inglis to Scots (FITS): Mapping sounds to spellings £1M AHRC-funded project at AMC RQ: How did the highly distinctive form of speech that evolved in Scotland in the Middle Ages develop? 5 researchers, 1 programmer, 1 PhD student + advisory panel of experts Apr 2014 – Mar

From Inglis to Scots: ‘Inglis’‘Scots’ C12-C15C16 onwards Mapping sounds to spellings Inglis & Early Scots pre-date the era of recorded sound, so we rely on their written language for evidence No national standard of spelling until very much later so ESc spellings are highly variable 3 See further: Aitken 1971, Macafee & Aitken 2002, McClure 1995, Jones 1997

‘earl’in 15 th -century Scots 4

‘both’in 15 th -century Scots 5

‘law’in 15 th -century Scots 6

Spelling as a window on MidEng Phonology No national written standard in MidEng So ME spellings are highly variable too Clues to features of spoken language, e.g. – [h] dropping: (h)ard ‘hard’, (h)euene ‘heaven’ – fricative loss: ni(h)t ‘night’, ri(ch)te ‘right’ – Nth. stan, ban, ham ~ Sth. ston, bon, hom ‘stone, bone, home’ 7 Spelling as a window on spoken language

Spelling as a window on ESc phonology Some progress, e.g. Johnston (1997), Aitken (2002) But the focus has tended towards: – major developments, i.e. those with reflexes in ModSc – distinctive developments, i.e. those that distinguish Scots from English 8

Like Aitken (2002) we will trace the history of individual speech sounds rather than individual words Unlike Aitken we focus on: – the period to 1500 – the language of documents – words of Germanic origin – all types of speech sounds – rare as well as common spelling variants – regional as well as temporal developments 9 FITS: methodology

ESc spellings: our data source A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots corpus: – 1,400+ diplomatically-transcribed, local texts – All dated before 1500 when Scots was flourishing as a national language before anglicisation effects took off – All dated after 1380 no older texts of this type survive 10

spellings sound systems FITS: methodology sound-spelling mappings

Spelling complexities: Mod St. English A letter may have > 1 sound – : electric [k], electricity [s] – : beard [i], break [e], heard [ɛ], heart [a] A sound may have > 1 representations – [ʤ]: jump, germ, ledger – [i]: feet, beat, grieve, deceive Our analysis will capture phonotactic data 12

spellings sound systems Sources of the sound systems FITS: methodology diachronic correspondences (= the CC) sound-spelling mappings

Designed and built – Primary data extractor tool – Data analysis tool – FITS database – CC database – FITS website ( amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/fits/) Lots of level 1 analyses (Esc Spellings :: ESc Sounds) First set of data ready for level 2 (diachronic) analysis 14 Progress so far

A freely-available, fully-searchable, online database to answer user-defined Qs like: – what does Inglis represent? – when and where did [v]-deletion begin? – which aspects of Scots are not of OE origin? Digital maps to display answers temporo- spatially Workshops to introduce FITS tools A transferrable methodology 15 Expected outputs

Aitken, A.J Variation and variety in Middle Scots. In A.J. Aitken et al. (eds.) Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots, London: Longman. Aitken, A.J The Older Scottish Vowels. Ed. C. Macafee. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. CoNE: Lass, R., M. Laing, R. Alcorn & K. Williamson (eds.) A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Primitive OE to Early ME. Johnston, P Older Scots phonology. In Jones (ed.). Jones, C. (ed.) The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: EUP. LAOS: A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots , ed. K. Williamson Macafee, C. & A.J. Aitken A History of Scots to McClure, J.D Scots and its Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 16 References

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