English Cosmos by Dr Mukesh Pareek

What Is " I -Mutation" or Front Mutation? "Early in the history of English a rule called  i-Mutation  (or  i-Umlaut ) existed that turned back vowels into front vowels when an /i/ or /j/ followed in the next syllable. For example in a certain class of nouns in the ancestor of Old English, the plural was formed not by adding  -s  but by adding  -i . Thus the plural of /gos/ 'goose' was /gosi/ 'geese.' . . . [T]he  i -Mutation is an example of a rule that was once present in Old English but has since dropped out of the language, and thanks to the  Great Vowel Shift  even the effects of  i -Mutation have been altered." (Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, and Robert M. Harnish,  Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication , 5th ed. MIT Press, 2001)

Stress timed A stress-timed language is a language where the  stressed  syllables are said at approximately regular intervals, and unstressed syllables shorten to fit this rhythm. Stress-timed languages can be compared with syllable-timed ones, where each syllable takes roughly the same amount of time. Example English and German are examples of stress-timed languages, while Spanish and Cantonese are syllable-timed. In the classroom Learners whose first language is syllable-timed often have problems producing the unstressed sounds in a stress-timed language like English, tending to give them equal  stress .

In Shakespeare studies, the  problem plays  are three plays that  William Shakespeare  wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century:  All's Well That Ends Well ,  Measure for Measure , and  Troilus and Cressida . Shakespeare's problem plays are characterised by their complex and ambiguous tone, which shifts violently between dark, psychological drama and more straightforward comic material; compare  tragicomedy . The term was coined by critic  F. S. Boas  in  Shakespeare and his Predecessors  (1896), derived from a type of drama that was popular at the time of Boas' writing