IV On the whole the Early NE voicing of fricatives was rather inconsistent and irregular.
V Loss of cs.With the disappearance of x’ the system lost one more opposition – through palatalisation as “hard” to “soft”.
VI Late ME long cs were shortened and the phonemic opposition through quantity was lost.
VII Some cs were lost in consonant clusters, which became easier to pronounce:the initial x was lost when followed by a sonorant
The aspirate h was lost initially before vowels, but not in all ws e.g. honour but hope
Вопрос №33 Changes in the spelling conventions in ME and NE.
In ME the former anglo-saxon spelling tradition wa replaced by that of te Norman sribes reflecting the influence of French and often mixing purely phonetics spelling with French spelling habbits and traditions inherited from OE. The scribes substituted the so-called continental variant of the Latin alphabet for the old ‘insular writing’. Some letters came into disuse, replaced by new means of expressing the sounds formally denoted by them- thus the letters p[th] and p[w], being of Runic origin, unknown to the Norman scribes, disappeared all together. Some letters, already existing in OE but being not very frequent there, expanded their sphere of use – like the letter k. New letters were added – among them j,w,v,z. Many digraphs – combinations of letters to denote one sound, both vowel and consonant – appeared, mostly following the pattern of the French language.
The NE with the revival of learning in the 16th century and new principle of spelling was introduced, later to be called etymological. It was believed that, whatever the pronunciation, the spelling should represent to the eye the form from which the word was derived, especially in the words of Latin or Greek origin.
However, the level of learning at that age was far from perfect and many of the so-called etymological spellings were wrong.
Вопрос №34 Word stress in ME and NE.
The word accent acquired greater positional freedon and began to –play a more important role in the word derivation. These changes were connected with the phonetic assimilation of thousands of loan-words adopted during the ME period.
New accentional patterns are found in numerous middle English loan words from French. Gradually, as the loan words were assimilated, the word stress was moved closer to the beginning of the word in line with the English (Germanic) system. This shift is accounted for by what is known as the ‘recessive’ tendency. In disyllabic words the accent moved to the first syllable.
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In words of three or more syllables the shift of stress could be caused by the recessive tendency and also by the rhythmic tendency, which required a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Under the rhythmic tendency a secondary stress would arise at a distance of one syllable from the original stress. This new stress was either preserved as a secondary stress or else became the only or the principal stress of the word.
Вопрос №35 Qualitative changes of vowels in early NE (the Great vowel shift)
In NE we had the foll.monophthongs
close i: u:
e: o:
є: o:
open a:
In early NE (15-17cent) - the Great Vowel Shift (GVSh):
- it affected only long vowels;
- was caused to eliminate quantity as a distinctive feature;
- it was an independent development;
- as it took place in the 15th and 17th centuries and the spelling norm was fixed under the introduction of printing (1475), it was not reflected in spelling. There developed a gap between spoken and written ws.;
- no new sounds appeared, but the pronunciation of a great majority of ws became different.
All the long vowels became closer and some which were already narrow were diphthongised (a>ei; e:>i:; i:>ai; o:>u:; o:>эu; u:>au; au>o:). In the 16th century when the sound [є:] was still differentiated from the [e:], the digraph [ea] was introduced to denote more open [є:]: the great vowel shift (book[o:]>book[u:]; to[o:]>to[u:]; founden[u:]>founden[au]).
While the long ME vws had undergone drastic changes the short ME vws were much better preserved and on the whole had the same value as in ME. The changes were not numerous and the tendency was opposite to the change of long vws. They became more open: [a] >[æ]
But when this short [a] was preceded by the bilabial [wa] due to assimilation it developed into [wo]
[u] lost its labial character and developed into [a] unless it was preceded by a labial consonant
e.g. OEsunu>son[sun]>son[san] but in the ws full and pull the sound remained [u], there were also some exceptions as pulse, butter
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