Acute accents as graphic markers of vowel quantity in two Late Old English manuscripts

Abstract

The available standard accounts of Old and Middle English usually assert that scribes paid very little or no attention to vowel quantity. However, a great deal of what has been said so far about quantitative changes in Late Old and Early Middle English is based either on purely theoretical models, or on extremely questionable Modern English data. Surprisingly, except for a few more detailed studies on the peculiar orthography of The Ormulum, little has been done so far to analyse other orthographic systems from this perspective. Furthermore, as has already been shown in earlier studies, vowel quantity of Old and Middle English can be reconstructed to some extent on the basis of orthographic evidence from some manuscripts. Since use of the accent mark by some scribes is often associated with vowel length, the primary aim of the present study is to assess the reliability of the accent marks used in MSS Gg. 3.28 (Homilies of Ælfric) and William H. Scheide (The Blickling Homilies) as potential orthographic indicators of vowel quantity. The results of the analysis clearly show that the accent mark is one of those orthographic notations that can be extremely helpful in establishing vowel quantity in a Late Old English manuscript.