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Part of
Investigating West Germanic Languages: Studies in honor of Robert B. Howell
Edited by Jennifer Hendriks and B. Richard Page
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 8] 2024
► pp. 14–31

Homorganic lengthening in late Old English revisited

| The Pennsylvania State University

Minkova & Stockwell (1992) and Kruger (2020) claim that homorganic lengthening is limited to the environment before -ld and -nd, with only high vowels lengthening before -nd. This paper examines evidence in the Ormulum and from other sources for lengthening and finds ample evidence of regular vowel lengthening before -ld, -nd, -mb, -rd, and -rn. The cross-linguistic tendency of phonetic lengthening of vowels and sonorants in sequences of vowel plus sonorant plus homorganic voiced consonant provided a phonetic motivation for the lengthening. Already existing Old English words like frēond ‘friend’ and fēond ‘fiend’ served as a basis for a phonological reanalysis of the phonetically lengthened vowel as underlyingly long.

Keywords: quantity, vowel lengthening, Ormulum, historical phonology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A bird’s eye view of homorganic lengthening
  • 3.Evidence of homorganic lengthening in the Ormulum
  • 4.The motivation for homorganic lengthening
  • 5.The distribution of lengthened reflexes of homorganic lengthening in PDE revisited
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.8.02pag
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