Open Syllable Lengthening - Germanic Languages

Germanic Languages

Open syllable lengthening affected the stressed syllables of all Germanic languages in their history to some degree. Curiously, it seems to have affected the languages around a similar time, somewhere between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (the late Middle Ages). The languages mainly differ in which vowels were lengthened and in which specific environment, but also in what the result of this lengthening was. There is substantial variation and in many languages the process has been largely undone by paradigmatic leveling. Sometimes, the newly lengthened vowels merged with existing long vowels, while in other languages they remained distinct because the older long vowels underwent changes of their own (such as in Icelandic, and in the Scandinavian languages to a lesser degree).

The lengthening often also applied in reverse at some point, shortening long vowels in closed syllables. As a consequence of the combination of these two changes, vowel length and consonant length came to be in complementary distribution. Because of that, one of the two features is no longer distinctive, being predictable from the other. Many languages shortened the long consonants at some point afterwards. This in turn had consequences for spelling, in which consonant length was generally marked by doubling in the various Germanic languages, but vowel length was not. The doubled consonants then came to be used as an indicator for vowel length (and later, quality), a feature seen in most Germanic languages today.

Some Germanic varieties such as High Alemannic German have no general open syllabic lengthening. It may be restricted to a few cases before sonorant consonants, as in Bernese German ('to drive') or ('valleys'), or it may not occur at all, as in Walser German. Consequently, these varieties feature both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length.