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‘I Intend to Try Some Other Part of the Worald’: Evidence of Schwa-Epenthesis in the Historical Letters of Irish Emigrants

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Book cover Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context

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Abstract

To date, Irish English (IrE) lacks a broad, diachronic and empirical investigation of its phonology, simply because the available material has been limited. In the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)—a collection of over 6000 texts written between the late 1600s and the early 1900s, most of which are Irish emigrant letters—many non-standard features of IrE phonology can be found. Today, schwa-epenthesis is a well-known feature of IrE, and occurs across the island in e.g. [ˈfɪləm] film and more regionally in clusters such as /rm/ and /rl/, e.g. [ˈfarəm] farm and [ˈgɛrəl] girl. Nevertheless, little evidence of epenthesis in past varieties of IrE has been presented. How common is epenthesis in CORIECOR, and does its phonological distribution differ from present day IrE?

In this paper, I examine spelling variation in CORIECOR that reveals evidence of epenthesis. By systematically and qualitatively assessing phonetic representation in letters written over a period of more than 200 years, I document possible clusters containing epenthesis, the most common words affected by the feature and the regional and diachronic development of this phonological process. This paper shows that epenthesis is well attested in the corpus and is found in a wide range of clusters (e.g. /wn/, /dr/, /ŋr/, /fl/, /rl/, /tr/, /nr/ and /rn/), but to a much lesser extent in clusters where it would be expected today.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kevin McCafferty, and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. CORIECOR—Corpus of Irish English Correspondence. Bergen and Cáceres: University of Bergen and University of Extremadura. In preparation.

  2. 2.

    Alan J. Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979); Raymond Hickey, A Sound Atlas of Irish English (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004); and Jeffrey L. Kallen, Irish English. Volume 2: The Republic of Ireland (Berlin, Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013).

  3. 3.

    Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw, World Englishes (London: Arnold, 2003), 19.

  4. 4.

    Raymond Hickey, A Sound Atlas, 83.

  5. 5.

    Alan J. Bliss, ‘English in the South of Ireland’, in Language in the British Isles, ed. Peter Trudgill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 139; Raymond Hickey, Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27; and Katrin Sell, ‘[ˈfɪləm] and [ˈfarəm]? Sociolinguistic Findings on Schwa Epenthesis in Galway English’, in New Perspectives on Irish English, eds Bettina Migge, and Máire Ní Chiosáin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 49. As the corpus largely predates partition (1920), the term ‘Ireland’ is used for the whole island, i.e. both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

  6. 6.

    Raymond Hickey, A Sound Atlas, 83; and Irish English, 307–8.

  7. 7.

    Patrick L. Henry, An Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon: Phonology, Accidence, Syntax (Dublin: University College, 1957), 69.

  8. 8.

    Jeffrey Kallen, Irish English, 67.

  9. 9.

    Shane Walshe, Irish English as Represented in Film (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 231. /t̪/ refers to a dental stop realisation of /θ/, common in IrE (see e.g. Raymond Hickey, Irish English, 12).

  10. 10.

    Raymond Hickey, A Sound Atlas.

  11. 11.

    Shane Walshe, Irish English, 231–33.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 250–69.

  13. 13.

    Katrin Sell, ‘[ˈfɪləm] and [ˈfarəm]’.

  14. 14.

    Rudolf Dekker, ‘Jacques Presser’s Heritage: Egodocuments in the Study of History’, Memoria y civilización 5 (2002): 13–14, http://www.egodocument.net/pdf/2.pdf.

  15. 15.

    Wolfgang Helbich, and Walter D. Kamphoefner, ‘How Representative Are Emigrant Letters? An Exploration of the German Case’, in Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, eds Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 29. According to these authors, illiteracy, early deaths, no relatives to write to, and disinterest in keeping contact must have been some of the reasons behind not writing.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 50.

  17. 17.

    Michael Montgomery, ‘The Linguistic Value of Ulster Emigrant Letters’, Ulster Folklife 41 (1995): 26–41; Edgar W. Schneider, ‘Variation and Change in Written Documents’, in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, eds J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 67–96; Stephan Elspaß, ‘“Everyday Language” in Emigrant Letters and Its Implications for Language Historiography: The German Case’, Multilingua. Special Issue: Lower Class Language Use in the Nineteenth Century 26, no. 2–3 (2007): 151–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/MULTI.2007.008; and Marijke van der Wal, and Gijsbert Rutten, ‘Ego-Documents in a Historical-Sociolinguistic Perspective’, in Touching the Past. Studies in the Historical Sociolinguistics of Ego-Documents, eds Marijke van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013), 1–17.

  18. 18.

    Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke, ‘Introduction’, in Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, eds Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3–4.

  19. 19.

    Michael Montgomery, ‘The Linguistic Value’, 31.

  20. 20.

    David Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish Emigration and the Art of Letter-Writing’, in Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, eds Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 112.

  21. 21.

    David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation. Personal Accounts of Migration to Australia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 89.

  22. 22.

    Tony Fairman, ‘Writing and “the Standard”: England, 1795–1834’, Multilingua. Special Issue: Lower Class Language Use in the Nineteenth Century 26, nos 2–3 (2007): 175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/MULTI.2007.009.

  23. 23.

    See Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, ‘A Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR): A Tool for Studying the History and Evolution of Irish English’, in New Perspectives on Irish English, eds Bettina Migge, and Máire Ní Chiosáin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 265–88; and ‘“I Will Be Expecting a Letter from You Before This Reaches You”: Studying the Evolution of a New-Dialect Using a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)’, in Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, eds Marina Dossena and Gabriella del Lungo Camiciotti (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 179–204.

  24. 24.

    Patrick Fitzgerald and B. K. Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 194–95.

  25. 25.

    Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, ‘A Corpus of Irish English’.

  26. 26.

    The Irish Emigration Database includes material from Irish emigrants and their families. It originates from the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. The corpus is biased towards the province of Ulster due to its initial focus on local material, but since 1988 has incorporated material from all Irish counties.

  27. 27.

    In both cases, epenthesis occurs in the cluster /rl/ which can contain epenthesis in IrE today, e.g. [ˈgɛɻəl] ‘girl’.

  28. 28.

    Marijke van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten, ‘Ego-Documents’, 52.

  29. 29.

    Carolina P. Amador-Moreno and Kevin McCafferty, ‘Linguistic Identity and the Study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the Making’, Lengua y migración 4, no. 2 (2012): 29.

  30. 30.

    Personal names and place names from letters (unless quoted directly) have in this paper been capitalised according to ‘Standard’ English orthography, even in those instances where the original spelling in the source letter was not. As mentioned in Sect. 4.1.2, capitalisation in egodocuments was often erratic.

  31. 31.

    Patrick L. Henry, An Anglo-Irish Dialect, 69.

  32. 32.

    Raymond Hickey, Irish English; and Katrin Sell, ‘[ˈfɪləm] and [ˈfarəm]’.

  33. 33.

    Margaret A. Maclagan and Elizabeth Gordon, ‘How Grown Grew from One Syllable to Two’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 18, no. 1 (1998): 5–28.

  34. 34.

    Margaret Maclagan, and Elizabeth Gordon, ‘How Grown Grew’, 7.

  35. 35.

    An underscore between the labels for phonetic environments is used to indicate the position of epenthesis, e.g. ‘plosive_liquid’.

  36. 36.

    For ‹confiniment› confinement, epenthesis has been identified on the basis that the silent ‹e› has been substituted by ‹i›.

  37. 37.

    Katrin Sell, ‘[ˈfɪləm] and [ˈfarəm]?’, 48.

  38. 38.

    Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Social Stratification’, in Sociolinguistics and Language Study: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, eds Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 58.

  39. 39.

    William Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 2: Social Factor (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 31n.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Norwegian Military Academy, Oslo, Norway

    Persijn M. de Rijke

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  1. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Diana Villanueva Romero

  2. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

  3. Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Manuel Sánchez García

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de Rijke, P.M. (2018). ‘I Intend to Try Some Other Part of the Worald’: Evidence of Schwa-Epenthesis in the Historical Letters of Irish Emigrants. In: Villanueva Romero, D., Amador-Moreno, C., Sánchez García, M. (eds) Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66029-5_4

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