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The history of the merger dates back to two Middle English phonemes: the long vowel /oː/ (which shoot traces back to) and the short vowel /u/ (which put traces back to). As a result of the Great Vowel Shift , /oː/ raised to /uː/ , which continues to be the pronunciation of shoot today.
The next–text split is a vowel split occurring in Singaporean English where next /nekst/ and text /tɛkst/ use different vowel phonemes and do not rhyme. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] The met – mate merger is a phenomenon occurring for some speakers of Zulu English where /eɪ/ and /ɛ/ are both pronounced /ɛ/ .
Moving forward in time, the two Middle English vowels /a/ and /aː/ correspond directly to the two vowels /a/ and /ɛː/, respectively, in the Early Modern English of c. 1600 AD (the time of Shakespeare). However, each vowel has split into a number of different pronunciations in Modern English, depending on the phonological context.
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
Back mutation (sometimes back umlaut, guttural umlaut, u-umlaut, or velar umlaut) is a change that took place in late prehistoric Old English and caused short e, i and sometimes a to break into a diphthong (eo, io, ea respectively, similar to breaking) when a back vowel (u, o, ō, a) occurred in the following syllable. [24]
The long–short vowel pair /æ æː/ developed into the Middle English vowels /a ɛː/, with two different vowel qualities distinguished by height: Hogg 1992 suggests they may have had different qualities in late Old English as well. [110] The back low vowels /ɑ ɑː/ also generally show a qualitative distinction in Middle English: short /ɑ ...
The same process also affects stressed front and back vowels in hiatus if they are antepenultimate (in the third-to-last syllable of a word). When /j/ is produced, primary stress shifts to the following vowel, but when /w/ is produced, primary stress shifts instead to the preceding syllable, as in /fiːˈliolus, teˈnueram/ > /fiːˈljolus ...
In English, this happens most often with vowels, although not exclusively. See phonemic differentiation for more information. Due to the wide geographic distribution of the English language and the number and variety of speakers, there are phonemic pairs which are distinguished in some accents and varieties, but considered identical in others.