A sixteenth-century sound change in Scots has resulted in the appearance in that language of a system of vowel-length variations strikingly different from the common Germanic system still visible in other West Germanic speech forms. The present situation is described by the set of rules known as Aitken's Law (Aitken 1962 and 1977; see also Lass 1974): all vowels and diphthongs are long in stressed open syllables, before voiced fricatives and /r/, and before morpheme boundaries; and short elsewhere; with the two exceptions of /ι/ and /ʌ/ which are invariably short.
In days when mankind were but callants At grammar, logic an' sic talents, They took nae pains their speech to balance Or rules to gie, But spak their thoughts in plain, braid Lallans, Like you or me.
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