‘My’ and ‘mine’ shadow

‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”). But once in a while I see them used the same way. In the King James Version, Psalm 119 has “my affliction” (verse 50) and “mine affliction” (verses 92 and 153). Were “my” and “mine” somewhat interchangeable at the discretion of the writer? A: When “mine” first appeared in Old English as a singular possessive adjective (spelled min, myn, mine, etc.), it was used before nouns beginning with consonants as well as vowels, but it gradually came to be used only before nouns with an initial vowel or consonant “h.” When “my,” a shortened version of “mine,” began appearing in Middle English (as mie, mi, my, etc.), it was used before all consonants except “h,” but it evolved over the years to become the universal possessive adjective corresponding to the pronoun “I” in Modern English. However, the evolution of “my” and “mine” as possessive adjectives was messy in Middle…