Open syllable lengthening (original) (raw)
Open syllable lengthening, in linguistics, is the process by which short vowels become long in an open syllable. It occurs in many languages at a phonetic or allophonic level, and no meaningful distinction in length is made. However, as it became phonemic in many Germanic languages, it is especially significant in them, both historically and in the modern languages.
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| dbo:abstract | Open syllable lengthening, in linguistics, is the process by which short vowels become long in an open syllable. It occurs in many languages at a phonetic or allophonic level, and no meaningful distinction in length is made. However, as it became phonemic in many Germanic languages, it is especially significant in them, both historically and in the modern languages. Open syllable lengthening affected the stressed syllables of all Germanic languages in their history to some degree. Curiously, it seems to have affected the languages around a similar time, between the 12th and the 16th centuries, during the late Middle Ages. The languages differ mainly as to the specific vowels that were lengthened the specific environment but also in the result of the lengthening. There is substantial variation, and in many languages, the process has been obscured by paradigmatic levelling. Sometimes, the newly-lengthened vowels merged with existing long vowels, but in other languages, they remained distinct because the older long vowels underwent changes of their own such as in Icelandic and, to a lesser degree, the continental Scandinavian languages. The lengthening often also applied in reverse at some point by shortening long vowels in closed syllables. As a consequence of the combination of the two changes, vowel length and consonant length came to be in complementary distribution: one of the two features is no longer distinctive but is predictable from the other. Many languages later shortened the long consonants. That had consequences for spelling, as consonant length was generally marked by doubling in the various Germanic languages, but vowel length was not. The doubled consonants then came to be used as an indicator for vowel length and, later, quality). That feature is seen in most Germanic languages today. Some Germanic varieties such as High Alemannic German have no general open syllabic lengthening. It may be restricted to a few cases before sonorant consonants, as in Bernese German [ˈv̥aːrə] ('to drive') or [ˈtæːlər] ('valleys'), or it may not occur at all, as in Walser German. Consequently, the varieties feature both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length. (en) |
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| rdfs:comment | Open syllable lengthening, in linguistics, is the process by which short vowels become long in an open syllable. It occurs in many languages at a phonetic or allophonic level, and no meaningful distinction in length is made. However, as it became phonemic in many Germanic languages, it is especially significant in them, both historically and in the modern languages. (en) |
| rdfs:label | Open syllable lengthening (en) |
| rdfs:seeAlso | dbr:Middle_English_phonology |
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