Preaspiration is regarded as originating from Gmc. *ht, cf. Runic dohtiR, OE dohter, Oldottir Modern Icelandic [douhtir], preserved in the 10th c. Scandinavian loanwords in English, cf. haht (< hactta) ‘danger’, saht (sætt, sått) ‘agreement’. This set up a model for assimilatory changes resulting in consonant doubling, e.g. /mp/ > /pp/, etc. Depending on the place of syllable boundary in the /VhC/ combination, viz. after [h] or [hC], preaspiration can be interpreted either as part of the /Vh-C/ complex (i.e. /VC:/ = /VCC/) and of the vowel segment or as a monophonemic/hC/segment (=/C:/) and, hence, part of the consonant. In either case, it has a prosodic function, which it had in the earlier periods, participating in in compensatory processes.
