Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda. This may be considered an extreme form of fusion (Crowley 1997:46), or possibly arise from speakers` attempts to preserve a word`s moraic count. An example from th.....
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensatory_lengthening
the lengthening of a vowel when a following consonant is weakened or lost, as the change from Old English niht (nikht) to night (nīt), with loss of (kh) and lengthening of (i) to a vowel that eventually became (ī).
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https://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/compensatory-lengthening
No exact match found.
