the traditional pronunciation of golf was . Before , become , as in alms, balm, calm, palm; Holmes. Some words have irregular pronunciations, e.g. from non-standard dialects (salmon) or spelling pronunciations (falcon in American English). Short develop into lax Great Vowel Shift; all long vowels raised or diphthongized. become , respectively. become , respectively. become or , later and . New developed from old (see below). Thus, effectively rotated in-place. Later, the new are shifted again to in Early Modern English, causing merger of former with ; but the two are still distinguished in spelling as ea, ee. the meet-meat merger (see below) Initial cluster reductions: merges into ; hence rap and wrap become homophones. Doubled consonants reduced to single consonants. Loss of most remaining diphthongs. became , merging with the vowel in broad and the of the lot–cloth split below. The long mid mergers: are raised to , eventually merging with , so that pane and pain, and toe and tow, become homophones in most accents. The above two mergers did not occur in many regional dialects as late as the 20th century (e.g. Northern England, East Anglia, South Wales, and even Newfoundland). merge to , so that dew (EME < OE dēaƿ), duke (EME < Old French duc ) and new (EME < OE nīƿe) now have the same vowel. This would become in standard varieties of English, and later still in some cases through "Yod-dropping". remains in Welsh English and some other non-standard varieties. and merge to // (today ), the only Middle English diphthong that remains in the modern standard English varieties. Up to the American–British split This period is estimated to be c. AD 1600–1725. At some preceding time after Old English, all become . Evidence from Old English shows that, at that point, the pronunciation occurred only before a consonant. Scottish English has consistently. /p t k/ develop aspirated allophones /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ when they occur alone at the beginning of stressed syllables. Initial cluster reductions: both merge into ; hence gnat and Nat become homophones; likewise not and knot. The foot–strut split: In southern England, becomes unrounded and eventually lowered unless preceded by a labial and followed by a non-velar. This gives put but cut and buck . This distinction later become phonemicized by an influx of words shortened from to both before (flood, blood, glove) and after (good, hood, book, soot, took)