This study has attempted to describe the main changes in the history of quantity in Germanic and explain the connection between them. Above all, the interaction between vowel and consonant length has been used as an explanatory tool. It is, as it turns out, the underlying principle governing the three major quantity changes in accented syllables. Already in the old period, it seems that Germanic words were moving in the direction of complementary length in accented syllables. Words that already had complementary length, i.e., ones with one long segment, the vowel or the consonant, tended to remain intact, while those which in retrospect have over-short or over-long syllables, are lengthened or shortened to what Luick called a “standard mass.” Complementary length allowed phonological quantity to be replaced by the prosodic feature of syllable cut.
The first of the major changes in the direction of complementary length was gemination. In the treatment of the various types of consonant lengthening in Old Germanic, including West Germanic gemination, which was actually almost as common in North Germanic, and the Germanic sharpening in Gothic and Old Norse, it was proposed that the main function of a geminate is to accompany a short, accented vowel. After semantic gemination, long consonants, although not due to phonetic causes, also accompany short vowels. Despite other suggestions, it seems that the position following a short, accented vowel is the only relevant environmental factor in all of the phonetic gemination processes in Germanic. Consonants rarely geminated following long vowels and when they did, the sequences were almost always reduced by shortening the vowel or the consonant.
The second major change, open syllable lengthening, which probably did not really take place in open syllables, together with the analogous monosyllable lengthening, constituted the other half of the equation, namely lengthening of vowels before short consonants in accented syllables in Middle Germanic. While OSL did away with the remainder of the over-short syllables, which had been left unaffected by gemination in Old Germanic, MSL realigned numerous words from the short + long camp to the long + short camp. Although these words already conformed to the correlation of complementary length, paradigm analogy made them move in the same direction as the corresponding disyllables. Yet MSL has a much more restricted spread geographically than OSL and analogy sometimes worked in the other direction, notably in English. These changes completed the drive to complementary length in accented syllables in Germanic, allowing the correlation of syllable cut to supersede segmental length of vowels and consonants. With the loss of the phonological status of consonant length, postvocalic long consonants were degeminated and shortened, especially in Danish, bordering Low German, most of Middle German, and northern Upper German, setting off a chain reaction of consonant weakening. That these changes were triggered by the establishment of complementary length and syllable cut through vowel lengthening, mainly OSL, becomes clear if one compares the geographic distribution of OSL and lenition or examines the minor lenitions directly tied to vowel lengthenings in North Frisian, Middle Bavarian, Carinthian, and western Mosel Franconian. The change in the latter area was previously only known to dialectologists working on the speech of individual areas. Unlike consonant length, vowel length needed to remain intact in order to hold the new prosodic structures in place.
After our discussion of the major quantity changes in Germanic, certain developmental trends can be observed. While vowel length has always played an important role in the phonological system and continues to do so, despite the loss of an independent correlation of distinctive vowel length, consonant length originated in Old Germanic and rose to great importance through its distribution and role in vocalic changes, only to lose its phonological relevance and wither away even in phonetic terms, due to the establishment of the correlation of syllable cut. The “great” lenitions in Danish and German, and degemination throughout most of Germanic, are part of the greater evolutionary trend in Germanic to the weakening of consonants, which began in pre-Old Germanic with the First Consonant Shift and continued with the Second Consonant Shift. As we saw in the discussion of consonant strength, the spirantization processes in the two shifts constitute weakening according to the strength hierarchy. This is also the case with consonant lenition in Middle Germanic. In general, the consonant system is moving away from employing voice and occlusion in obstruent formation, the most dramatic example of the latter being the lenition in Danish, which follows Germanic tendencies to the extreme.
Apparently running counter to the trend of consonant weakening is consonant lengthening, although this latter trend was, for the most part, active only in the earlier history of Germanic. The pre-literary period is, as we said, the age of gemination in Germanic. All the significant gemination processes belong to this period, while later geminations in the middle periods only serve to shore up the correlation of complementary length in words that did not conform by OSL. The consonant shifts also belong to the period of lengthening, although they weakened consonants. At this point in the development of Germanic phonology, obstruents gave up part of their strength, again in terms of the hierarchy, in order to lengthen. This is what spirantization in the shifts was all about. Final strengthening is also part of the lengthening trend in early Germanic consonants. After this earlier period of lengthening in consonants comes the shortening of the great lenitions, triggered by the establishment of the correlation of syllable cut.
Compensation has been posited as an important factor in the two main lengthening processes described in this book: vowel lengthening and gemination. The idea is not new with regard to open syllable lengthening, but has first been put forward here with regard to the phonetic gemination processes of Old Germanic. This has been proposed specifically in connection with West and North Germanic gemination and the Germanic sharpening of semivowels. With the shortening, centralization to schwa, and loss of phonemes in unaccented syllables in the various waves of apocope in Germanic, the unaccented syllables were no longer able to perform their phonological functions. Accented syllables have thus compensated functionally by lengthening, not only vowels, but also consonants. It seems that in Old Germanic, the languages lengthened whatever accented segment they could, be it vowel or consonant, as phonological compensation for apocope of unaccented syllables. As Liberman points out, it is compensation and analogy that are the only two mechanisms of lengthening in the history of Germanic.
All of these lengthenings and shortenings, strengthenings and weakenings are in the service of the overarching motivation in Germanic, to give prominence to the accented syllable. As we have seen, all of the changes discussed in this book are related to the position in accented syllables: gemination, vowel lengthening, and lenition. These three significant changes, like umlaut, breaking, diphthongization, and the consonant shifts, belong to the Germanic trend to concentrate phonological information on the root syllable. This overarching trend in Germanic was first pointed out by Liberman. Vowel and consonant lengthening are part of the swelling of accented syllables, at the expense of unaccented syllables, as they gobble up phonological features relinquished by unaccented syllables due to apocope. Compensation, as we have just said, was the immediate cause, not only of open syllable lengthening, but also of gemination.
Lenition moves the concentration of information even earlier in the word. Whereas previously the accented CVC sequences took part in the swelling, the postvocalic consonants now also began to fall into obscurity along with the following unaccented syllables. In Danish, the nucleus of the word has been further reduced from CVC, as in the other Germanic languages, to CV. This is also true, to a lesser extent, of the languages surrounding Danish at the center of the Germanic speaking world. While English, Dutch, Frisian, Low German, and Middle German have simplified geminates, the peripheral languages and dialects of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Upper German still retain not only phonetic consonant length, but also gemination, at least in parts of Upper German. With regard to vowels, most Germanic languages and dialects, although some stragglers still remain, follow this path to the end and lengthen accented vowels where they can lengthen them, while for consonants, the tendency to lengthening has been reversed and the new trend to weakening is taken to its extreme in the dialects with full lenitions, especially in Danish.
