had been lost early on, as in om, uem, from homō. Intervocalic from both Latin and was lenited to in the early period (cf. contemporary Spanish: amado ). At the end of words, it was also devoiced to . In some texts it was sometimes written as dh or th (aiudha, cadhuna, Ludher, vithe). By 1100 it disappeared altogether. Vowels In Old French, the nasal vowels were not separate phonemes but only allophones of the oral vowels before a nasal consonant. The nasal consonant was fully pronounced; bon was pronounced ( ). Nasal vowels were present even in open syllables before nasals where Modern French has oral vowels, as in bone ( bonne ). Monophthongs Notes: had formerly existed but then closed to ; the original Western Romance having previously been fronted to across most of what is now France and northern Italy. would later appear again when monophthongized and also when closed in certain positions (such as when it was followed by original or but not by , which later became ). may have similarly become closed to , in at least in some dialects, since it was borrowed into Middle English as > ( computāre > conter > English count; rotundum > ront > English round; bonitātem > bonté > English bounty). In any case, traces of such a change were erased in later stages of French, when the close nasal vowels were opened to become . may have existed in the unstressed third-person plural verb ending -ent, but it may have already passed to , which is known to have happened no later than the Middle French period. Diphthongs and triphthongs Notes: In Early Old French (up to about the mid-12th century), the spelling represented a diphthong instead of the later monophthong , and represented the diphthong , which merged with in Late Old French (except when it was nasalized). In Early Old French, the diphthongs described above as "rising" may have been falling diphthongs (, , ). In earlier works with vowel assonance, the diphthong written did not assonate with any pure vowels, which suggests that it cannot have simply been . The pronunciation of the vowels written and is debated. In the first records of Early Old French, they represented and were written as , and by Middle French, they had both merged as , but the transitional pronunciations are unclear. Early Old French had