Words were generally spelled according to how they sounded to the person writing a text, rather than according to a formalised system that might not accurately represent the way the writer's dialect was pronounced, as Modern English is today.
In the rest of the article, abbreviations are used as follows: The surface sounds of Chaucer's Middle English (whether allophones or phonemes) are shown in the tables below.
That led to many alternations: hūs ('house') [huːs] vs. hūses ('of a house') [ˈhuːzes]; wīf ('woman') [wiːf] vs. wīfes ('of a woman') [ˈwiːves].
The behaviour of open syllable lengthening seems to indicate that the short vowels were open-mid in quality, but according to Lass, they were close-mid.
/yː/ may have existed in learned speech in loanwords from Old French, also spelled ⟨u⟩, but, as it merged with /iw/, becoming /juː/ in Modern English, rather than /iː/, it can be assumed that /iw/ was the vernacular pronunciation that was used in French-derived words.
The following processes produced the above diphthongs: The following sections describe the major phonological processes occurring between written Late West Saxon, the standard written form of Old English, and the end of Middle English, which is conventionally dated to around 1500 AD.
The changes steadily effaced most inflectional endings: In the last two examples, the stressed vowel was affected by open-syllable lengthening.
A short /a/ was treated as a back vowel in the process; the long equivalent did not occur in the relevant context.
That accounts, for example, for the vowel difference between staff and the alternative plural staves (Middle English staf vs. stāves, with open-syllable lengthening in the latter word).
The process was restricted in the following ways: The effects of open-syllable lengthening and trisyllabic laxing often led to differences in the stem vowel between singular and plural/genitive.
Generally, such differences were regularized by analogy in one direction or another but not in a consistent way: In late Old English, vowels were shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed.
In some cases, later changes have led to apparently anomalous results, e.g. south vs. southern with only two syllables (but /suːðernə/ while trisyllabic laxing applied).
Later in Middle English, vowels were shortened before clusters of two consonants, except before /st/ and in some cases where homorganic lengthening applied.
The loss of gemination may have been stimulated by its small functional load since few minimal pairs of words existed that were distinguished solely by that feature.
The timing of the process depended on the dialect; the fricatives were still pronounced in some educated speech in the 16th century, but they had disappeared by the late 17th.
In some cases, the velar fricative [x] developed into /f/; as such, the preceding vowel was shortened, and the [u] of a diphthong was absorbed.
/h/ spelled -gh- is realized as [x] even today in some traditional dialects of northern England and more famously in Scots.
The modern phoneme /x/ most commonly appears today in the typically-Scottish word loch and in names such as Buchan.
English-speakers from elsewhere may replace the /x/ in such cases with /k/, but some use /x/ in imitation of the local pronunciations as they may in certain foreign words such as Bach, Kharkiv, Sakhalin and chutzpah.
In the column on modern spelling, CV means a sequence of a single consonant followed by a vowel.
The Modern English vowel that is usually spelled ⟨au⟩ (Received Pronunciation: /ɔː/, General American: /ɔ/ ~ /ɑ/) does not appear in the above chart.
Its main source is late Middle English /au̯/ < early /au̯/ and /ɔu/, which come from various sources: Old English ⟨aw⟩ and ⟨ag⟩ (claw < clawu, law < lagu); diphthongization before /h/ (sought < sōhte, taught < tāhte, daughter < dohtor); borrowings from Latin and French (fawn < Old French faune, Paul < Latin Paulus).
Some words with the sound were borrowed into London Middle English, where the unfamiliar /y/ was substituted with /u/: Some apparent instances of modern ⟨e⟩ for Old English ⟨y⟩ are actually regular developments, particularly if the ⟨y⟩ is a development of earlier (West Saxon) ⟨ie⟩ from i-mutation of ⟨ea⟩, as the normal i-mutation of ⟨ea⟩ in Anglian is ⟨e⟩; for example, stern < styrne < *starnijaz, steel < stȳle < *stahliją (cf.