User:PhanAnh123/Middle Vietnamese

Contrast between ‹d-› and ‹dĕ-›/‹d-›
It seems that there was a contrast between the phoneme consistently spelled with lone ‹d-› and the phoneme spelled with digraph ‹dĕ-›.

It's pretty clear that in the dialect de Rhodes recorded, there was an on-going (not yet near completion like ‹ꞗĕ-› > ‹ꞗ-›) loss of palatalization in words spelled with ‹dĕ-›, resulted in a variant spelled with lone ‹d-›. This would eventually give rise to  in modern Northern dialects. In the South, lost the fricative element and gave rise to the  in modern dialects. Certain conservative North Central dialects, whose modern reflex is, shared the loss of palatalization with the Northern dialects (or maybe they were never palatalized there in the first place?), while other small dialects in Thanh Hoá and coastal Northern region have a rhotic.

Words spelled with ‹nh-› also frequently have variant spelled with ‹d-›, showing that in certain speakers, was merging into ‹d-›. However, this phenomenon is strangely underrepresented in modern dialects (except for certain words, such as ). Might be due to dialect leveling leading to demerging? (similar to the on-going demerging of ‹d-› < and ‹v-› <  in Southern dialects)

Before ‹ê› and ‹i›  (and the diphthongs with these two letters as initial element), only ‹d-› can be found, but it did precede ‹e›  (cf.  > ).

Words that were only spelled with ‹d-›
Excluding words also spelled with ‹nh-› or words that are etymologically from (such as  and ). Note that medial was spirantized to  and thus spelled with ‹gi-›, cf. .

Words that can be spelled with ‹dĕ-›
‹dĕ-› can be ascertained to be phonetically.

Exceptions
A few forms such as lack variants with ‹dĕ-›.