Yesterday while looking for examples of the Georgian shairi poetry format, I ran across a reference to “the long sixteen-syllable line that the obscure hynmographer Pilipe Betlemeli had used for his invocation of the virgin.” I wasn’t able to track down Betlemeli’s Georgian invocation, but oddly enough there is a hymn to the virgin written in a similar form, a Welsh poetry form called Tawddgyrch Cadwynog, also with 16 syllables, but with a slightly different end-rhyming scheme. This early English Hymn to the Virgin was written in English but with Welsh orthography about 1470 by Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal, a Welshman attending Oxford in England. It has been the subject of much curiosity by linguists as it occurs about the time the Great Vowel Shift:
Very early in the NE period, the ME i tended to develop into a
diphthong. This diphthongization, together with that of ME ii,
constitutes (according to Jespersen) the first step in the ” great
vowel-shift.”^ “The long |i”| must through |ii| have become |ei|
about 1500 ; it is transcribed ei in the Welsh hymn written
about that time, by S[alesbury], 1547 and H[art, Orthographic),
1569, while the Lambeth fragment 1528 identifies it with F ay "
(Jespersen, p. 234). On this point, Wyld, p. 223, states : " The
present-day development [of ME i] is the well-marked diphthong
[ai]. The first stage in the process was most probably [i*], that is,
the latter part of the old long vowel was made slack. We must
consider this stage as already diphthongal. The next stage was
probably a further differentiation between the first and second
elements of the diphthong, the former being lowered to [e]. The
subsequent career of the diphthong may well have been [si-sdi-ai].
A point of importance is that at one stage the diphthong became
identical with that developed out of old oi^ . . . The stage [ei]
may be represented by the occasional spellings with ey, ei in the
fifteenth century.” Among these he mentions those found in the
W Hymn to the Virgin. He concludes (p. 225) by stating that
” from this combined evidence of occasional spellings and the
statements of grammarians, it appears (i) that from the fifteenth
to well into the seventeenth century old i was pronounced by many
speakers as a diphthong ^ of which the first element was a front
vowel, the diphthong thus being either [e^', ei] or [sti] ; (2) that
during the same period other speakers pronounced old I and old
with one and the same diphthongal combination ; (3) that at any
rate from the seventeenth century onwards, the first element of the
diphthong was either [9] or [a], most probably the latter, giving
the diphthong [a«].” So there were in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, two types of pronunciation for this i.
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