Compensatory lengthening

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Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda. An example from the history of English is the lengthening of vowels that happened when the voiceless velar fricative /x/ was lost. For example, in Chaucer's time the word night was pronounced /nixt/; later the /x/ was lost and the /i/ was lengthened to /iː/ by compensatory lengthening. (Later the /iː/ became /aɪ/ by the Great Vowel Shift.)