Middle English
In early Middle English, a vowel /i/ was inserted between a front vowel and a following /h/ (pronounced in this context), and a vowel /u/ was inserted between a back vowel and a following /h/ (pronounced in this context). This is a prototypical example of the narrow sense of "vowel breaking" as described above: The original vowel breaks into a diphthong that assimilates to the following consonant, gaining a front /i/ before a palatal consonant and /u/ before a velar consonant.
Read more about this topic: Vowel Breaking
Famous quotes containing the words middle and/or english:
“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
—Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)
“He that bulls the cow must keep the calf.”
—Sixteenth-century English proverb.