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The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as,
In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers.A number of these changes are specific to vowels which occur before /l/, especially in cases where the /l/ is at the end of a syllable (or is not followed by a vowel).
Cardinal vowel chart showing peripheral (white) and central (blue) vowel space, based on the chart in Collins & Mees (2003:227). Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something ...
A widely accepted approach is the maximal onset principle: [89] this states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable. Thus the word leaving should be divided /ˈliː.vɪŋ/ rather than * /ˈliːv.ɪŋ/ , and hasty is /ˈheɪ.sti/ rather than * /ˈheɪs.ti/ or * /ˈheɪst ...
*sċolde > sċeolde "should" (cf. German sollte) *sċadu > sċeadu "shadow" (cf. Dutch schaduw) Most likely, the second process was simply a spelling convention, and a, o, u actually did not change in pronunciation: the vowel u continued to be pronounced in ġeong, o in sċeolde, and a in sċeadu. This is suggested by their developments in ...
It works most of the time, but some of the newer ones have eliminated this feature. ... Up up, down down down, left right, left right, b, a, start. Works every time. Image credits: Anthony N Lee #38.
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The phenomenon that occurs in many dialects of the United States is one of tense–lax neutralization [1] in which the normal English distinction between tense and lax vowels is eliminated. In some cases, the quality of a vowel before /r/ is different from the quality of the vowel elsewhere.