Jonathan Wei

Research

My research seeks to better understand vowel breaking in Old English.  Specializing in phonetics, I am interested in how perceptual factors played a role in conditioning the Proto-Germanic front vowels, and how they evolved into the sounds represented by the Old English short digraphs.  To this end, my research offers a reductionist account of vowel breaking, by employing phonetic methods to study the reconstructed sounds of Old English.  

Generally, I am interested in all aspects of sound change.

Teaching

I have taught Prelims tutorials in Phonetics & Phonology at a number of Oxford colleges.

Publications

Hudson, T., Wei, J., & Coleman, J. (2024). Using acoustic-phonetic simulations to model historical sound change. Diachronica, 41(3), 355-378.

About me

I am a native New Yorker.  I completed my BA in Anthropology, with a focus on Cultural Anthropology and Biology, at Stony Brook.  During this period, I also conducted linguistics fieldwork in Madagascar.  After the BA, I worked in the city for some time before moving to Glasgow for a very fruitful year to obtain my MSc in English Language & Linguistics.