NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 76, Issue 2, 2023

The present paper examines the history of the digraph 〈oa〉 in English: it is relatively rare in OE and early ME, falls out of use in late ME, and reappears in the late fifteenth century. Different lexemes have been spelt with 〈oa〉 in the different language periods, but in the majority of cases, the vowel so represented is the reflex of early ME /ɔ:/ or OE o in an open syllable; hence, the digraph is clearly phonetically conditioned. The paper also investigates the graphotactic constraints on the orthographic variants 〈oa〉, 〈oCe〉, 〈oe〉.

This contribution supports and extends the principle of end-weight, first formulated by Quirk et al. (1972) to describe the tendency of heavy constituents to appear late in a sentence. Developing this principle further, we argue that it favours the addition of (functionally non-neutral) morphological markers to sentence-final constituents, which are typically characterized by prosodic prominence. The markers we study are undergoing diachronic establishment or loss and are thus temporarily variable. They represent rather diverse categories in different West Germanic languages and varieties (English, Northern Low German, Frisian) and have been gathered from different periods. Examples include inflectional endings of nouns, adjectives, finite verbs and infinitives, pro-form uses of possessives and the adjective other, prepositional choices, the a-prefix and periphrastic doon ‘do’. We suggest that end-weight is scalar, with absolute sentence-final position producing the strongest effects.

The way in which Slavic names in Bavaria have been transmitted into Old High German has been well researched already, but open questions remain. It is possible to date the loan processes when the names contain sounds with diagnostic value or show datable sound changes, such as the metathesis of liquids or the rounding of Proto-Slavic *a to Common Slavic *o or when Slavic *b is substituted by OHG *v > f. The integration of Slavic names into OHG started before 800 and came to an end around 1100. The way in which Slavic *ě was loaned also might play a role in dating these processes, but the situation remains unclear so far: Mostly it appears as OHG e, ē, but in a few cases there is a resulting sound containing /i/. This sound may have come into existence either by an early integration of Slavic *ě as OHG *ē² or when a younger Sorbian raising of *ě to some i-diphthong had already taken place.

In 2021–2023, several rune-inscribed sandstone fragments were discovered by archaeologists of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, at a Roman Iron Age grave field by the Svingerud road at Hole in eastern Norway. Several of these fragments fit together as parts of one larger sandstone slab. The main fragment with multiple inscriptions was unearthed in a flat grave (cremation) in November 2021. Radiocarbon dating of the organic material dated the burial to before 300 CE (Solheim et al., forthcoming). This article provides a detailed runological and linguistic account of the inscribed fragments, as of July 2023. The focus is on the main finds, while the work on numerous small fragments is ongoing. This find may shed new light on the features and functions of early runic writing.