Sandhi h after third-person pronouns in Middle Welsh

Abstract

‘Sandhi h’ after 3 sg. feminine possessive pronouns in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton is agreed to be ancient. Although it has been supposed that sandhi h after other pronouns in Welsh is also of ancient origin, an earlier study (Sims-Williams 2010) argued that h did not appear after first-person possessive and infixed object pronouns with nasal auslaut (’m, yn, ’n) until about the middle of the thirteenth century. At that point sandhi h was already frequent after infixed object and third-person plural possessive pronouns (’y/’e, eu), but it did still not appear consistently. Here it is argued that some of the examples without h were due to dissimilation (a form of Grassmann’s Law), but that when these exceptions are set aside enough evidence of significant absence remains to conclude that sandhi h after third-person pronouns was a recent development in the mid-thirteenth century. In the case of the infixed object pronouns, the main evidence comes from alliteration in poetry composed before c. 1258. In the case of 3 pl. possessive pronouns, the main evidence is provided by thirteenth-century manuscripts in which sandhi h is significantly less frequent than in the early fourteenth century. It is argued that sandhi h spread first from third-person infixed pronouns to 3 pl. possessive pronouns and then to first-person pronouns. An Appendix revisits the relevance of post-nasal hypercorrect h to the emergence of sandhi after first-person pronouns with nasal auslaut, and comments on the relevance of ‘post-sonorant aspiration’ in Basque.