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'Broken' and 'shortened' forms
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A stem with a centring diphthong may show up with a corresponding rising diphthong in inflected forms, in derivations, and when it is the left-hand member of a compound. This 'Modern Frisian Breaking' is an irregular process, both as to its contexts and the stems it applies to. This means that words with centring diphthongs displaying the alternation must be assumed to have allomorphs with a rising diphthong. The same holds for words with a long vowel alongside which there are inflected forms, derivations, and compounds with a short vowel.

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A stem with a centring diphthong may show up with a corresponding rising diphthong in inflected forms, in derivations, and when it is left-hand member of a compound. This 'Modern Frisian Breaking' is an irregular process, both as to its contexts and the stems it applies to. The relation between base form and allomorph can be expressed as follows:

breaking Relation
Figure 1
[click image to enlarge]

In essence, breaking and vowel shortening are instantiations of the same process. A stem with a long monophthong may show up with a short vowel in the same contexts as those in which a stem with a broken diphthong occurs. Also, vowel shortening is just as irregular as breaking. The relation between base form and allomorph can be expressed as follows:

shortening relation
Figure 2
[click image to enlarge]

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Breaking and vowel shortening can also be treated as cases of stem allomorphy. In that case, stems like stien stone, koer basket, beam tree, doar door, laam lamb, and tiid time have the disjunctive lexical representations /st{iə/jɪ}n/, /k{uə/wo}r/, /b{ɪə/jɛ}m/, /d{oə/wa}r/, /l{a:/a}m/, and /t{i:/i}d/, with both the centring diphthong/long monophthong and the rising diphthong/short vowel. Where the latter occur has to be accounted for by a general distributional statement.

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See Breaking and Vowel Shortening for a phonological characterization of the historical process of Breaking and Vowel Shortening and for elaborate overviews of the phonological and morphological contexts in which the broken and shortened allomorphs show up.

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