The Vowel Phonology

Abstract

Following on his discussion of John Dryden’s pronunciation and the phonetic transcription he supplies for the poet’s description of the character of a good parson, A.J. Ellis (1874: 1039) offers a summary of the differences between what he sees as ‘the transitional character’ of that pronunciation compared with that of ‘our modern pronunciation’. Among the issues he raises are the less advanced nature of the English Vowel Shift in Dryden’s speech, where pronunciations like [hææt], [sææt] for hate, seat are still recorded as against the modern raised and (as we shall see) diphthongized [eɪ] vowel space. He notes too the presence of post-vocalic [r] as a still salient feature, its loss in Ellis’s pronunciation accompanied by vowel lowering: ‘the pure (iir, oor, uur) in place of our modern (iiɹ, ooɹ, uuɹ)’. In addition, Ellis records the fact that Dryden’s failure to unround the vowel in post-[w] contexts, as in war, quality, is no longer characteristic, while the low and back [ɑ] vowel in items like last, fast has replaced Dryden’s [a], although this usage is still ‘often used by refined speakers in the north’. He records too how the common eighteenth-century raising of [oo] to [uu] in an item like golden is ‘still heard from elderly speakers’, while long u ([ju]) in items like true and rule is found not infrequently ‘at least in intention, provincially’. Ellis admits that this set is incomplete and he does not seem to imply that any one of the features he lists are more salient than any of the others, although, as we shall see below, he spends a great deal of time in illustrating developments such as syllable final [r]-loss and its consequences as well as the diphthongization of long mid front and back vowels.