The final -a of Old English pāpa would have turned into a schwa and then been lost. I assume that the question "how and when did the vowel change come about?" is about the first vowel. ( The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English, Volume 1, by Hugh Swinton MacGillivray, p. not until after the aforesaid period, designates only the pope. that the Roman pontiff alone began to be addressed as ‘papa’. The Latin title „papa“ was, as the reader is doubtless informed, at first applied to all bishops indiscriminately. unchanged from the Latin in the form of the weak masc. pāpa, signifying properly 'spiritual father', i.e. The long vowel in the Old English form corresponds to a long open vowel in Latin: And Middle English regularly develops to the modern English "long o" sound, which is spelled the same way. A regular sound change turned Old English ā into Middle English, a long back mid-open rounded vowel that was generally written with the letter o. The Old English form was apparently pronounced pāpa, with a long back open vowel in the first syllable (in the modern representation of Old English, ā represents a vowel reconstructed with the quality ).
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