poetry, as we can see from careful versifiers like Chaucer. Here are examples from Troilus and Criseyde illustrating three options: total retention, partial retention and total deletion. In these examples pronounced final -e is represented as -e¨, and deleted -e as -(e):

(30)(a) Han felt that lov-e¨ dorst-e¨ yow disples-e¨ (27)

(b)O blynd-e¨ world, O blynd-(e) entencioun (211)

(c)Among this-(e) other-(e) folk was Criseyda (169)

Since many final -e were vowels that had triggered MEOSL, their phonological loss made available a new diacritic for indicating vowel length in writing. Given name /na m/ < /na mə/, etc., length could be marked with a ‘silent’ final <e>, even in originally monosyllabic words like wrote < wrat¯ . Similarly, after degemination, pre-cluster shortening allowed double consonant graphs to be diacritics for shortness: otter, hammer < OE otor, hamor.

2.6.2.4Stress

The controversy´ or controversy´ about how to pronounce this word, as well as British rotate´ vs American rotate´, are remnants of a complex pattern of variability. The heyday of the conflict was the period from about 1600 to 1780, when both codifiers of the emerging standard and speakers in general were struggling with the relics of a complex history. But the seeds were already present in Middle English, as we can see from this Chaucerian line:

(31)In d´ıvers arts and in diverse´ figures (CT 2:1460)

Such doublets were available to later poets as well (here Shakespeare):

(32)The Reuennew´ whereof shall furnish vs (Richard II, I.iv.46) My manors, Rents, Reuenues´, I forgoe (Richard II, IV.i.212)

Two stress systems coexist, one old and one new. To understand the later developments, we must go back to Old English. Let us imagine accentuation as a kind of ‘scanning’ procedure that inspects a word – either from the beginning or the end – looking for certain specified syllables to make prominent. Recall that OE stress was assigned by the Germanic Stress Rule (GSR), which counts from the left-hand word-edge, and stresses the first syllable of the lexical root, ignoring prefixes (except special ones defined as stress-bearing). Examples (major lexical categories like N, V, A have brackets at each end; affixes have only one bracket;marks the ‘start’ of the scan):