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However, this earlier Middle English vowel /a/ is itself the merger of a number of different Anglian Old English sounds: the short vowels indicated in Old English spelling as a , æ and ea ; the long equivalents ā , ēa , and often ǣ when directly followed by two or more consonants (indicated by ā+CC, ǣ+CC, etc.);
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,
The Modern English descendants sleep and sheep reflect the Anglian vowel; the West Saxon words would have developed to *sleap, *sheap. The vowel affected by this change, which is reconstructed as being a low back vowel ā [ɑː] in Proto-West-Germanic, was the reflex of Proto-Germanic /ɛː/.
Certain English accents feature variant pronunciations of these sounds. These include fronting , where they merge with /f/ and /v/ (found in Cockney and some other dialects); stopping , where they approach /t/ and /d/ (as in some Irish speech); alveolarisation , where they become /s/ and /z/ (in some African varieties); and debuccalisation ...
English spelling was also influenced by Norman in this period, with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being spelled th, rather than with the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not exist in Norman. These letters remain in the modern Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, having been borrowed from Old English via Old West Norse.
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.
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The difference between [f θ s] and [v ð z] was generally not marked in Old English spelling. The sounds [f v] were both written as f , the sounds [s z] were both written as s , and the sounds [θ ð] were both written as either ð or þ (the two letters were not used in Old English to distinguish between the voiceless and voiced versions of ...