Talk:sweora

(Notifying Leasnam, Lambiam, Urszag, Hundwine, Mnemosientje): To User:Hundwine, why did you add short-vowel sweora as an alternative? It is long in Köbler and Clark-Hall, which is what you'd expect from *swerhô. Benwing2 (talk) 19:37, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

I added it based on Richard Hogg's book on Old English phonology, which says:

When /x/ is lost between a voiced consonant and a vowel, then in all dialects the fluctuation between lengthened and unlengthened forms described in §5.124 occurs regularly, although it seems likely that the unlengthened forms were the more common. Typical examples occur in the inflected forms of words such as feorh, wealh, see §5.124, and all other short-stemmed nouns of the same structure, similarly verbs such as fēolan ‘adhere’ < *feolhan, cf. WS filhð ‘he adheres’. Of special interest are various forms of sweora ‘neck’ < Gmc *swerho, for the usual LWS form is swura which can only have a short, that is, unlengthened, vowel.

I remember reading a source that said that despite what the standard sources say, there is basically no evidence that the vowel in the preceding syllable was lengthened as a rule when h was lost after a consonant. It looks like what I'm remembering is "Velars in the history of Old English," by Daniel Huber (2006): I still have to finish rereading it, but Huber says e.g. "there is no reason to assume compensatory lengthening in the mearh group at all" (p. 15)--Urszag (talk) 06:39, 16 December 2019 (UTC)