Re: Somewheres

On 2024-09-05, jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

happened to French <s> has a lot of parallels to what's
happening to English <r> in non-rhotic dialects.  The [r] is
lost, leaving a long vowel as you say, and then <r> is used to
write that vowel (still mostly non-standard, but there are
examples like "Burma" and "argo").  In the same way the
French [s] was lost, leaving long vowels, and then used
to write those vowels as in "resve".

That was a rather specific change of [s] between a vowel and another
consonant.  Yes, it resulted in compensatory lengthening and a new
set of long vowel phonemes.

Closer to home, there's the loss in Middle English of [x]~[ç] after
vowels. (Consistent after front vowels, sometimes shifted to [f]
instead after back vowels.)  That also included compensatory
lengthening of short vowels, e.g. <right> [rɪçt] > [riːt] > [raɪt].

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de