Everything about Compensatory Lengthening totally explained
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 palatal fricative /ç/ and its
allophone /x/ were lost. For example, in
Chaucer's time the word
night was pronounced /niçt/; later the /ç/ was lost and the /i/ was lengthened to /iː/ by compensatory lengthening. (Later the /iː/ became /aɪ/ by the
Great Vowel Shift.)
Both the
Germanic spirant law and the
Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law show vowel lengthening compensating for the loss of a nasal.
Non-rhotic forms of English have a lengthened vowel before a silent post-vocalic r: in Scottish English,
girl has a short /i/ followed by a light alveolar /r/, as presumably it did in Middle English; in Southern British English, the /r/ has dropped out of the spoken form and the vowel has become a "long schwa".
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