Albert H. Marckwardt

Middle English wa in the Speech of the Great Lakes Region

T HROUGHOUT the greater part of the Middle English period, stressed short a was apparently not affected by a preceding w-at least not to the extent of bringing about a phonemic realignment, as had earlier been the case with a before a nasal. In the second half of the fifteenth century, naive spellings of wa as wo began to occur, rather infrequently but over a wide range of words, becoming more numerous in the sixteenth and particularly the seventeenth centuries. This phenomenon admits of at least two phonetic interpretations, which have been advanced by Zachrisson and Luick respectively,l but in any event it is clear that words with initial wa were becoming phonemically associated with those having ME 6 as their stressed vowel, since ME a had generally fronted to [ae]. It is unnecessary for our purpose to trace the subsequent history of these wa words in its somewhat complicated detail. It will suffice to say that poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were even more than normally reluctant to rhyme words derived from ME wa with those derived from ME 6. Rhymes such as match : watch, want: pant, and flatter : water persist down to the late eighteenth century, whereas rhymes of the type wallow: follow are not common before the poetry of Swift.2 Moreover, orthoepists and lexicographers were equally conservative. Although some kind of low back vowel, presumably rounded, was suggested for ME wa in 1636 by Du Gres3 and in 1640 by Daines,4 such eighteenth century lexicographers as Buchanan, Enfield, and Walker indicate the