this split. Ng-coalescence: Reduction of in most areas produces new phoneme . In some words, coalesce to produce , and the new phoneme , a sound change known as yod-coalescence, a type of palatalization: nature, mission, procedure, vision. These combinations mostly occurred in borrowings from French and Latin. Pronunciation of -tion was from Old French , thus becoming . This sound mutation still occurs allophonically in Modern English: did you → didjou. /ɔ/ as in lot, top, and fox, is lowered towards /ɒ/. Long vowels , from ME , inconsistently shortened, especially before : sweat, head, bread, breath, death, leather, weather Shortening of occurred at differing time periods, both before and after the centralizing of to ; hence blood versus good : also foot, soot, blood, good. The Meet–meat merger /eː/ (ea) raises to /iː/ (ee) Thus Meet and meat become homophones in most accents. Words with (ea) that were shortened (see above) avoided the merger, also some words like steak and great simply remained with an /eː/ (which later becomes /eɪ/ in most varieties) merging with words like name, so now death, great, and meat have three different vowels. Changes affect short vowels in many varieties before an at the end of a word or before a consonant as in start and as in north are lengthened. (the last of these often deriving from earlier before , as in worm and "word") merge before , so all varieties of ModE except for some Scottish English and some Irish English have the same vowel in fern, fir and fur. Also affects vowels in derived forms, so that starry no longer rhymes with marry. , as in cat and trap, fronted to in many areas. In certain other words it becomes , for example father . is actually a new phoneme deriving from this and words like calm (see above). Most varieties of northern English English, Welsh English and Scottish English retain in cat, trap etc. The lot–cloth split: in some varieties, lengthening of before voiced velars (, ) (American English only) and voiceless fricatives (, , ). Hence American English long, dog, loss, cloth, off with (except in dialects with the cot–caught merger where the split is made completely mute). becomes in many words spelt oo: for example, book, wool, good, foot. This is partially resisted in the northern and western variants of English English, where words ending in -ook