Features of Middle English phonology

LENGTHENING IN OPEN SYLLABLES This is a phonological process which started in the north of England in the 13th century and affected the high vowels /i/ and /u/ in the following century. It is one of the major sound changes of early Middle English and involves lengthening and lowering as seen in the following examples.

RETENTION OF MORA THROUGH COMPENSATORY LENGTHENING To understand Open Syllable Lengthening properly one must start with the notion of mora. A mora corresponds metrically to the quality of a short vowel; all long vowels and diphthongs are bimoric in English. The constituents of a syllable correspond to morae in metrics. One can see that in the history of English various cases of compensatory lengthening recognize that with the loss of a consonant its mora is transferred to a preceding vowel, for instance light /lɪxt/ [lɪçt] (-VCC) > /li:t/ (-V:C).

SYLLABIC RESTRUCTURING Recall here that a metrical foot (F = foot) refers to those syllables which stand between two stressed (S = strong, i.e. stressed, indicated by a superscript stroke: ˡ) syllables including the first stressed syllable, irrespective of the number of weak, i.e. unstressed (W = weak) syllables after it: ˡHe’s preˡdicting a ˡlandslide ˡvictory.

The labels S, ‘strong’, and W, ‘weak’, refer to the relative accentuation of the syllable. With the designations L, ‘light’, and H, ‘heavy’, the reference is to the quantity of the syllable. The correlation between strong and heavy on the one hand and weak and light on the other is in Middle English such that when a syllable is the only one in a foot then it must also be ‘heavy’, hence the lengthening of short stressed vowels after the loss of final /ə/. The entire metrical quantity of the words was retained by Open Syllable Lengthening.

VOWELS BEFORE /X/ In West Saxon there were only two recognisable variants for /x/, [h] in initial position, [x] in all other positions, irrespective of the preceding vowel. It was only towards the end of the Old English period that the variant [ç] appears as an allophone after front vowels. In Middle English this led to a diphthong with the mid front vowels /e/ and /e:/.

There is an equivalent to the diphthongisation of [e(:)ç] to [eiç] with back vowels. With the latter vowels the allophone was [x] up to early Middle English. During this period a velar glide appears before this sound, [u], the back equivalent to /i/ with [ç]. This merged with the preceding vowel and resulted in a diphthong.

THE SHIFT OF /X/ TO /F/ Already by the 14th century a shift is to be found in English which is common in many other languages as well. It is the shift among fricatives from velar to labial place of articulation. In English the shift was unidirectional and represents one of the many reflexes of /-x/ in Modern English (the remaining reflexes are vocalic). Note that there are two main outputs from this shift, one with an original high vowel /ʊ/ (later lowered to /ʌ/) and one with a mid back vowel /ɔ/; occasionally the shift occurred with a mid front vowel, cf. the form dwarf which itself shows later lowering of /e/ to /a/ before /r/.

SHORT VOWEL DEVELOPMENTS The development of late Old English /y/ differed in the various dialects. In Kentish the vowel had already unrounded to /ɛ/ in the late 9th century; in the west midlands and in the south-west it was retained in the Middle English period. In the east midlands it was probably unrounded early on (after the 11th century).