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home / papers / 1998 / Middle English Origins of Present-Day Distinction in the Pronunciation of Word-Final or Pre-Consonantal Sequences -or, -oar, -oor, -our

Middle English Origins of Present-Day Distinction in the Pronunciation of Word-Final or Pre-Consonantal Sequences -or, -oar, -oor, -our

Paper · 1998 · Ana Belén Fernández Guerra

Summary

Some English accents keep the vowel of the NORTH words (horse, born, short) apart from the vowel of the FORCE words (hoarse, borne, port). This holds for parts of General American, Scottish and Irish English, among others. In RP and many other accents the two have merged. The paper asks which Middle English sources gave rise to this split. It starts from Wells' (1982) two lexical sets, about 250 words, which are listed in an appendix. It places these words in tables of near-identical structure that nonetheless end up in different sets. It then surveys how Middle English and Early Modern English authorities transcribe them: Bliss, Luick, Wright, Mossé, Berndt, Jordan & Crook, Ekwall, Dobson and Kökeritz.

The survey shows that these handbooks disagree with one another and are often inconsistent internally. The author's proposal is that Middle English had a contrast between short open [ɔ] and short close [o] before r. Early Modern English lengthening before r + consonant then turned this into long [ɔː] versus long [oː]. That contrast is what survives as NORTH versus FORCE. Several exceptions are explicitly left open, because explaining them requires Modern English evidence.

Key points

  • The paper builds on Wells (1982), Accents of English, and its NORTH and FORCE lexical sets. The full word lists are reproduced, split by position: word-final, pre-consonantal and prevocalic.
  • American evidence for the open/close contrast is cited from maps 43–45 of Kurath & McDavid (1961).
  • Bliss (1952–53) attributes long vowels in Anglo-Norman loans to lengthening before [r]. After the labials [p, f], as in force and porch, he finds both open and close variants. Dobson likewise posits three variants after a labial but only two elsewhere.
  • Native words such as ford and sword are linked to the voiced homorganic cluster [rd]. The past participles borne, torn and worn are linked to an original syllable between r and n.
  • Some cases stay unresolved:
    • polysyllabic French loans such as fortune, mortal and porter;
    • morn and remorse, where a preceding m produces no narrowing;
    • coarse and hoarse;
    • words borrowed after 1500.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Lay out several authorities' transcriptions of the same words side by side, so that disagreement among sources becomes visible evidence rather than being hidden by picking one source.
  • I2. Build tables of words that look structurally alike but end up in different classes (ford/lord, port/short, force/remorse), as a stress test for any explanation.
  • I3. Treat spelling clues such as the digraphs oa, oo and ou as weak indicators of an underlying property (historical length), rather than as decisive proof.
  • I4. Explain a present-day contrast as the output of an ordered chain of rules, where a later rule restores a distinction an earlier stage had already encoded.
  • I5. State plainly which exceptions the hypothesis does not cover and which kind of evidence would be needed for them.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): silver data from witness parsers could be stored as a per-token disagreement table, with conflicts kept visible for review instead of being collapsed by a majority vote.
  • I2 (learn): evaluation could include curated near-identical contrast pairs as negative controls, to check whether a repair rule or classifier relies on surface form alone.
  • I3 (tokens): orthographic patterns could feed morphology and lemma guessing as explainable soft features that carry their own confidence.
  • I4 (tokens): morphological derivations could be logged as explicit ordered rule steps, so every surface form has a traceable derivation history.
  • I5 (answer): readers could output a list of unexplained residue alongside each answer, keeping the explanation honest about where it does not apply.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 3 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2 English · 1,373 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Ana Belén Fernández Guerra. 1998. Middle English Origins of Present-Day Distinction in the Pronunciation of Word-Final or Pre-Consonantal Sequences -or, -oar, -oor, -our. SELIM 8.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.8.1998.223-238

@inproceedings{guerra1998middle,
  title = {{Middle English Origins of Present-Day Distinction in the Pronunciation of Word-Final or Pre-Consonantal Sequences -or, -oar, -oor, -our}},
  author = {Ana Belén Fernández Guerra},
  booktitle = {SELIM 8},
  year = {1998},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.8.1998.223-238},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.8.1998.223-238}
}

References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Berndt, R. 1960. Einführung in das Studium des Mittelenglischen. Halle (Saale): Niemeyer. 1 To answer them we must refer to Modern English rather than to Middle English sources. Ana B. Fernández Guerra Universitat Jaume I (Castellón) Ana Belén Fernández Bliss, A. J. 1952-53. Vowel-quantity in Middle English borrowings from Anglo-Norman. Archivum Linguisticum 4: 121-147, 5: 22-47. find
  2. Brunner, K. 1962. Die englische Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. find
  3. Brunner, K. 1963. An outline of Middle English grammar. (Trans. G. Johnston). Oxford: Blackwell. find
  4. Cercignani, F. 1981. Shakespeare’s works and Elizabethan pronunciation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  5. Dobson, E. J. 1968. English pronunciation 1500-1700. (2nd ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  6. Ekwall, E. 1975. A history of Modern English Sounds and Morphology. (Trans. and ed. by A. Ward). Oxford: Blackwell. find
  7. Fernández, F. 1993. Historia de la lengua inglesa. Madrid: Gredos. find
  8. Gimson, A. C. 1970. An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. Bristol: E. Arnold. find
  9. Jones, D. 1960. An Outline of English Phonetics. Cambridge: Heffer Jordan, R. and E. Crook. 1974. Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology. The Hague: Mouton. find
  10. Kökeritz, H. 1953. Shakespeare’s pronunciation. New Haven: Yale University Press. find
  11. Kurath, H. and R. I. McDavid, Jr. 1961. The pronunciation of English in the United States. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. find
  12. Luick, K. 1921. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache I. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. find
  13. Mossé, F. 1952. A handbook of Middle English. (Trans. A. J. Walker). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. find
  14. Prins, A. A. 1974. A History of English Phonemes. (2nd ed.) Leiden: Leiden University Press. find
  15. Weinstock, H. 1968. Mittelenglisches Elementarbuch. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. find
  16. Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English. I. Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  17. Wright, J. and E. M. Wright. 1929. An Elementary Middle English Grammar. London: Oxford University Press. find
  18. Wyld, H. C. 1927. A Short History of English. London: Murray. ME origins of -or, -oar, -oor and -our sequences NORTH WORDS or, for, nor, Thor; (a) war; Thorpe. assort, cavort, consort, distort, exhort, resort, retort, short, snort, tort, cork, fork, stork, torque, York; scorch, torch; morph; gorse, horse, remorse; (b) orb, absorb; accord, chord, cord, lord, record, George, gorge; corm, form, reform, storm; adorn, born, corn, horn, morn, porn, scorn, shorn, thorn; corpse; porpoise, torpid, torpor, fortify, fortunate, fortune, important*, corporal, importunate, mortal, mortar, shorten, tortoise, orchestra, orchid, Dorking, torture, forfeit. morpheme, morphia, morphine, orthodox, torso; orbit, order, border, ordinary, organ, organism, organize, Morgan; dormer, Mormon, normal, ornament, corner, forward, fortress; quart, quarter, quartz, sward, swarm, swarthy, warble, ward, warden, wardrobe, warlock, warm, warmth, warn, warp, Warsaw, wart; aura, aural, Laura, Taurus. (c) *The adjective important: “in accents other than GenAm usually a FORCE word.” (Wells 1982: 160) A PPENDIX Ana Belén Fernández FORCE WORDS ore, adore, afore, before, bore, chore, core, crore, deplore, explore, fore, galore, gore, ignore, implore, more, ore, pore, restore, score, shore, snore, sore, spore, store, swore, tore, whore, wore, yore; (a) boar, hoar, oar, roar, soar; floor, door; four, pour; deport, export, fort, import, port, report, sport; support, pork, porch, forth, divorce, afford, ford, horde, sword, forge, borne, shorn, sworn, torn, worn, portent, porter, portrait, proportion, Borneo; (bi) coarse, hoarse, board, hoard, boarder; (bii) court, fourth, course, resource, source, mourn**, courtier, mourning; oral, adorable, angora, aurora, borax, boron, choral, Dora, fedora, flora, floral, glory, gory, moron, Nora(h), porous, story, thorax, torus, Tory, (c) censorious, euphoria, gloria, glorious, Gregorian, historian, laborious, memorial, meritorious, moratorium, notorious, pictorial, pretorian, stentorian, thorium, uxorious, Victoria(n), other words in ‘-orial’, hoary, uproarious. **The items mourn and mourning “also sometimes with RP /uë/, GenAm /ur/.” (Wells 1982: 162). * † * find

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