On the excrescent Middle English /p/

Abstract

After a historical discussion of consonantal epenthesis and the accounts of the insertion of /p/ in early english, a dialectal corpus analysis of ME texts is performed to study the sporadic and the permanent insertion of epenthetic /p/ in the Northern, east and West Midlands, Southwest, and Southeast varieties. Throughout Middle English the forms with the extra plosive are clearly outnumbered by those without the stop with the exception of the West Midlands. The process seems to have been irregular with no apparent correlations to time or place. It seems to have been a device facilitating the interpretation of minims by scribes, and permanent cases are scarce.