ABSTRACT

Metathesis, a specific phonological development consisting in an alteration within the sequence of sounds in a word was usually materialised in the development of English as a shift of a prevocalic consonant to a postvocalic position or vice versa. The change affected various classes of words: nouns (OE brid> bird), adjectives (OE beorht > brigt 'bright', or verbs (OE irnan > rinnan 'run', etc.) This type of change, especially frequent in Northumbrian Old English, soon spread to other areas of England, showing a pattern typical of lexical diffusion. The paper concentrates on the metathesis of the liquid [r] and the adjacent vowel in the early periods of English. While only a very limited number of words with Old English metathesis survive into Modem English, those with Middle English metathesis have proved to be much more stable, retaining the metathetic form until Present-day English. The evidence of the available corpora, especially the OED, confirms the hypothesis of the change being rather abrupt than gra dual.

1. Metathesis

On the level of phonology, metathesis consists in an alteration within the sequence of sounds which seems to be a reflection of "performance errors" (cf Crystal 1980). In other words, it is a transposition of sounds and/or letters in a word (OCEL). Sometimes classified as belonging to the category of the slips of the tongue, metathesis is found to be a type of sound change especially common in child language. Erroneous metathetic sequences of sounds also develop in adult language, but their rise is governed by principles different from those responsible for errors in the language of children (cf Drachman 1978).

Hogg (1977) distinguishes three kinds of metathesis, of which two can be traced in English. The first is labelled as "sporadic" (e.g. [sp] > [ps]; wasp wapse) and as such is not rule-governed, the other, "regular", is best represented by the transposition of [r] and a vowel. In Germanic, metatheses, including r-metathesis, belong to the earliest processes and are present in each language belonging to that family. The transposition of a postvocalic r-sound to the prevocalic position is also attested in other Indo-European languages, including Slavic (cf Proto-Slavic *orsti > Russ. rosti 'grow'; Keyser 1975).

In English, the process is represented by the two basic modifications: (1) change of positions by a vowel and an adjacent consonant and (2) a mutual replacement of two items in a consonant cluster. In the former, prevocalic [r] moves to the position after the following vowel, especially when that vowel stands before [n] or [s], and, at a later date, before [d] in Late Northumbrian (cf PGmc * rinnan > WS irnan 'run', PGmc * brunna- > OE burna 'bourn', ONhb bird/WS brid 'bird', etc.). Alternatively, the liquid [r] after a vowel is moved before that vowel, the latter change being frequent in late Old Northumbrian when the vowel stands directly before the cluster [xt], as exemplified by ONhb wrybta from wyrhta (cf WGmc *wurhtjo- 'wright').

The other type of metathesis is a purely consonantal development in...