The Phonetic Representation of ME ì in Some Norfolk Works of the Late Fifteenth Century

The Hymn to the Virgin is the play taken by modern editors and philologists as an example of the earliest proof which testifies to the diphthongization process of Middle English (henceforth ME) ì. They claim that, by writing <ei>, the Welsh scribe who copied that play was trying to represent the sound of late ME ì. In some Norfolk plays of the late 15th century, too, there is evidence of the occurrence of the diagraph <ei> in some words (but not all) which have radical ME ì. Assuming that the <ei>-type spelling revealed a diphthongized pronunciation of the result of ME ì, I will try to investigate when such an <ey>-grapheme occurred and why it appeared in few words of these 15th century Norfolk works. In order to carry out this study, I analyzed four plays taken from the Bodleian Digby MSS 133 which seem to belong to the East Anglian dialect, and more precisely to the Norfolk county: The Conversion of St Paul, Mary Magdalene, The Killing of the Children, and Wisdom. I then compared the results I had found in these plays with those of the Paston Letters, a collection of family letters written in the Norfolk dialect throughout the 15th century. The data I obtained seem to cast a new light on the Great Vowel Shift (henceforth GVS) phenomenon, as it appears that the diphthongization of ME ì may have been helped by a phonetic coarticulation process induced by the consonant which follows the radical vowel and which, apparently, had a fundamental role in the development of a centralized and lowered diphthongal onset.