Towards a corpus of eighteenth-century English phonology
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Abstract
This paper gives an account of plans for constructing a searchable database of eighteenth-century English phonology. The project incorporates data from pronouncing dictionaries and other texts dealing with pronunciation published in the second half of the 18th century. The data will be recorded in the form of Unicode transcriptions of as many of the approximately 1,700 words used to exemplify John Wells’ (1982) Standard Lexical Sets as appear in the eighteenth-century texts. Although all the eighteenth-century texts purported to describe the ‘best’ English, they were compiled by authors from different parts of the English-speaking world (mainly different regions of England, Scotland and Ireland but including some from North America) and so can provide evidence for geographical diffusion of innovations. (Beal 1999, C. Jones 2006). This paper provides an account of the design of this database and presents the results of a pilot study demonstrating how such a database can be used to answer questions concerning the chronological, social, geographical and phonological distribution of variation between /hw/ ~/w/ ~ /h/ in WHICH, WHO, NOWHERE, etc. which is of interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists and historical phonologists.