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Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and place, and in contrast with Old English and Modern English, spelling was usually phonetic rather than ...
Although Middle English spelling was never fully standardised, the following table shows the pronunciations most usually represented by particular letters and digraphs towards the end of the Middle English period, using the notation given in the article on Middle English phonology. [47]
This period is estimated to be c. AD 1725–1945. Split into rhotic and non-rhotic accents: syllable-final /r/ is lost in much of the English of England, with exceptions including West Country English and Lancashire dialect. The loss of coda /r/ causes significant changes to preceding vowels: /ər/ merges with /ə/.
The first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels /eː oː/, as in beet and boot, and the close vowels /iː uː/, as in bite and out. The close-mid vowels /eː oː/ became close /iː uː/, and the close vowels /iː uː/ became diphthongs. The first phase was completed in 1500, meaning that by that time, words ...
Early Middle English had two separate diphthongs /ɛj/ and /aj/. The vowel /ɛj/ was typically represented orthographically with "ei" or "ey", and the vowel /aj/ was typically represented orthographically with "ai" or "ay". These came to be merged, perhaps by the fourteenth century. [1] The merger is reflected in all dialects of present-day ...
Y-cluster reductions. Y-cluster reductions are reductions of clusters ending with the palatal approximant /j/, which is the sound of y in yes, and is sometimes referred to as "yod", from the Hebrew letter yod (h), which has the sound [j]. Many such clusters arose in dialects in which the falling diphthong /ɪu/ (the product of the merger of ...
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
The Old English fricatives /f, θ, s/ had voiceless and voiced allophones, the voiced forms occurring in certain environments, such as between vowels, and in words originating from the Kentish dialect (like vane, vinew, vixen, and zink), word-initially. In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes ...