earticle

영어

Nasal loss before voiceless fricatives and its concomitant vowel nasalization and compensatory lengthening in West Germanic languages including Old English pose two crucial questions. First, why is the nasal loss in Old English confined to before voiceless fricatives? Second, how can a formal theory like Optimality account for the nasal loss and its accompanying changes? This paper addresses both issues and shows that previous studies of nasal loss and its related sound changes are inadequate in that they treat the nasal loss and nasalization of the preceding vowel as concurrent processes, which is improbable from the diachronic standpoint, and in that they simply fail to account for the compensatory lengthening of the vowel. Assuming the chronological order of “vowel nasalization > nasal loss before voiceless fricatives and compensatory lengthening of the vowel”, the proposed solution neatly accounts for these sound changes with a limited set of universal markedness and faithfulness constraints within the framework of Optimality Theory.