Trisyllabic laxing, or trisyllabic shortening, is any of three processes in English in which tense vowels (long vowels or

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s) become lax (short

monophthong A monophthong ( ) is a pure vowel sound, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

s) if they are followed by two or more syllables, at least the first of which is unstressed, for example, ''grateful'' vs ''gratitude'', ''profound'' vs ''profundity''. By a different process, laxing is also found in disyllabic and monosyllabic words, for example, ''shade'' vs ''shadow'', ''lose'' vs ''lost''.

Trisyllabic laxing

Trisyllabic laxing is a process which has occurred at various periods in the history of English: #The earliest occurrence of trisyllabic laxing occurred in late

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

and caused stressed

long vowel In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many languages do not d ...

s to become shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed. #Later in

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...

, the process was expanded to all vowels when two or more syllables followed. #The Middle English sound change remained in the language and is still a mostly-productive process in

Modern English Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England England is a Count ...

, detailed in Chomsky and Halle's '' The Sound Pattern of English''. The Middle English sound change occurred before the

Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...

and other changes to the nature of vowels. As a result of the changes, the pairs of vowels related by trisyllabic laxing often bear little resemblance to one another in Modern English; however, originally they always bore a consistent relationship. For example, tense was , and lax was at the time of trisyllabic laxing. In some cases, trisyllabic laxing appears to take place when it should not have done so: for example, in "south" vs. "southern" . In such cases, the apparent anomaly is caused by later sound changes: "southern" (formerly ''southerne'') was pronounced when trisyllabic laxing applied. In the modern English language, there are systematic exceptions to the process, such as in words ending in ''-ness'': "mindfulness, loneliness". There are also occasional, non-systematic exceptions such as "obese, obesity" (, not *), although in this case the former was back-formed from the latter in the 19th century.

Disyllabic laxing

Several now-defunct Middle English phonological processes have created an irregular system of ''disyllabic laxing''; unlike trisyllabic laxing which was one phonological change, apparent disyllabic laxing in Modern English is caused by many different sound changes: * ''please'' → ''pleasant'' * ''shade'' → ''shadow'' : ''pale'' → ''pallid'' * ''child'' → ''children'' : ''dine'' → ''dinner'' : ''divide'' → ''division'' * ''south'' → ''southern'' : ''out'' → ''utter'' * ''goose'' → ''gosling'' : ''fool'' → ''folly'' : ''food'' → ''fodder'' * ''cone'' → ''conic'' (and other words in ''-ic'') : ''depose'' → ''deposit'' Many cases of disyllabic laxing are due, as in ''southern'' and ''shadow'' above, to Middle English having had more unstressed sounds than Modern English: ''sutherne'' , ''schadowe'' . Cases such as ''please'', ''pleasant'' and ''dine'', ''dinner'' come from how French words were adapted into Middle English: a stressed French vowel was borrowed into English as an equivalent long vowel. However, if the stressed English vowel was originally an unstressed vowel in French, the vowel was not lengthened;Harrison, Thomas Carlton. ''Robert Robinson's alphabet and seventeenth-century English phonetics'' (1978), pg. 23 examples of this which did not create an alteration are Old French ''pitee'' → Middle English ''pite'' and Old French ''plais-'' (stem of ''plaire'') → Middle English ''plesen'' , ''plaisant'' → ''plesaunt'' . Some Latinate words, such as ''Saturn'', have short vowels where from syllable structure one would expect a long vowel. Other cases differentiate British and American English, with more frequent disyllabic laxing in American English – compare RP and GA pronunciations of ''era'', ''lever'', ''patent'', ''primer'' (book) and ''progress'' (noun), though there are exceptions such as ''leisure'', ''produce'' (noun), ''Tethys'', ''yogurt'' and ''zebra'' that have a short vowel in RP. On the other hand, American English is ''less'' likely to have trisyllabic laxing, for example in words such as ''dynasty'', ''patronize'', ''privacy'' and ''vitamin''. Much of this irregularity is due to morphological leveling.

Monosyllabic laxing

Laxing also occurs in basic monosyllabic vocabulary, which presumably helps keep it active across generations. For example, the → shift occurs in the past-tense forms of basic verbs such as ''feel'', ''keep'', ''kneel'', ''mean'', ''sleep'', ''sweep'', ''weep'' and – without a suffix ''-t'' – in ''feed'', ''lead'', ''read''. Other shifts occur in ''bite'' → ''bit'', ''do'' → ''done'', ''go'' → ''gone'', ''hide'' → ''hid'', ''lose'' → ''lost'', ''shoot'' → ''shot'', etc.

References

Sources

* * * * * Myers, Scott (1987)
"Vowel Shortening in English"
''Natural Language & Linguistic Theory'', Vol. 5, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 485–518. * {{History of English English phonology Vowel shifts