Patterns of Similarity in the Language of Middle English Texts

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY IN THE LANGUAGE OF MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXTS The words 'Middle English dialect' are not a collocation much used these days. Angus Mcintosh1 was perhaps thefirstto point out that the seemingly definitive work of Moore, Meech and Whitehall lacked any satisfactory grounding in theory. It was directed, rather, tofindingjust those few criteria whose distribution corresponded to popularly recognized divisions, while by implication neglecting a host of other features which might have turned out to be distributed in other ways. T o replace lines A to K w e now have the maps and the linguistic profiles of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, and anyone who has used the resources of that work will acknowledge that the pictures it presents are, whatever else, certainly not oversimplified. The old assumption was that any text could be located in 'a dialect' that 'had boundaries'. Every scribe had been socialized into some particular form of the language and that form would show through the scribe's written practice and make it possible to locate a text in time and space. Clearly, such a view was one with which a stereotypical nineteenth-century linguist could be happy; it fitted well with a Stammbaum model of linguistic and ethnic relationships and came to be abandoned precisely when detailed observation of the contemporary languages of Europe seemed to show that coherent patterns of isoglosses owed their existence to selective reporting, and that linguistic continua were very much the rule. 'Every area is, in respect of some of its features, a border area,' report the editors of the Atlas (Vol. 1, p. 12) of the findings of twentieth-century dialectology, drawing the conclusion that what is needed is a technique for dealing with continua and for locating items within them. It would be wrong, though, to dismiss Moore, Meech and Whitehall as naively reflecting pre-modern preoccupations; quite the reverse. O n the one hand they explicitly reject the possibility of tracing a continuity between Middle English divisions and their Old English precursors; on the other, they 1 'The analysis of written Middle English,' TPS, 1956, pp. 26-55. 2 'Middle English dialect characteristics and dialect boundaries', University of Michigan Publications: Language and Literature, XIII, 1-60. 3 Angus Mcintosh, M. L. Samuels & Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986). P A R E R G O N ns 14.2 (January 1997) 52 Alex Jones regard the differences that they describe as reflecting a continuum fragmented by the relative difficulties of communication. Where they are lacking is in a methodology for showing that the boundaries they draw are significant discontinuities, a lack they share with traditional dialectologists generally. It is not enough to accumulate facts in the hope that the important questions will both pose and answer themselves. Mcintosh and Samuels explicitly work from the opposite point of view: that Middle English texts emerge from a continuum of scribal practices; that this fact makes possible the (progressive) localization of texts of unknown provenance by reference to those whose place of origin is known; and that plotting the forms thus localized is the only way of representing Middle English as w e can know it.4 It might seem that a lot of weight is resting on thefirstof these assumptions: that because the locations of some texts are known, their characteristics are in some way correctable with their locations. This has to be true in a trivial sense, but is useful only to the extent that the linguistic characteristics of texts can be shown to vary in the same way as their locations. Mcintosh and Samuels seem here to be assuming precisely one of the things that one would like to find out-just how, according to what variables, does the language of one Middle English text differ from another? One would like to know whether there are linguistic discontinuities in medieval England, either those traditionally assumed or not, which the Atlas sets out by assuming do not exist. If there are discontinuities one would like to know whether the discontinuities correlate with non-linguistic features, political, geographic, or whatever the case might be. One would like...