In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture,[The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.] or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
Types
Vowel breaking may be unconditioned or conditioned. It may be triggered by the presence of another sound, by stress, or in no particular way.
Assimilation
Vowel breaking is sometimes defined as a subtype of diphthongization, when it refers to harmonic (assimilatory) process that involves diphthongization triggered by a following vowel or consonant.
The original pure vowel typically breaks into two segments. The first segment matches the original vowel, and the second segment is harmonic with the nature of the triggering vowel or consonant. For example, the second segment may be (a back vowel) if the following vowel or consonant is back (such as velar consonant or pharyngeal), and the second segment may be (a front vowel) if the following vowel or consonant is front (such as palatal).
Thus, vowel breaking, in the restricted sense, can be viewed as an example of assimilation of a vowel to a following vowel or consonant.
Unconditioned
Vowel breaking is sometimes not assimilatory and is then not triggered by a neighboring sound. That was the case with the Great Vowel Shift in
English language in which all cases of and changed to diphthongs.
Stress
Vowel breaking sometimes occurs only in stressed syllables. For instance,
Vulgar Latin open-mid and changed to diphthongs only when they were stressed.
Indo-European languages
English
Vowel breaking is a very common sound change in the history of the English language, occurring at least three times (with some varieties adding a fourth) listed here in reverse chronological order:
Southern American English
Vowel breaking is characteristic of the "Southern drawl" of Southern American English, where the short
have developed a glide up to j, and then in some areas back down to schwa:
pat ,
pet ,
pit .
[Kathryn LaBouff, Singing and Communicating in English, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 268.]
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift changed the long vowels to diphthongs, which became
Modern English .
-
Old English īs > Modern English ice
-
Old English hūs > Modern English house
Middle English
In early
Middle English, a vowel was inserted between a front vowel and a following (pronounced in this context), and a vowel was inserted between a back vowel and a following (pronounced in this context).
That is a prototypical example of the narrow sense of "vowel breaking" as described above: the original vowel breaks into a diphthong that assimilates to the following consonant, gaining a front before a palatal consonant and before a velar consonant.
Old English
In
Old English, two forms of harmonic vowel breaking occurred: breaking and retraction and back mutation.
In prehistoric Old English, breaking and retraction changed stressed short and long front vowels i, e, æ to short and long diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea when followed by h or by r, l + another consonant (short vowels only), and sometimes w (only for certain short vowels):[Robert B. Howell 1991. Old English breaking and its Germanic analogues (Linguistische Arbeiten, 253.). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer]
-
Proto-Germanic *fallan > Anglo-Frisian *fællan > Old English feallan "fall"
-
PG *erþō > OE eorþe "earth"
-
PG *lizaną > OE liornian "learn"
In late prehistoric Old English, back mutation changed short front i, e, æ to short diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea before a back vowel in the next syllable if the intervening consonant was of a certain nature. The specific nature of the consonants that trigger back umlaut or block it varied from dialect to dialect.
Old Norse
Proto-Germanic stressed short
e becomes
ja or (before
u)
jǫ regularly in Old Norse except after
w, r, l. Examples are:
-
PG ek(a) "I" → (east) ON jak, Swedish language jag, Danish language and Norwegian Bokmål jeg, and Icelandic ek → ég (but Jutlandic æ, a, Nynorsk eg).
-
Faroese language has both. The standard form is eg, while the dialects of Suðuroy have jeg.
-
PG hertōn "heart" → ON hjarta, Swedish language hjärta, Faroese language hjarta, Nynorsk hjarta, Danish language hjerte
-
PG erþō "earth" → Proto-Norse proto=yes → ON jǫrð, Swedish language, Danish language, Norwegian jord, Faroese language jørð
According to some scholars,[J. Svensson, Diftongering med palatalt förslag i de nordiska språken, Lund 1944.] the diphthongisation of e is an unconditioned sound change, whereas other scholars speak about epenthesis[hermann Paul, "Zur Geschichte des germanischen Vocalismus", Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Kultur 6 (1879) 16-30.] or Germanic umlaut.[K. M. Nielsen, Acta Philologica Scandinavica 24 (1957) 33-45.]
German and Yiddish
The long high vowels of Middle High German underwent breaking during the transition to Early New High German: → . In
Yiddish, the diphthongization affected the long mid vowels as well: →
-
MHG êwic → NHG ewig, ("eternal")
-
MHG hôch → NHG hoch, ("high")
-
MHG schœne → NHG schön, ("nice")
-
MHG snîden → NHG schneiden, ("to cut")
-
MHG vriunt → NHG Freund, ("friend")
-
MHG hût → NHG Haut, ("skin")
This change started as early as the 12th century in Upper Bavarian and reached Moselle Franconian only in the 16th century. It did not affect Alemannic or Ripuarian dialects, which still retain the original long vowels.
In Yiddish, the diphthongization applied not only to MHG long vowels but also to in words of Hebrew (in stressed open syllables) or Slavic languages origin:
Scottish Gaelic
Vowel breaking is present in Scottish Gaelic with the following changes occurring often but variably between dialects: Archaic Irish → Scottish Gaelic and Archaic Irish → Scottish Gaelic
Specifically, central dialects have more vowel breaking than others.
Romance languages
Many Romance languages underwent vowel breaking. The
Vulgar Latin open vowels
e and
o in stressed position underwent breaking only in open syllables in
French language and
Italian language, but in both open and closed syllables in
Spanish language. Vowel breaking was mostly absent in
Catalan language, in which and became diphthongs only before a palatal consonant: Latin coxa 'thigh', octō 'eight', lectum 'bed' > Old Catalan , , . The middle vowel was subsequently lost if a triphthong was produced: Modern Catalan cuixa, vuit, llit (cf. Portuguese coxa, oito, leito). Vowel breaking was completely absent in Portuguese. The result of breaking varies between languages:
e and
o became
ie and
ue in Spanish,
ie and
uo in Italian and
ie and
eu in French.
In the table below, words with breaking are bolded.
Romanian
Romanian underwent the general Romance breaking only with , as it did not have :
-
Latin pellis > Romanian piele "skin"
It underwent a later breaking of stressed e and o to ea and oa before a mid or open vowel:
-
Latin porta > Romanian poartă "gate"
-
Latin flōs (stem flōr-) > Romanian floare "flower"
Sometimes a word underwent both forms of breaking in succession:
-
Latin petra > Early Romanian pietră > Romanian piatră "stone" (where ia results from hypothetical * iea)
The diphthongs that resulted from the Romance and the Romanian breakings were modified when they occurred after palatalized consonants.
Quebec French
In
Quebec French, long vowels are generally diphthongized when followed by a consonant in the same syllable (even when a final ʁ is optionally made silent).
-
tard → ; but not in tardif (because short a)
-
père →
-
fleur → ; but not in fleuriste (long œ is at end of syllable)
-
fort → ; but not forte (short o)
-
autre → ; but not autrement (long o is at end of syllable)
-
neutre → ; but not neutralité (long ø is at end of syllable)
-
pince → ; or → ; but not pincer
-
onze → ; but not onzième
Proto-Indo-European
Some scholars
[Francis Normier, in: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 91 (1977) 171-218; J.S. Klein, in: Die Laryngaltheorie und die Rekonstruktion des indogermanischen Laut- und Formensystems, Heidelberg 1988, 257-279; Olsen, Birgit Anette, in: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Armenian linguistics, Cleveland's State University, Cleveland, Ohio, September 14–18, 1991, Delmar (NY) 1992, 129-146; J.E. Rasmussen, in: Selected Papers on Indo-European Linguistics, Copenhagen 1999, 442-458.] believe that Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
i, u had vowel-breaking before an original
laryngeal theory in Greek, Armenian and Tocharian but that the other Indo-European languages kept the monophthongs:
-
PIE gʷih3wos → gʷioHwos "alive" → Gk. ζωός zōós, Toch. B śāw-, śāy- (but Sanskrit jīvá-, Latin vīvus)
-
PIE protih3kʷom → protioHkʷom "front side" → Gk. πρόσωπον prósōpon "face", Toch. B pratsāko "breast" (but Sanskrit prátīka-)
-
PIE duh2ros → duaHros "long" → Gk. δηρός dērós, Arm. * twār → erkar (Sanskrit dūrá-, Latin dūrus).
However, the hypothesis has not been widely adopted.
Austronesian languages
Some languages in
Sumatra have vowel breaking processes, almost exclusively in syllable-final position. In Minangkabau, the Proto-Malayic vowels
*i and
*u are broken to
ia and
ua before word-final
*h,
*k,
*l,
*ŋ,
*r (
*təlur >
*təluar >
talua "egg").
In
Rejang language, the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian vowels
*ə,
i, and
u are broken to
êa,
ea, and
oa before any of word-final consonants above except
*k and
*ŋ (
*tənur >
*tənoar >
tênoa "egg").
This process has been transphonologized by loss of
*l and
*r and merging of several word-final consonants into a
glottal stop (
*p,
*t,
*k in Minangkabau, or
*k,
*h in most dialects of Rejang except Kebanagung).
Word-final Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *-i and *-u were also broken in Sumatra. In Rejang, these vowels are broken into -ai and -au in Pesisir dialect, or into -êi and -êu elsewhere.
Although Acehnese is also spoken in Sumatra, the entire Chamic languages has undergone vowel breaking separately. Final open *-i and *-u were broken in Proto-Chamic into *-ɛy and *-ɔw. However, they remained when closed by another consonant (final *-r was lost in native words). The following are the outcomes for the diphthongs:
|
| *ɛy | ɔə | ɛi | əi | ai | ay | ɛ̆y |
| *ɔw | ɛə | ău | əu | au~ ə | au | ɔ̆w |
Following its split from Proto-Chamic, several daughter languages have undergone further vowel breaking. In Acehnese, *a: normally became ɯə, but when preceded by a nasal, it became ɯ instead.
See also
-
Smoothing (phonetics)
-
Unpacking (linguistics)
Bibliography
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Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
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