Middle English phonology


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 conventional. Words were generally spelled according to how they sounded to the person writing a text, rather than according to a formalised system that might not accurately represent the way the writer's dialect was pronounced, as Modern English is today.
The Middle English speech of the city of London in the late 14th century is used as the standard Middle English dialect in teaching and when specifying "the" grammar or phonology of Middle English. It is this form that is described below, unless otherwise indicated.
In the rest of the article, abbreviations are used as follows:

Sound inventory

The surface sounds of Chaucer's Middle English are shown in the tables below. Phonemes in bold were added across Middle English; those in italics were removed during the period.

Consonants

1. The exact nature of Middle English r is unknown. This article uses indiscriminately.

Consonant allophones

The sounds marked in parentheses in the table above are allophones:
  • is an allophone of occurring before and
  • *For example, ring is ; did not occur alone in Middle English, unlike in Modern English.
  • are allophones of in syllable-final position after front and back vowels, respectively.
  • Based on evidence from Old English and Modern English, and apparently had velarised counterparts or allophones and. These occurred after back vowels or the consonant.

    Voiced fricatives

In Old English,,, were allophones of,,, respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants. That led to many alternations: hūs vs. hūses ; wīf vs. wīfes . In Middle English, voiced allophones become phonemes and have become solidly established in Modern English as separate phonemes by several sources:
  1. Borrowings from foreign languages, especially Latin, Ancient Greek and Old French, which introduced sounds where they had not occurred: modern fine vs. vine ; ether vs. either.
  2. Dialect mixture between Old English dialects that voiced initial fricatives and the more standard dialects that did not. Compare fat vs. vat and fox vs. vixen.
  3. Analogical changes that levelled former alternations: grass, grasses, grassy and glass, glasses, glassy with replacing the original between vowels. Contrast wife vs. wives; greasy, still with a in some dialects and staff, with two plurals, analogical staffs and inherited staves.
  4. Loss of final, resulting in voiced fricatives at the end of a word where only voiceless fricatives had occurred. That is the source of the modern distinctions teeth vs. to teethe, half vs. to halve, house vs. to house.
  5. Reduction of double consonants to single consonants, which explains the contrast between kiss, to kiss vs. house, to house with in the verb.
  6. A sandhi that introduced the voiced fricative /ð/, instead of original /θ/, at the beginning of unstressed function words. Contrast this with initial vs. thistle with initial.
  7. A sound change that caused fricatives to be voiced after a fully unstressed syllable. That is reflected in the modern pronunciation of the endings that are spelled -s, which now have the phonemic shape -, having developed in Middle English from - to - and then, after the deletion of the unstressed vowel, to -. The sound change also affects function words ending in original - that are normally unstressed. Contrast this with vs. is with ; off with vs. of with, originally the same word; with with in many varieties of English vs. pith with.
The status of the sources in Chaucer's Middle English is as follows:
  • The first three sources were already established.
  • As indicated by versification, the loss of final was normal in Chaucer's time before a vowel-initial word and optional elsewhere. That is assumed to be a poetic relic, with the loss of final having been completed in spoken English.
  • The reduction of double consonants was apparently about to occur.
  • The sandhi effects on unstressed function words occurred somewhat later, during the transition to Modern English.
The strongest distinction was between and because of the large number of borrowings from Old French. It is also the only distinction that is consistently indicated in spelling, as and respectively. sometimes appears as, especially in borrowings from Greek and sometimes as. Both and are spelled.

Vowels

1 The Old English sequences, produced late Middle English and had apparently passed through early Middle English : OE grōwan → LME. However, early Middle English that was produced by Middle English breaking became late Middle English : OE tōh → EME → LME. Apparently, early became before the occurrence of Middle English breaking, which generated new occurrences of, which later became.

Monophthongs

Middle English had a distinction between close-mid and open-mid long vowels but no corresponding distinction in short vowels. The behaviour of open syllable lengthening seems to indicate that the short vowels were open-mid in quality, but according to Lass, they were close-mid. Later, the short vowels were in fact lowered to become open-mid vowels, as is shown by their values in Modern English.
The front rounded vowels existed in the southwest dialects of Middle English, which developed from the standard Late West Saxon dialect of Old English, but not in the standard Middle English dialect of London. The close vowels and are direct descendants of the corresponding Old English vowels and were indicated as. may have existed in learned speech in loanwords from Old French, also spelled, but, as it merged with, becoming in Modern English, rather than, it can be assumed that was the vernacular pronunciation that was used in French-derived words.
The mid-front rounded vowels likewise had existed in the southwest dialects but not in the standard Middle English dialect of London and were indicated as. Sometime in the 13th century, they became unrounded and merged with the normal front mid vowels. They derived from the Old English diphthongs and. There is no direct evidence that there was ever a distinction between open-mid and close-mid, but it can be assumed because of the corresponding distinction in the unrounded mid front vowels. would have derived directly from Old English, and derived from the open syllable lengthening of short, from the Old English short diphthong.
The quality of the short open vowel is unclear. In early Middle English, it was presumably central since it represented the coalescence of the Old English vowels and. During Middle English breaking, it could not have been a front vowel since rather than was introduced after it. During Early Modern English, it was fronted in most environments to in southern England, and it and even closer values are found in the contemporary speech of southern England, North America and the Southern Hemisphere. It remains in much of Northern England, Scotland and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the long open vowel, which developed later because of open syllable lengthening, was. It was gradually fronted, to successively, and, in the 16th and the 17th centuries.

Diphthongs

All of the above diphthongs came about during the Middle English. Old English had a number of diphthongs, but all of them had been reduced to monophthongs in the transition to Middle English. Diphthongs in Middle English came about by various processes and at various time periods and tended to change their quality over time. The changes above occurred mostly between early and late Middle English. Early Middle English had a distinction between open-mid and close-mid diphthongs, and all of the close-mid diphthongs had been eliminated by late Middle English.
The following processes produced the above diphthongs:
  • Reinterpretation of Old English sequences of a vowel followed by Old English or with pre-existing, :
  • *OE weġ → EME
  • *OE dæġ → ME → LME
  • Middle English breaking before
  • Borrowing, especially from Old French

    Phonological processes

The following sections describe the major phonological processes occurring between written Late West Saxon, the standard written form of Old English, and the end of Middle English, which is conventionally dated to around 1500 AD.

Homorganic lengthening

In late Old English, vowels were lengthened before certain clusters:,,,,. Later, the vowels in many of those words were shortened again, which gives the appearance that no lengthening happened, but evidence from the Ormulum indicates otherwise. For details see Phonological history of Old English: Vowel lengthening.

Stressed vowel changes

, the standard written form of Old English, included matched pairs of short and long vowels, including seven pairs of pure vowels and two pairs of height-harmonic diphthongs: and. Two additional pairs of diphthongs, and, existed in earlier Old English but had been reduced to and, respectively, by late Old English.
In the transition to Middle English, the system underwent major changes by eliminating the diphthongs and leaving only one pair of low vowels but with a vowel distinction appearing in the long mid vowels:
  • The diphthongs simplified to and, respectively. Subsequently, the low vowels were modified as follows:
  • * and merged to a single central vowel.
  • * and rose to and, respectively.
  • The diphthongs and respectively simplified to new front-round vowels and . Everywhere except in the southwest, and were soon respectively backened to and between a palatal consonant and a following syllable, and unrounded to and everywhere else. In the southwest, it took 200 or 300 years for the process to take place, and in the meantime, the sounds were spelled in texts there.
  • The front rounded vowels and unrounded to and respectively everywhere but in the southwest and the southeast.
  • *In the southwest, the front rounded vowels and remained, and were spelled.
  • *In the southeast, the vowels had already been unrounded to and respectively in Old English and remained as such in Middle English.
That left an asymmetric system consisting of five short vowels and six long vowels, with additional front rounded vowels in the southwest. Some symmetry was restored by open syllable lengthening, which restored a long low vowel.