Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Narrow diphthongs are the ones that end with a vowel which on a vowel chart is quite close to the one that begins the diphthong, for example Northern Dutch [eɪ], [øʏ] and [oʊ]. Wide diphthongs are the opposite – they require a greater tongue movement, and their offsets are farther away from their starting points on the vowel chart.
These ligatures are proper letters in some Scandinavian languages, and so are used to render names from those languages, and likewise names from Old English. Some American spellings replace ligatured vowels with a single letter; for example, gynæcology or gynaecology is spelled gynecology .
For example, vowels were often lengthened in late Old English before /ld/, /nd/, /mb/, and vowels changed in complex ways before /r/ throughout the history of English. Vowels were diphthongized in Middle English before /h/ , and new diphthongs arose in Middle English by the combination of vowels with Old English w , g /ɣ/ → /w/ , and ġ /j/ .
Where one word ended with a vowel (including the nasalized vowels written am em im um~(om) and the diphthong ae) and the next word began with a vowel, the former vowel, at least in verse, was regularly elided; that is, it was omitted altogether, or possibly (in the case of /i/ and /u/) pronounced like the corresponding semivowel.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
Short high vowels (/i, u/) are deleted in open syllables following a long syllable, but usually remain following a short syllable; this is part of the process of high vowel loss. Syncopation of low/mid vowels occurred after i-mutation and before high vowel loss. An example demonstrating that it occurred after i-mutation is mæġden "maiden":
Result in some dialects, for example Anglian, was back vowels rather than diphthongs. West Saxon ceald; but Anglian cald > ModE cold. Diphthong height harmonization: The height of one element of each diphthong is adjusted to match that of the other. /ɑi/ > /ɑː/ through this change, [6] possibly through an intermediate stage /ɑæ/.
A short diphthong had the same length as a short single vowel, and a long diphthong had the same length as a long single vowel. [124] As with monophthongs, their length was not systematically marked in Old English manuscripts, but is inferred from other evidence, such as a word's etymological origins or the pronunciation of its descendants.