It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. For example, Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's "sheep" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "shape" in the International Phonetic Alphabet ). Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.īeginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made). But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as "kn," that were later simplified. Reconstruction of patterns on higher prosodic levels-phrasal and intonational contours-is hampered by lack of testable evidence.The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. Verse evidence allows the reconstruction of left-prominent compound stress there is also some early evidence for the formation of clitic groups. Stress-assignment was based on a combination of morphological and prosodic criteria: root-initial stress was obligatory irrespective of syllable weight, while affixal stress was also sensitive to weight. The final unstressed vowels of ME were gradually lost, resulting in the adoption of # as a diacritic marker for vowel length. The changes that jointly contribute to this are homorganic cluster lengthening, ME open syllable lengthening, pre-consonantal and trisyllabic shortening. In addition to shifts in height and frontness, the stressed vowels were subject to a series of quantity adjustments that resulted in increased predictability of vowel length. The OE long vowels and diphthongs were unstable, producing a number of important mergers including /iː - yː/, /eː - eø/, /ɛː - ɛə/. The so called “short” diphthongs usually posited for OE suggest a case for which a strict binary taxonomy is inapplicable to the data. The non-low short vowels of OE are reconstructed as non-peripheral, differing from the corresponding long vowels both in quality and quantity. In the vocalic system, OE shows changes that identify it as a separate branch of Germanic: Proto-Germanic (PrG) ē 1 > OE ǣ/ē, PrG ai > OE ā, PrG au > OE ēa. Consonantal length was contrastive, there were no affricates, no voicing contrast for the fricatives, no phonemic velar nasal, and loss was under way. The consonantal system of OE differs from the Modern English system. pre-1350, is marked by great diversity of scribal practices it is only in late ME that some degree of orthographic regularity can be observed. Middle English (ME) covers roughly 1050–1500. These late OE manuscripts were produced in Wessex and show a degree of uniformity interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most of the manuscripts on which the descriptive handbook tradition relies date from the latter part of the period. Old English (OE) is a cover term for a variety of dialects spoken in Britain ca.
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