Re: [tied] Oddity of English

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>>Don't be too sure of anything. OE a: is irregularly reflected as "short
>>O" in <gone> and <shone>, and of course in several compounds where the
>>shortening goes back to Middle English, such as <holiday> and <bonfire>.
>
>
> Aren't the latter two regular? The first is an example of
> 'antepenultimate shortening', and the second is paralleled by the
> infrequent placename _Stonton_ (< sta:n + tu:n) - infrequent because
> the shortening usually occurred before rounding, yielding _Stanton_.

"Trisyllabic shortening" is a ghost change, partly laid to rest by
recent analyses of early English quantitative changes. I'd describe both
shortenings as compositional. Cf. <Monday>, <gospel>, <twopence>,
<shepherd>, the older pronunciation of <forehead>, etc.

Another well-known example of OE a: > Mod.E "short O" is cloth < cla:þ,
cf. the regular reflex of OE a: in <clothes>. <groat> also had a variant
with a short vowel (in addition to /O:/ and /ou/) a few centuries ago,
as indicated by early spellings like <grotte>.

Piotr