Older Scots double consonant spellings: Sound-change, graphotactics, and proto-standard orthography

Both in spoken and written form, contemporary Scots lacks a standard. Indeed, beginning in the mid-16th century, the formal register in Scotland came to be occupied by Southern Standard English. This anglicisation stripped Scots of its linguistic autonomy. However, there is evidence that already in the 15th and 16th century Older Scots had begun to coalesce around several spelling features that were (a) distinct from the emerging southern standard and (b) increasingly internally consistent (see Knieza 1997; Molineaux et al. 2020a, 2020b). This proto-standard orthography is the result of shared communities and histories of practice which begin to mark Scots out as a distinct linguistic entity, gaining ground both in function and form. Nevertheless, the growth of the implicit —and later, explicit— power differential between Scotland and England saw these formal conventions lose ground, as Scots’ range of use was curtailed.

In this paper we survey a particularly multifaceted feature in the development of this proto-standard Scots orthographic system: the use of double consonant spellings (DCSs). In the aftermath of Old English degemination, DCSs were freed from their links to consonant length and could be re-purposed to convey a variety of phonological, morphological and lexical features broadly described as graphotactic (cf. Treiman & Boland 2017). While there is substantial variability on the path to —and in the present-day use of— DCSs in Standard English spelling, we can see a trend to mainly signal the length/quality of a preceding vowel (fill v. file), particularly at morpheme boundaries (hopping v. hoping – cf. Brooks 2015: 110). Pre-anglicisation Scots seems to have followed a similar path, although other resources (final <-e> and <-i> diphthongs) competed to mark vowel length. These patterns shed light on what Modern Scots could have become, had it run its course without external influence.

Using a large grapho-phonologically parsed corpus —From Inglis to Scots (FITS, Alcorn et al. Forthcoming)— this study investigates Scots-specific phonic and morphological correlates to DCSs in the 1380-1500 documentary record. Results for binomial regressions suggest that vowel length, final ⟨e⟩, and morpheme boundary influence the choice between Older Scots single and double consonants. As with English, the main pattern is that in polymorphemic words, DCSs follow short vowels (mĕssis ‘masses’), while single consonants occur after long vowels (hou̅sis ‘houses’). In monomorphemic words, nonetheless, double consonants are avoided in Older Scots, even after short vowels (mĕs ‘mass’; hou̅s ‘house’), a pattern where orthographic practice had begun to diverge from southern English.