At 10:21:03 AM on Friday, May 16, 2008, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> But it may be that before OSL, very early Middle English
> had a short /a/ phoneme and a long /A:/ (or /A.:/)
> phoneme, the latter very quickly becoming /O:/ while the
> former remained for a time at /a/ before later evolving
> into /a/ and /a:/ -- no?
We know that OE /æ/ and /A/ merged in very late OE / very
early ME, and we know that later on the value was /a/. It
seems to me that the simplest explanation is that the
initial merger was to /a/. Also early, but probably after
this merger (according to a chronology set out by Roger
Lass), is the raising of OE /æ:/ to /E:/, and the raising of
/A:/ to /O:/ is a bit later yet. At that point the full
non-northern system would have been:
i: i u u:
e: e o o:
E: O:
a
OSL then filled the missing /a:/ slot.
Brian