Old English phonology


Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.
Old English had a distinction between short and long consonants, at least between vowels, and a distinction between short vowels and long vowels in stressed syllables. It had a larger number of vowel qualities in stressed syllables – and in some dialects – than in unstressed ones –. It had diphthongs that no longer exist in Modern English, which were, with both short and long versions.

Phonology

The inventory of surface sounds of Old English is as shown below. Allophones are enclosed in parentheses.

Consonants

Intervocalic voicing

The fricatives had voiced allophones between vowels or voiced consonants unless geminated.
Proto-Germanic developed into the OE stop, but Proto-Germanic developed into the OE fricative except when geminated.
Old English had a fairly large set of dorsal and glottal consonants:. Typically only are analyzed as separate phonemes; is considered an allophone of, an allophone of, and and allophones of.
Historically, developed from by palatalization, and some cases of developed from palatalization of, while others developed from Proto-Germanic. Both the velars and the palatals are spelled as, in Old English manuscripts.
In modern texts, the palatalized versions may be written with a dot above the letter:,.
was pronounced as in most cases, but as the affricate after or when geminated. The voiced velar stop was pronounced as a fricative after a vowel or liquid. At the end of a word, was devoiced to an allophone of . Because of this, and the palatalization referred to above, the phonemes,, and alternate in the inflectional forms of some words.
In Proto-Germanic and probably early Old English, appeared in initial position as well, and was best considered an allophone of, occurring only after a nasal or when geminated. But after became word-initially in Old English, it makes sense to consider the stop the basic form and the fricative the allophone.
are allophones of occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively.
The evidence for the allophone after front vowels is indirect, as it is not indicated in the orthography. Nevertheless, the fact that there was historically a fronting of to and of to after front vowels makes it very likely. Moreover, in late Middle English, sometimes became , but only after back vowels, never after front vowels. This is explained if we assume that the allophone sometimes became but the allophone never did.

Sonorants

is an allophone of occurring before and. Words that have final in standard Modern English have the cluster in Old English.
The exact nature of Old English is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant, as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar flap, or an alveolar trill.
The sequences were pronounced as voiceless sonorants. They developed from the clusters in Proto-Germanic.
could have been a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, as it is the case in modern Icelandic.

Velarization

apparently had velarized allophones and, or similar, when followed by another consonant or when geminated. This is suggested by the vowel shifts of [|breaking and retraction] before, which could be cases of assimilation to a following velar consonant:
Due to [|phonotactic constraints] on initial clusters, ⟨wr⟩ and ⟨wl⟩ are thought by some to be digraphs representing these velarized sounds, in which case the distinction was phonemic:
However, this theory is inconsistent with orthoepic evidence from the Early Modern English era.

Vowels

Old English had a moderately large vowel system. In stressed syllables, both monophthongs and diphthongs had short and long versions, which were clearly distinguished in pronunciation. In unstressed syllables, vowels were reduced or elided, though not as much as in Modern English.

Monophthongs

Old English had seven or eight vowel qualities, depending on dialect, and each could appear as either a long or short monophthong. An example of a pair of words distinguished by vowel length is god and gōd .
The front mid rounded vowels occur in the Northumbrian dialect, for instance, but merged into in the best attested Late West Saxon dialect.
The long–short vowel pair developed into the Middle English vowels, with two different vowel qualities distinguished by height, so they may have had different qualities in Old English as well.
The short open back vowel before nasals was probably rounded to. This is suggested by the fact that the word for "man", for example, is spelled as mann or monn.
In unstressed syllables, only three vowels,, were distinguished. Here were reduced to, were reduced to, and remained. Unstressed were sometimes pronounced as, as in haliġ and heofon.

Diphthongs

All dialects of Old English had diphthongs. Like monophthongs, diphthongs appear to have had short and long versions. In modern texts, long diphthongs are marked with a macron on the first letter. The short versions behave like short monophthongs, and the long versions like long monophthongs. Most Old English diphthongs consist of a front vowel followed by a back offglide; according to some analyses they were in fact front vowels followed by a velarized consonant. The diphthongs tend to be height-harmonic, meaning that both parts of the diphthong had the same vowel height.
The Anglian dialects had the following diphthongs:
First
element		Short
Long
Spelling
Spelling
Highioio, īo
Mideoeo, ēo
Loweaea, ēa

The high diphthongs io and īo were not present in Late West Saxon, having merged into eo and ēo. Earlier West Saxon, however, had an additional pair of long and short diphthongs written ie, which developed from i-mutation or umlaut of eo or ea, ēo or ēa. Scholars do not agree on how they were pronounced; they may have been or. They were apparently monophothongized by Alfred the Great's time, to a vowel whose pronunciation is still uncertain, but is known as "unstable i". This later went on to merge with, according to spellings such as gelyfan, for earlier geliefan and gelifan. This produced additional instances of alongside those that developed from i-mutation and from sporadic rounding of in certain circumstances. All instances of were normally unrounded next to, and, hence gifan from earlier giefan 'to give'.

Origin of diphthongs

Old English diphthongs have several origins, either from Proto-Germanic or from Old English vowel shifts. Long diphthongs developed partly from the Proto-Germanic diphthongs and partly from the Old English vowel shifts, while the short diphthongs developed only from Old English vowel shifts. These are examples of diphthongs inherited from Proto-Germanic:
There are three vowel shifts that resulted in diphthongs: breaking, palatal diphthongization, and back mutation. Through breaking, Anglo-Frisian short developed into the short diphthongs io, eo, ea before or a consonant cluster beginning with, and Anglo-Frisian long developed into the diphthongs īo and ēa before. Palatal diphthongization changed e, æ and a, ǣ, u and o, ē to the diphthongs ie, ea, ēo, ēa respectively after the palatalized consonants ġ, sċ, and ċ. Back mutation changed i, e, and sometimes a to io, eo, and ea before a back vowel in the next syllable.
Scholars disagree on whether short diphthongs are phonologically possible, and some say that Old English short diphthongs must actually have been centralized vowels. Hogg argues against this, saying that a length contrast in diphthongs exists in modern languages, such as Scots, in which the short diphthong in tide contrasts with the long diphthong in tied.
Peter Schrijver has theorized that Old English breaking developed from language contact with Celtic. He says that two Celtic languages were spoken in Britain, Highland British Celtic, which was phonologically influenced by British Latin and developed into Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, and Lowland British Celtic, which was brought to Ireland at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain and became Old Irish. Lowland British Celtic had velarization like Old and Modern Irish, which gives preceding vowels a back offglide, and this feature was loaned by language contact into Old English, resulting in backing diphthongs.

Phonotactics

is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form. In this study it is usual to represent consonants in general with the letter C and vowels with the letter V, so that a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure. The IPA symbol used to show a division between syllables is the dot. Old English stressed syllables were structured as 3V3.

Onset

can be analyzed as having three "slots": the first can be occupied by fricatives, the second by stops, and the third by the sonorants. The other onset consonants always occur alone. Alternatively, the voiceless sonorants can be analyzed as clusters of and a voiced sonorant:.

Nucleus

The syllable nucleus was always a vowel.

Coda

Sound changes

Like Frisian, Old English underwent palatalization of the velar consonants and fronting of the open vowel to in certain cases. It also underwent vowel shifts that were not shared with Frisian: smoothing, diphthong height harmonization, and breaking. Diphthong height harmonization and breaking resulted in the unique Old English diphthongs io, ie, eo, ea.
Palatalization yielded some Modern English word-pairs in which one word has a velar and the other has a palatal or postalveolar. Some of these were inherited from Old English, while others have an unpalatalized form loaned from Old Norse.

Dialects

had four major dialect groups: Kentish, West Saxon, Mercian, and Northumbrian. Kentish and West Saxon were the dialects spoken south of a line approximately following the course of the River Thames: Kentish in the easternmost portion of that area and West Saxon everywhere else. Mercian was spoken in the middle part of the country, separated from the southern dialects by the Thames and from Northumbrian by the River Humber. Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as "Anglian".
The biggest differences occurred between West Saxon and the other groups. The differences occurred mostly in the front vowels, and particularly the diphthongs.
The early history of Kentish was similar to Anglian, but sometime around the ninth century all of the front vowels æ, e, y merged into e. The further discussion concerns the differences between Anglian and West Saxon, with the understanding that Kentish, other than where noted, can be derived from Anglian by front-vowel merger. The primary differences were:
Modern English derives mostly from the Anglian dialect rather than the standard West Saxon dialect of Old English. However, since London sits on the Thames near the boundary of the Anglian, West Saxon, and Kentish dialects, some West Saxon and Kentish forms have entered Modern English. For example, bury has its spelling derived from West Saxon and its pronunciation from Kentish.

Examples

The prologue to Beowulf:
Hƿæt! ƿē Gār-Dena in ġēar-dagum
þēod-cyninga þrym ġefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Sċyld Sċēfing sċeaþena þrēatum,
monegum mǣġþum meodo-setla oftēah.
Eġsode eorl, syððan ǣrest ƿearð
fēa-sċeaft funden; hē þæs frōfre ġebād,
ƿēox under ƿolcnum, ƿeorð-myndum þāh,
oð þæt him ǣġhƿylċ þāra ymb-sittendra
ofer hron-rāde hȳran sċolde,
gomban ġyldan; þæt ƿæs gōd cyning.

The Lord's Prayer:
Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum,
Sī þīn nama ġehālgod.
Tōbecume þīn rīċe,
ġeƿurþe þīn ƿilla, on eorðan sƿā sƿā on heofonum.
Ūrne ġedæġhƿāmlīcan hlāf syle ūs tō dæġ,
and forġyf ūs ūre gyltas, sƿā sƿā ƿē forġyfað ūrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelǣd þū ūs on costnunge, ac ālȳs ūs of yfele.
Sōþlīċe.