ME phonetics: vowel (reduction, shortening/lengthening, development of OE monophthongs in ME)

In the ME period a great change affected the entire system of vowel phonemes. OE had both short and long vowel phonemes, and each of these could occur in any phonetics environment, that is, they were absolutely independent phonemic units. But in the 10^th—12^th centuries, the ME vowel system was basically different.

Shortening - a long vowel occurring before 2 consonants (including a doubled, i.e. long, consonants) is shortened. The vowels are shortened before 2 consonants, but remain long in other environments. However, long vowels remain long before the ‘lengthening’ consonant groups ld, nd, mb, i.e. those consisting of 2 voiced consonants articulated by the same organ speech. Long consonants also remained long before such consonant clusters as belonged to the following syllable. This mainly affects the group –st.

Lengthening – short vowels were lengthened in open syllables. This was another item of the development which deprived quantity of its status as a phonetic feature. It affected the short vowels a, e, o. The narrow vowels I and u remained as a rule unaffected by this change, and thus the difference between short I and long and also that between short u and long u retained its quality as a phonemically relevant feature.

Monophthongization of OE Diphthongs – all OE diphthongs were monophthongized in ME. OE short ea became a passing through the stage of ᵫ, as in eald – ald ‘old’, healf – half.