"Now You See It, Now You Don't" Once More: The Loss and Insertion of Dental Stops in Medieval English‪.‬

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the issue of the contextual disappearance of dental consonants in medieval English. The loss of dental [d] is analogous to the loss of labial [b] in that both occurred in homorganic clusters, although the loss of the dental is less systematic. In the study, a distinction is made between a permanent and a sporadic loss of the dental. The relatively rare opposite process of d-insertion after [n], observed in loanwords from French, is also given some attention. An effort is made to determine the extent of the loss of the dentals in both time and space.