Compensatory lengthening

Encyclopedia : C : CO : COM : Compensatory lengthening

Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda. An example from the history of English is the lengthening of vowels that happened when the voiceless velar fricative /x/ was lost. For example, in Chaucer's time the word night was pronounced /nixt/; later the /x/ was lost and the /i/ was lengthened to /iː/ by compensatory lengthening. (Later the /iː/ became /aɪ/ by the Great Vowel Shift.)

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.