Phonological history of English high back vowels

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Most dialects of modern English have two high back vowels: the close back rounded vowel /u/ found in words like goose, and the near-close near-back rounded vowel /ʊ/ found in words like foot. This article discusses the history of these vowels in various dialects of English, focusing in particular on phonemic splits and mergers involving these sounds.

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[edit] Foot-goose merger

The foot-goose merger is a phenomenon that occurs in Scottish English, Ulster varieties of Hiberno-English, Malaysian English and Singaporean English, [1] where the vowels /ʊ/ and /uː/ are merged. As a result, pairs like look/Luke are homophones and good/food and foot/boot rhyme. The merged vowel is usually /ʉ/ or /y/ in Scottish English and /u/ in Singaporean English.[2] The use of the same vowel in "foot" and "goose" in these dialects is not due to phonemic merger, but the appliance of different languages' vowel system to the English lexical incidence [3]. The full-fool merger is a conditioned merger of the same two vowels before /l/, making pairs like pull/pool and full/fool homophones.

[edit] Foot-strut split

The foot-strut split is the split of Middle English /ʊ/ into two distinct phonemes /ʊ/ (as in foot) and /ʌ/ (as in strut) that occurs in most varieties of English; the most notable exception is Northern England and the English Midlands.[4]

The origin of the split is the unrounding of /ʊ/ in Early Modern English, resulting in the phoneme /ʌ/. In general (though with some exceptions), this unrounding did not occur if /ʊ/ was preceded by a labial consonant (e.g., /p/, /f/, /b/) and followed by /l/, /ʃ/, or /tʃ/, leaving the modern /ʊ/. Because of the inconsistency of the split, the words put and putt became a minimal pair, distinguished as /pʊt/ and /pʌt/.

In non-splitting accents, cut and put rhyme, putt and put are homophonous as /pʊt/, and pudding and budding rhyme. However luck and look are not necessarily homophones; many accents in the area concerned have look as /luːk/, with the vowel of goose.

The absence of this split is a less common feature of educated Northern English speech than the absence of the trap-bath split.[5] The absence of the foot-strut split is sometimes stigmatized, and speakers of non-splitting accents often try to introduce it into their speech, sometimes resulting in hypercorrections such as pronouncing pudding /pʌdɪŋ/.

The name "foot-strut split" refers to the lexical sets introduced by Wells (1982), and identifies the vowel phonemes in the words, though that name may be a bit misleading as the word foot itself may have had a different vowel from put at the time the split occurred and so did not participate in the split.

[edit] Merger of Middle English /y/, /eu/, and /iu/

Middle English distinguished the close front rounded vowel /y/ (occurring in loanwords from Anglo-Norman like duke) and the diphthongs /iu/ (occurring in words like new) and /eu/ (occurring in words like few).[6]

By Early Modern English, these three vowels merged as /iu/, which has remained as such in some Welsh, northern English, and American accents in which through /θɹuː/ is distinct from threw /θɹiu/.[7] In the majority of accents, however, /iu/ later became /juː/, which, depending on the preceding consonant, either remained or developed into /uː/ by the process of yod-dropping, hence the present pronunciations /d(j)uːk/, /n(j)uː/, and /fjuː/.

Middle English /y/ was commonly represented the spellings uCe and ue as in duke and hue, while /iu/ and /eu/ were commonly represented by the spellings ew and eu as in dew.

[edit] Shortening of /uː/ to /ʊ/

In a handful words, including some very common ones, the vowel /uː/ was shortened to /ʊ/. In a few of these words, notably blood and flood, this shortening happened early enough that the resulting /ʊ/ underwent the "foot-strut split" and are now pronounced with /ʌ/. Other words that underwent shortening later consistently have /ʊ/, such as good, book, and wool. Still other words, such as roof, hoof, and root are in the process of the shift today, with some speakers preferring /uː/ and others preferring /ʊ/ in such words.

[edit] Ruin-smoothing

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Ruin-smoothing is a process that occurs in many varieties of British English where bisyllabic /u:ɪ/ becomes the diphthong [ʊɪ] in certain words. As a result, "ruin" is pronounced as monosyllabic [ɹʊɪn] and "fluid" is pronounced as [flʊɪd].

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:dRqKKxBEWLMJ:www.waseda.jp/ocw/AsianStudies/9A-77WorldEnglishSpring2005/LectureNotes/03_HKE_TonyH/HKE_unit3.pdf
  2. ^ Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 400–2, 438–39. ISBN 0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3). 
  3. ^ Macafee 2004: 74
  4. ^ Wells, ibid., pp. 132, 196–99; 351–53
  5. ^ Wells, ibid., p. 354
  6. ^ http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/, http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/phone/me/mvowel.htm
  7. ^ Wales, ibid., p. 206
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