1 An Historical Study of English (1996), Essentials of Early English ( 2 2005 [1999]), An Introduction to Middle English (co-authored with Simon Horobin, 2002); “From Middle to Early Modern English” (2006). 2 This review will use page numbers for references, since using the book’s system would unnecessarily complicate the checking of quotes: Except for the preface, every single paragraph in the book, and be it only 3 lines, is numbered, but the numbering starts anew in each subchapter. Thus, the first paragraph of Ch. 1, subch. 1, has the number 1.0., but so does the first paragraph of Ch. 2, subch. 1, and so on, so that e.g. a paragraph numbered 4.3 can be found on pages 14, 40, 63, 99, 114, 139. However, the page headers do not identify the chapters and subchapters, which makes looking up Smith’s many cross references extremely difficult. 3 This point has also been raised by Hansen (2001: 112-113) in a review of Smith 1999: “Die referierten Fakten werden zu wenig zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt”. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen Jeremy J. Smith, Sound Change and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Corinna Weiss Over the last decade, Jeremy J. Smith has published a number of introductory texts 1 for students of English historical linguistics. His new book also targets “advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students” (xi) as the primary readership, and for their benefit Smith intends to “keep the use of technical terms to a minimum, [...] describe what some may consider rather basic knowledge about the history of English sounds [and] re-examine basic notions from first principles” (xi). Yet he modestly hopes that “teachers may also find something of value [...], if only to dispute”(xi). This mixed audience may be responsible for the division of the book into two parts: The first (1-91 2 ) establishes the theoretical framework on an introductory level, the second (93-160) presents three specialist studies of key sound changes at turning points in English language history: Old English Breaking, quantitative changes in the transition from Old to Middle English, and the Great Vowel Shifts [sic]. However, the two parts do not always correspond well: some introductory descriptions are insufficient for the understanding of the more technical chapters, while some of the provided theoretical framework is not at all employed in Smith’s argumentation 3 . Rezensionen 122 4 Cf. a similar criticism in Skaffari (2001: 413) on Smith 1999: “However, teachers may be looking for more extensive accounts of the language-external cultural background”. Smith focuses on the ‘Why? ’ rather than the ‘What? ’ or ‘When? ’ questions, and attempts “an articulation between current trends in sociohistorical linguistics and wider debates in historiography” (1) in examining the complex matter of “the articulation between variation and change” (3). He argues that modern historiography, “stimulated by postmodernism to rethink its theoretical underpinnings” (5), is of “some relevance for historians who work with language” (6). However, the book does not quite fulfil the reader’s expectations in this respect: modern historiography plays a rather subordinate role in both the text and the References 4 . On the other hand, Smith, in what he disparagingly calls “parasitism on other disciplines” (5), uses examples from philosophy, evolutionary biology, meteorology, or physics to discuss questions of contingency. As Valtonen (1999: 115), in her review of Smith 1996, has pointed out, this is not entirely unproblematic either, since there is “a consistent difficulty for the writers or readers of interdisciplinary publications to be specialists in more than one discipline”. Thus, while Smith quotes Keller 1994 for the “‘hidden hand’ or ‘blind watchmaker’ effect (Keller 1994)”, Keller’s subtitle suggests “invisible hand”, and the The Blind Watchmaker is Dawkins’ (1986). Ch.1, “On Explaining Sound Change” (1-28), outlines the general theoretical framework. Subch. 1 familiarizes readers with Smith’s main aims, and subch. 9 more or less repeats the list of Contents in outlining the structure of the book. Subchs. 2-7 establish the first principles of sound change, speaker innovation, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, actuation, hyperand hypo-adaptation, contact, and systemic regulation. Ch. 2, “On Evidence” (29-50), discusses witnesses, writing systems, verse practices, contemporary comments, and reconstruction. Here, Smith distinguishes between protoand pre-languages: the term protosignifies a nodal point on a tree model, while prerefers to the period of divergence. For him, “Pre-Old English”, therefore, is taken “to refer to the period between the node ‘Anglo-Frisian’ and the node ‘Old English’” (49). Though aware that this distinction “may seem to be rather technical and (to some) unnecessary”, he considers it “important [since] we need a way of referring to the process of divergence” (50). However, the nodes Anglo-Frisian and Old English do not appear in his family tree (89), and Ch. 4 employs ‘Pre-English’ rather than ‘Pre-Old English’ for “the period of divergence which resulted in what may reasonably be considered a discrete language” (88-89). Also, the family tree has the nodes “Proto-North West Germanic” and “Proto-West Germanic”, but Smith variously uses “Proto-Germanic”, along with “pre-Germanic”, “(Proto-) Ingvaeonic” (despite his observation “that there is considerable controversy about what is meant by Ingvaeonic” (91)), “the Germanic period”, “West Germanic”, and additionally “Anglo- Saxon”, “pre-West Saxon”, “pre-historic Old English”, “Early Old English”, “Proto-Old English”, “Norse” and “Scandinavian” in rather less strictly defined ways. Thus, Valtonen’s (1999: 114) criticism of Smith (1996), i.e. the “inaccuracy or unnecessary overlap in the use of terminology for the languages and peoples”, equally applies to this book. Ch. 3 describes phonological approaches and processes (51-87), but it appears that Smith attempts a little too much considering the overall length of the book’s main Rezensionen 123 body (160 pages). He admits that the “constraints of space” make his outlines of e.g. Taxonomic, Generative, and Natural and Evolutionary Phonology (63-73) “very crude and un-nuanced [sic]”. One wonders why he nevertheless feels obliged to include the latter two, since ultimately, “the approach of the book is eclectic” and the terminology that “of taxonomic phonology, which has advantages of simplicity and being widely understood” (74). Ch. 3 concludes with an explanation of Grimm’s Law as a phenomenon induced by contact between Germanic and Raetic, which Smith himself admits to be “extremely tentative given the limitations of the evidence” (87). This extended example is mainly based on Esau 1973, and supplemented by passages from Smith 1996, Smith 2004a and 2004b. However, Esau’s interpretation of perceptive and productive problems crucially hinges on a special feature ‘murmur’, which Smith’s conventional account of Grimm’s Law (53) does not mention at all. What is worse, some extremely misleading errors make it well-nigh impossible to understand the argumentation without going back to Esau’s original. Smith, e.g., states that “both series [of obstruents] were voiceless [my emphasis]. A secondary distinction seems to have been aspiration […]. However, aspiration was not, in Raetic, of crucial importance; voice [my emphasis], being more salient acoustically, was the primary distinctive feature” (83). This contradiction topples the whole argument. What Esau (1973: 467-468) really says is that the “P T X were phonologically voiceless fricatives [and] p t k voiceless stops” and that, therefore, the “Raetic series used the feature continuance [my emphasis] as main contrast”. Smith’s corroborative evidence from Present-Day English, i.e. “that many foreign speakers of English, notably Germans, have a habit of using a bilabial fricative [ß] in place of English [f]”(80) is hardly convincing in the light of Gimson (2001: 183): “particularly Germans […] use bilabial friction / ß/ instead of the labiodental sound”, since the respective labiodental in Gimson is / v/ and not / f/ . The examples frater - brother and kannabis - hemp are not particularly well chosen either, because they contain two instances of Grimm’s Law each, but the sounds under discussion are neither consistently the initial ones nor indicated by special fonts. Also, that / f/ in Latin frater is the reflex of IE. / bh/ , the input of Grimm’s Law, would be helpful for students to know. Some of them may also wonder why Smith calls [ß] an “affricated realization of / b/ ” (80), if his own definition of affricates on the same page is to hold: “If the release of a plosive closure is not made rapidly, a fricative sound, articulated in the same area of articulation as the plosive, will be heard; plosives made with this slow, fricative release are said to be affricated”. It might have helped to add Gimson’s (2001: 147) observation “that in rapid, familiar, speech, where easy intelligibility rather than articulatory precision is the aim, the closure of plosives is often so weak that the corresponding fricative sound, without a preceding stop [my emphasis], is produced”. Ch. 4.1 (88-91) discusses the relationship of English to the Germanic languages without providing any maps. British students will perhaps know where “Jade Bay” is, or “old Germania”, when to date the “eve of the Adventus Saxonum”, or that the “North sea littoral” is the coastal area, but I doubt that these designations will enhance the understanding of foreign students. Quite generally, extending (non-native) students’ vocabularies is a laudable objective, but will they really need such quaintly stylish words as congener, congeries, conspectus, or fissiparous, which do not even occur in the British National Corpus on any scale to speak of (BNC 1, 4, 9, 9 occur- Rezensionen 124 5 On pages 5, 22, 25, 48, 61, 62, 64, 69 (2 times), 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 116, 118, 129, 130. The likely reason for its disappearance is that Smith 2004 does not employ the phrase. 6 On pages 1, 3 (2 times), 9, 14, 48, 61, 73, 84; in a context where “articulation” is simultaneously used to mean ‘production of sounds’ this is particularly misleading, e.g. “Bringing phonetics and phonology into articulation” (61). rences respectively). On the other hand, a little more variation of certain pet expressions would be welcome: underpin, in various word forms, is used 19 times between pp. 1-130, but disappears from the book thereafter 5 , articulate with/ articulation between, meaning ‘form a joint’, occurs 9 times 6 . Appendix 1, “The Principal Sound Changes from Proto-Germanic to Early Modern English” (161-173), relying on Hamer (1967), is a rather “old-school” list of sound changes and “for the sake of completeness” (161) it lists many changes which are not discussed in the body of the book at all. The “Suggestions for further reading” (177) are brief and mostly oriented towards beginners. The second half of the book with its more technical Chs. 4-7 (92-160) and Appendix 2, “Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening of i, u: Etymological Notes” (p.174-176), aims at “the more advanced scholars” (xi). Subjecting vowel changes to closer scrutiny, Smith argues along the lines of both language contact and systemic pressure. Ch. 4 first deals with the dating and dialect geography of Old English Breaking. On the assumption that it really did produce diphthongs, Smith discusses likely triggering factors, such as North Germanic influences on Anglian and, in turn, of a transfer to West Saxon of specifics thus acquired, e.g. the velar qualities of / l/ and / r/ . Ch. 5 deals with quantitative changes: drawing on some more recent literature, and trying to bring prosodic and phonetic explanations into accord, Smith describes Homorganic Lengthening [HOL], Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening [MEOSL] and “shortening before multiple and long consonants, and shortening before [sic! recte in] trisyllabic words” (121). For HOL, Smith first postulates a West Saxon process of “final-consonant devoicing in stressed vowels [sic! recte syllables]” (120), in words like cild or lomb/ lomp. This tendency of “the continental West Germanic languages”, though rarely reflected in the spelling, is absent from North Germanic. Anglian, as “the most North-Germanic-like of the Old English varieties” (120), therefore has voiced sounds, which later encroach upon West Saxon. The outcome would be a conditioned lengthening of the vowels, since “liquids and nasals are the most ‘vowelly’ [sic] of the consonants [...] liable to assimilation [my emphasis] with the preceding long vowel” (120). This may surprise students who remember Smith’s claim that / l, r, m, n/ are “the most ‘vowel-like’ of English consonants, and liable to dissimilation [my emphasis] to a preceding vowel” (112). The shortenings and MEOSL are linked to complex prosodic processes relating to the reduction of unstressed syllables. It is hardly surprising that this obscuration and loss is viewed as “the result of interaction between Norse and Anglian” and the “break-up of tightly knit communities which seems to have accompanied the spread of ‘Norsified’ culture”(123). Ch. 6 investigates the origins of what Smith calls the Great Vowel Shifts, since he identifies two processes quite distinct from each other: a ‘full’ Southern and a Northern Shift, which vary “diatopically, and quite possibly diachronically, in terms of […] Rezensionen 125 overall shape and even actuation” (126). Apart from systemic factors, the Southern Shift originates from linguistic contacts between the different layers of society in late medieval London with its emerging new standard. System I, the prestigious London variety, influences System II, the slightly different, less prestigious variety of the weakly tied and socially aspirant newcomers to London (‘Mopsae’). Then, in turn, their variety, with certain hyper-adaptations, becomes dominant for a time, only to be replaced by System III, the speech of easterners from East Anglia, again not without some hyper-adaptations. The description of the Northern Shift closely follows Aitken’s seminal survey of the vowels of the Older Scots period, with whose numbering of vowels specialists may be familiar, though students may find it less helpful. The argumentation is complex, primarily involving system internal pressures in threeand four-height vowel systems. A possible sociolinguistic aspect comes in more as an aside: in one brief paragraph, Smith draws a parallel to the London situation, since the Northern shift corresponds in date to the emergence of a quasi-standard language in Scotland. However, this “process of gradual elaboration” (152) might have warranted a more in-depth treatment and, as Skaffari (2001: 413) remarks on Smith (1999), “teachers may be looking for more extensive accounts of the language-external cultural background”, especially when promised new methods of modern historiography. Ch. 7 sums up the discussions and draws some general conclusions: as in history, explanations of language change are rarely, if ever, monocausal, rather they need multiple triggering. Breaking results from intraand extra-linguistic features, the quantitative changes from prosodic and phonetic features and contact between English and Norse, both Shifts from phonological input and social interaction. The “References”, “Suggestions for further Reading”, and an “Index” complete the volume. While reading this review, some more advanced readers may have experienced some kind of déjà vu: though Smith admits that his “discussions draw in part on material published [by him] elsewhere”, he claims that “in each case the development has been completely reassessed”, with “either a new or a much revised approach” (x). This did not exactly prepare the reviewer for the fact that large parts of the book are very close to verbatim reprints of older material. Thus, extended passages in the first part come from Smith 1996, 2002, 2004a and 2004b, and Horobin and Smith 2002. Chs. 4.2-4.7 are (near) verbatim reprints of Smith 2002 and Ch. 6 amounts to little more than a cut and paste from Smith 1993 (incidentally not in the References), 1996, and 2004a and 2004b, with only minor re-orderings, such as the shifting of footnotes into the text or vice versa, and very slightly altered vocabulary/ terminology: to give a few examples, Smith replaces “Germanic Heimat” by “Germanic homeland” (99), “the evolution of the classic Old English sound changes” by “the origin of the prehistoric Old English sound changes” (105), “minor” by “very small”, “actuation” by “triggering”, “interacted” by “have interacted” (p 153), “Indeed” by “Moreover” (139), “archaic” by “old-fashioned” (136), “local area” by “area”, “hypercorrect” by “hyperadapt”, “prone” by “liable” (135), “reactive hypercorrection” by “hyperadaptation” (133). Though self copy may not be unusual in the scientific community, reusing texts on such a large scale without clearly marking them as verbatim quotes does not set the best example for students. Rezensionen 126 7 Cf. previous reviews of Smith 1999: “more advanced readers may find the repetitions and heavy cross-referencing […] tedious” (Skaffari 2001: 412); and of Smith 1996, “a little too much repetition of the theoretical principles” (Valtonen 1999: 11). 8 “A sound change has taken place when a variant form, mechanically produced, is imitated by a second person and that process of imitation causes the system of the imitating individual to change”. Also, students are generally taught to provide an up-to-date and complete bibliography. However, the References do not live up to this standard: The Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology are missing, as are some of Smith’s own publications from which he takes over material (Smith 1993 and Smith 2004a). Smith 1995 is wrongly dated, since volume 95, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, appeared in 1994. Incidentally, the error already occurs in Smith 1996: 214. Jones 1912 correctly is 1911. And while occasionally it may be helpful to include the original publication date, more recent editions or reprints should not be omitted: thus, the first edition is Baugh 1935, while Baugh and Cable 1993 (4 th ed.) has seen a 5th edition in 2004; Gimson’s Pronunciation of English first appeared 1962, but Gimson 1989 [4 th ed. by Ramsaran] should be replaced by Gimson 2001 [6 th ed. by Cruttenden]. Suband series-titles/ volumes should be supplied in e.g. Jones 1911, Esau 1973, Keller 1994, or Dossena and Lass 2004. In addition to Labov 1972, one might want to find Labov 1994 and 2001. Quite generally, one would wish for the inclusion of more recent publications. To call Hamer 1967 [a booklet for beginners of 35[! ] pages, which in Austria exists in only two copies and is, moreover, out of print] a “standard grammar” (xv) and adopt its “handy scheme” (161) of lettering sound changes A, B, C, etc. in Appendix 1, is downright unacceptable. The amount of repetitiveness in such a short book, even in the light of didactic considerations, is irksome 7 : to give just one example, Smith’s three-line definition of sound change 8 (13) is fully repeated eight times in the book on pp. 27, 56, 70, 73, 94, 109f., 116, 126; its non-appearance after p. 126 has most likely the same reason as that for underpin (see fn. 5). Incidentally, the somewhat mechanical Index coyly has “sound change: 13 (defined) and passim” only. And while it lists Alpine passes, Austria, giraffes, Holocaust denial, human (male) nipples, meteorology, the Industrial and Russian Revolutions, Stilicho, Dick Whittington, etc. etc., (Proto-, pre-, North-, West-) Germanic, along with other preand protocombinations, are not listed. The page numbers under “German” variously refer to Old High, Middle High, Middle Low, and Present-Day German. Advanced readers may also want to know where Smith refers to secondary literature and therefore they may miss the names of these authors in the Index. The inclusion of a (comparative) list of phonetic symbols (as in Smith 1999: 25) might have helped foreign students with Smith’s transcriptions, which vacillate between Received Pronunciation/ Southern Standard British English, Present-Day Scots and Scottish Standard English. Finally, more careful editing might have eliminated misleading errors as well as problems with fonts (sometimes the readers are left with Unicode numbers) and simple misprints, such as e.g. “Raetic seems to have had two series of obstruents: / p, t, k/ and / f, T, k/ [recte / f, T, X/ ]” (82 and again 83), or “Gh in cough tussio, laugh tussio” [recte laugh rideo] (42). Also, why “the gloss sus indicates that sow here is not Present-Day English sow but rarer word sough” (44) is not clear, since sus means Rezensionen 127 ‘sow [animal]’ in Latin, and the gloss is there to distinguish it from “sow (both when it signifies seminare and encire)” (Jones 1991: 177). Despite the criticism, Smith’s text is generally easily readable and his anecdotal examples and comparisons from sciences outside the more narrow linguistic areas enliven the theoretical material; thus, embryos, patterned hexagons in a honeycomb, the long neck of the giraffe and the male human nipple, the kinetic energies of Porsches and lawnmowers, etc. are certain to get the attention of students. If students of historical linguistics are not deterred by the price (~ 63 ), they will benefit from the book, especially under the guidance of experienced tutors, since they will get insights into the workings of sound change and the kind of argumentation that, if only in a less narrow sense of the word, comes close to its explanation. References British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition) (2007). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http: / / www.natcorp. ox.ac.uk, 14.8.2009. Baugh, Albert C. (1935). A History of the English Language. New York: Appleton-Century. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable ( 3 1978, 5 2004). A History of the English Language. London: Routledge. Dawkins, Richard (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman. Esau, Helmut (1973). “The Germanic consonant shift. Substratum as an explanation for the first sound shift”. Orbis 22. 454-473. Gimson, A.C. (2001 [1962]). Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 6 th ed., rev. by Alan Cruttenden. London: Arnold. Hamer, Richard F.S. (1967). Old English Sound Changes for Beginners. Oxford: Blackwell. Hansen, Klaus (2001). “Review of Jeremy J. Smith (1999). Essentials of Early English. London, New York: Routledge”. Anglia 119. 111-113. Horobin, Simon and Jeremy J. Smith (2002). An Introduction to Middle English. (Edinburgh textbooks on the English language). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Jones, Charles (ed.) (1991). A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Jones, John D. (ed.) (1911). Coopers Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685). (Neudrucke frühneuenglischer Grammatiken, Bd.5). Halle a.S.: Niemeyer. Keller, Rudi (1994). On Language Change: the Invisible Hand in Language. London: Routledge [transl. of Keller, Rudi ( 3 2003 [1990]). Sprachwandel: von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. Tübingen: Francke]. Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. (Language in society, 20). Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. (Language in society, 29). Oxford: Blackwell. Onions, C.T. (ed.) (1966 [repr. 1996]). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon. Simpson, John (ed.) (2009). Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition on CD-Rom, Version 4.0., or Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online, http: / / dictionary.oed.com. Skaffari, Janne (2001). “Review of Jeremy J. Smith (1999). Essentials of Early English. London & New York: Routledge”. Language 77: 2. 412-413. Rezensionen 128 Smith, Jeremy J. (1993). “Dialectal variation in Middle English and the actuation of the Great Vowel Shift”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 94. 259-277. Smith, Jeremy J. (1994). “The Great Vowel Shift in the North of England, and some forms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95. 433-437. Smith, Jeremy J. (1996). An Historical Study of English. Function, Form and Change. London & New York: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. ( 2 2005 [1999]). Essentials of Early English: An Introduction to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. London: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. (2002). “The Origins of Old English Breaking”. In: Iyeiri, Yoko and Margaret Connolly (eds.). And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. Essays on Medieval English presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on his sixtieth Birthday. Tokyo: Kaibunsha. 39-50. Smith, Jeremy J. (2004a). “Classifying the vowels of Middle English”. In: Kay, Christian J. and Jeremy J. Smith (eds.). Categorization in the History of English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 221-236. Smith, Jeremy J. (2004b). “Phonological space and the actuation of the Great Vowel Shift in Scotland and Northern England”. In: Dossena, Maria and Roger Lass (eds.). Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. (Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, vol. 16). Bern et al.: Peter Lang. 309-328. Jeremy J. Smith (2006). “From Middle to Early Modern English”. In: Mugglestone, Linda (ed.). The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford UP. 120-146. Valtonen, Irmeli (1999). “Review of Jeremy Smith (1996). An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100. 111-115. Corinna Weiss Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Wien