nut, OE riden > NE ridden. The effects of open-syllable lengthening and trisyllabic laxing often led to differences in the stem vowel between singular and plural/genitive. Generally these differences were regularized by analogy in one direction or another, but not in a consistent way: ME > NE path, paths, but ME > NE whale, whales ME > NE cradle, cradles, but ME > NE saddle, saddles Trisyllabic laxing In late Old English, vowels were shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed. Later in Middle English this process was expanded, and applied to all vowels when two or more syllables followed. This led to the Modern English variations between divine vs. divinity, school vs. scholarly, grateful vs. gratitude, etc. In some cases, later changes have led to apparently anomalous results, e.g. south vs. southern with only two syllables (but at the time that trisyllabic laxing applied). This change is still fairly productive in Modern English. Pre-cluster shortening In late Old English, vowels were shortened before clusters of three consonants: OE gāst > NE ghost ; OE gāstliċ > NE ghastly OE ċild > NE child ; OE ċildru + OE -an > NE children OE gōd > NE good; OE gōdspell > NE gospel As shown by ghastly, this shortening occurred before the raising of OE to EME , which occurred in the transition to Middle English. Later in Middle English, vowels were shortened before clusters of two consonants, except before and in some cases where homorganic lengthening applied. Examples: OE cēpte > kept (cf. OE cēpan > keep) OE mētte > met (cf. OE mētan > meet) Reduction of double consonants Double (geminated) consonants were reduced to single ones. This took place after open syllable lengthening; the syllable before a geminate was a closed syllable, hence vowels were not lengthened before (originally) doubled consonants. The loss of gemination may have been stimulated by its small functional load—by this time there were few minimal pairs of words distinguished solely by the single vs. double consonant contrast. H-loss The phoneme , when it occurred in the syllable coda, is believed to have had two allophones: the voiceless palatal fricative , occurring after front vowels, and the voiceless velar fricative , occurring after back vowels. The usual spelling in both cases was , which is retained today in words like night and taught. These sounds were lost during