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How did Cyprian Norwid speak? In search of the poet’s voice
Abstract
This article discusses those elements of Cyprian Norwid’s pronunciation that could be reconstructed on the basis of the graphic features of his manuscripts, as well as on the basis of information about the poet’s linguistic biography, especially about the period of his lifetime and his Masovian origin. Norwid’s pronunciation probably had the following features characteristic of 19th-century Polish: the presence of the raised vowels é and ó, the synchronic pronunciation and different distribution of nasal sounds than today, the fronting of ł, the sonority of h, the synchronic realisation of palatalised labial consonants, the lack of alignment of sonority in clusters such as kw, sw, św, cw, ćw, tw, chw, and a wider distribution of proparoxytone stress than today. On the other hand, the Masovian influences in Norwid’s idiolect included: forms without apophony, the use of kie, gie in place of standard Polish ke, ge, and devoicing at the word boundaries. Furthermore, the Eastern Borderlands influence can be attributed to the more frequent use of o instead of ó, as well as the replacement of hard consonants with soft time, living in that environment. Strictly individual features of his pronunciation as well as para-linguistic behaviour characteristic of him can only be inferred indirectly by referring to the accounts of people who had contact with him. From a review of such testimonies, an image emerges of an interlocutor endowed with a beautiful timbre of voice, using expressive intonation and gestures aptly combined with speech.
Keywords:
phonetics, pronunciation, Cyprian Norwid’s idiolect, writer’s language, linguistic biographyDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
