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Vowel insertion in the middle of a word can be observed in the history of the Slavic languages, which had a preference for open syllables in medieval times. An example of this is the Proto-Slavic form * gordŭ 'town', in which the East Slavic languages inserted an epenthetic copy vowel to open the closed syllable , resulting in городъ ...
The Middle English sound change remained in the language and is still a mostly-productive process in Modern English, detailed in Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English. The Middle English sound change occurred before the Great Vowel Shift and other changes to the nature of vowels. As a result of the changes, the pairs of vowels ...
For instance, a can represent the lax vowel /æ/, tense /eɪ/, heavy /ɑː/, or tense-r /ɛə/. Heavy and tense-r vowels are the respective lax and tense counterparts followed by r . Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels with a "silent" e that is added at the end of words.
The front rounded vowels /y yː ø øː œː/ existed in the southwest dialects of Middle English, which developed from the standard Late West Saxon dialect of Old English, but not in the standard Middle English dialect of London. The close vowels /y/ and /yː/ are direct descendants of the corresponding Old English vowels and were indicated as u .
The formation of the causative is highly variable, and may involve replacement of the stem final vowel with short or long i or ī, palatalization of the final consonant of the stem (whereby c/z, t, tz become x, ch, ch, respectively), the loss of a stem final vowel, the addition of the suffix -l-, a number of minor strategies, or a combination ...
When adding one of the above suffixes, this silent e is often dropped and the soft pronunciation remains. While dge commonly indicates a soft pronunciation, the silent e may be dropped before another consonant while retaining the soft pronunciation in a number of words such judgment and abridgment.
A vowel or consonant added by prothesis is called prothetic or less commonly prosthetic. Prothesis is different from the adding of a prefix, which changes the meaning of a word. Prothesis is a metaplasm, a change in spelling or pronunciation. The opposite process, the loss of a sound from the beginning of a word, is called apheresis or aphesis.
Derivational suffixes and the second elements of compound words appear to display a wider range of vowel contrasts than inflectional suffixes: for example, a diphthong can be seen in the second syllable of the word spelled arleas [161] 'honorless' derived from the morphemes ār 'honor' and lēas 'devoid of, bereft of' (as a suffix, '-less ...