PART 1: Historical English phonology

OLD-ENGLISH (500bc-1150ac)

• The Old English vowel system was very symmetrical

• All vowels and diphthongs could be long or short.

• Old English consonants could also be long (doubled) or short

• The voiced fricatives were allophones of their voiceless counterparts in complementary distribution: short (undoubled) fricatives in medial positions were voiced →they didn’t distinguish meaning

• The grapheme <g> indicated either the phoneme /j/, (before [e,i]; e.g. gear), or the phoneme /g/ with its two allophones [g] (god) or [G] (fugol) (in intervocalic position)

• /h/ was pronounced [h] at the beginning of a syllable (hætt), and [x] after a back vowel (dohtor) / [C] after a front vowel (niht)

• /r/ was probably a trill and pronounced in all positions.

From old English to Middle English

• Short vowels were lengthened before the lengthening groups -mb, -nd, -ld, and -rd e.g., climban, wind, cild

  • This change did not take place if the lengthening group was followed by a third consonant, e.g., children

• Syllable structure:

  • Also towards Middle English, the syllable structure in stressed syllables was regularized:

    1. In open syllables, the vowel became a long vowel e.g. cepan ‘keep’

    2. In closed syllables, the vowel became a short vowel e.g. cepte ‘kept’

    3. In the antepenultimate syllable, the vowel was also shortened (this is an exception to the first rule!) e.g., divinity

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1150-1500)

• Since early Middle English, unstressed vowels were weakened to schwa /ə/

  • loss of inflectional endings.

  • Middle English is the period when English shifted most noticeably from a synthetic to an analytic language, and word order was fixed to SVO

From Middle English to Early modern English

Loss of /x/

• The phoneme /x/ was lost

  • As a consequence, the preceding vowel was lengthened (compensatory lengthening)

    • As this lengthened vowel then regularly underwent the Great Vowel Shift (GVS), /x/ must have been lost before the fifteenth century e.g., night, knight

  • In some Middle English dialects, /x/ became /f/ instead. Some words that came into Modern English through these dialects today still have /f/: e.g., laugh, draught

The Great Vowel shift

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (1500-1660)

Vowel changes

• Short /ʊ/ changed to /ʌ/.e.g. but, butter, cup. However, this change did not take place in all words e.g. pull, put, wolf, bull

• Middle English /ɛː/ was shortened to /e/ in some words e.g. breath, bread, sweat, spread

• Middle English /oː/ was shortened to /ʊ/.

  • Depending on whether this shortening took place early, the resulting /ʊ/ underwent the regular further change to /ʌ/ (blood, flood, see above) or not (look, foot).

Consonant changes

• /k/ and /g/ were lost before nasals at the beginning of words e.g. gnat, knight

• /b/ and /g/ were lost after nasals at the end of words, e.g., climbe

• /wr/ was simplified to /r/

From Early Modern English to Modern English

• Vowel changes:

  • In British English (RP), short /æ/ was lengthened to /æː/, long /æː/ was later changed to /ɑː/ in some environments:

    • before voiceless fricatives e.g. path, half, laugh, after, castle, bath

    • before /n/+/s,t/ e.g. aunt, dance, plant

  • In RP, vowels following /w/ were rounded; this affected /a/ in particular, e.g., swan, watch

• Consonant changes:

  • Postvocalic /r/ was lost in British English (RP), causing one of the following changes in the preceding vowel:

    • the vowel is lengthened e.g. arm, bark, card, horse, storm

    • or: the vowel is changed in quality / diphthongized e.g. here, poor

  • postvocalic /l/ was lost before consonants in some words, e.g., palm, calm