Danish: Why did the short vowels become more open in some words but not in others?

[Red Arrow]

In Danish, many short vowels are pronounced more open than what you would expect from their spelling. This is also true for long vowels before or after the letter R. The result is that Danish children have to learn the spelling of every short vowel sound. They hear [e̝] and don't know whether to write e or i. Danish has 15 short vowels and 7 of them have multiple spellings.

To give you an overview:

i [i: i], in some words more open: [e̝]
e [e̝: e̝], in some words more open: [ɛ̝], sometimes even more open: [a̝] (only next to R), unstressed: [ə], unstressed er: [ɐ]
æ [ɛ̝: ɛ̝], sometimes more open: [a̝] (only next to R)
a [a̝: a̝ ɑ]

y [y: y], in some words more open: [ø], sometimes even more open: [œ] (only after R)
ø [ø: ø œ: œ], sometimes even more open: [ɶ] (only next to R)

u [u: u], in some words more open: [ɔ]
o [o: o], in some words more open: [ɔ], in some words even more open: [ʌ]
å [ɔ: ʌ]

But my question is: how did this arise? For example, why did the short i in "mist" become more open whereas the short i in "mis" remained the same? I can give you hundreds of examples like this. Are there any rules or tendencies at all? Not even English sound changes are this bizarre. The Great Vowel Shift affected nearly all words in English, not half of them.

I am not a linguist, so I would love to hear what you think. How can sound changes affect only half of the words? The only thing I can think of is that this sound change affected all words and Danish then magically gained lots and lots of new vocabulary, but its lexical similarity with the more regular Swedish contradicts that theory.

 

[Awwal12]

For example, why did the short i in "mist" become more open whereas the short i in "mis" remained the same?

Can it go back to some form of tripartite length distinction (not uncommon in the area; cf. Estonian and early Slavic), with the shorter vowels becoming more lax and therefore more open in the case of /i/? And I'd expect some form of additional compensatory vowel shortening in "mist". Just a blind guess, though (I'm no expert in Scandinavian languages); asserting that for real would at least require much more material.

 

[S.V.]

Also Awwal's Estonian in other papers (Kuznetsova 2019, 5 Parallels...):

Jakobson (1931a: 156-158, 1938: 243-244) included both Danish and Estonian in a large Circum-Baltic Sprachbund of languages with two distinctive varieties of word stress [...] While in Danish, metrical foot relevance is under question and the main metrical unit is the word, in Estonian foot stress is phonetically and functionally stronger than word stress [...] the crucial functional feature which unites Estonian stress with Swedish-Norwegian stress: the existence of the set (paradigm) of distinctive accents linked to stress.​

Then perhaps a 'resulting' image from a previous process. Cf. NIH: "possibly reflecting geographically uninterrupted gene flow, further facilitated by the extended network of sea-based commerce and traveling (Derry 2000)." Then some comments on Danish, by Swedes and Norwegians, may find an answer in the 'distance' from this earlier state.

 

[merquiades]

@Red Arrow I've been slowly studying Danish lesson by lesson. I've started seeing the modified vowels as the normal variation. Basically any closed syllable, dropped consonant(s), glottal stops, r, d or l anywhere in the word will cause the shift. Longer words are slurred and articulated quickly and as approximately as possible.
Danish is not a phonetic language. Spelling doesn't help at all except maybe for the first letter of the word. I suppose it is an advantage for me never to have done Swedish or Norwegian. Maybe they match the spelling.
Sometimes it helps to think that Danish is written like German but pronounced more like English.
Dag sounds like "day", regen sounds like "rain",, kvinden sounds closer to "queen". Morgen sounds like "morn" rather "maan". Ķöbenhavn "Keubmhown". Danmark "Denmag".
Most consonants are voiced and soften except at that beginning. That somehow affects the pronunciation of the vowels. The ends of the words are clipped off. G and d between vowels disappear. So for example k is g and g is gone... Other consonants turn into a w or y like sounds. Vocalize the final r and raise the preceding vowel. There are lots of r at the end, so it happens a lot, at the end of every single verb and many plural nouns and articles. And don't forget to slur. Afterwards you start to guess the pronunciation better and better. Perhaps people learn English like this too.

 

[Awwal12]

Maybe they match the spelling.

Certainly not Swedish, although, of course, the situation is still better than in Danish.

 

[Red Arrow]

Certainly not Swedish, although, of course, the situation is still better than in Danish.

In Swedish and Norwegian, the vowels are completely predictable except for the letter O. The silent letters are also very predictable. Swedish then has multiple ways to write the sj sound, but it's completely predictable if you already know English, and also multiple ways to write the tj sound, but it's also mostly predictable if you look at the following vowel.

 

[wyrzyk]

In Swedish and Norwegian, the vowels are completely predictable except for the letter O. The silent letters are also very predictable. Swedish then has multiple ways to write the sj sound, but it's completely predictable if you already know English, and also multiple ways to write the tj sound, but it's also mostly predictable if you look at the following vowel.

The vowels are mostly predictable, but monosyllabic words ending in nasals don’t distinguish vowel length (/man/ and /mɑ:n/ are spelled the same).
Silent letters are rare but hardly predictable (you can’t just hear /'lɛs:ɛn/ and figure out there’s a <d> in it).
Swedish has plenty of words with no direct English cognates (e.g. skjul), and even cognates that do exist are often far from obvious (e.g. sked and sheath).
And in addition to sj/skj/stj and kj/tj, there’s also j/hj/gj/dj/lj as in Järna/hjärna/gärna…