ABSTRACT
The present chapter has grown out of an attempt to trace the vowel sounds of the Byers Green dialect back to their ME. ancestral types with the help of the "occasional spellings" found in local documents. This project entailed a comparative survey of the other Northern dialects that had been separately investigated in detail. It was then borne in upon me that the numerous early place-name forms that have appeared of late years in the various monographs on Northern geonymics often threw much light on the problems that I had set out to study. In consequence, this part of my work attained such dimensions that it seemed advisable to abandon my original intention of prefacing the sections dealing with the B.Gn. treatment of each ME. sound with a detailed discussion of its course of develop ment in Northern provincial English right down to the present day. Instead, I have grouped all the several items together under the above title. Accordingly in the following pages, the reader will find accounts of the histories of the more important members of the ME. vowel system from the medieval period down to Modern times. These accounts are almost exclusively based, in the first place, on the direct information obtained recently by the dialectologists, and in the second place on occasional spellings from North-country records and the early forms of Northern place-names. There is one notable omission, namely the development of ME. ō 1 1 (tense) and Fr. ǖ. But my opinions on this problem have already been printed in an article in Englische Studien (Band 63, pp. 229 ff.), apparently to the displeasure of Professor Luick, who has tried to deal with them rather ruthlessly in a later number of the same periodical (Band 65, pp. 68-73).
