Studies in the diachronic quantitative changes of English vowels

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We ascribe the lengthening of stressed short vowels preceding the homorganic consonant clusters such as -ld, -rd, -nd to stretching of vowel quantity caused only by the following voiced obstruents but not by the clusters, whic leads us to make satisfactory explanations to the various problems involved in the lengthening in question.As for the lengthening of stressed vowels in open syllables of disyllabic words we assume a process of two stages, tha is, compensatory lengthening as an outcome of the change of unstressed vowels with full quality into schwa and also a compensatory lengthening caused by the subsequent loss of schwa, which enables us to solve several problems such as the later shortening of the lengthened vowels, the periodical differences of the lengthening, and the dialectal differences of the lengthening.