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 its orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully and so certain conclusions can easily be drawn.
Old English had a distinction between short and long (doubled) consonants, at least between vowels (as seen in sunne "sun" and sunu "son", stellan "to put" and stelan "to steal"), and a distinction between short vowels and long vowels in stressed syllables. It had a larger number of vowel qualities in stressed syllables (/i y u e o æ ɑ/ and in some dialects /ø/) than in unstressed ones (/ɑ e u/). It had diphthongs that no longer exist in Modern English (/io̯ eo̯ æɑ̯/), with both short and long versions.
The inventory of consonant surface sounds (whether allophones or phonemes) of Old English is shown below. Allophones are enclosed in parentheses.
The fricatives /f θ s/ had voiced allophones [v ð z], which occurred between vowels or a vowel and a voiced consonant when the preceding sound was stressed.
Proto-Germanic *ð (a fricative allophone of *d) developed into the Old English stop /d/, but Proto-Germanic *β (a fricative allophone of *b) developed into the Old English fricative /f/ (either its voiced allophone [v] or its voiceless allophone [f]).[1]
Old English had a fairly large set of dorsal (postalveolar, palatal, velar) and glottal consonants: [k, tʃ, ɡ, dʒ, ɣ, j, ʃ, x, ç, h]. Typically only /k, tʃ, ɣ, j, ʃ, x/ are analyzed as separate phonemes; [dʒ] is considered an allophone of /j/, [ɡ] an allophone of /ɣ/, and [h] and [ç] allophones of /x/.
Old English manuscripts spelled the palatal consonants /tʃ, j, ʃ/ the same way as velar /k, ɣ, sk/: both were written as ⟨c⟩, ⟨g⟩, ⟨sc⟩. Modern texts may mark the palatalized consonants with a dot above the letter: ⟨ċ⟩, ⟨ġ⟩, ⟨sċ⟩.[2] Historically, /tʃ, ʃ/ developed from /k, sk/ by palatalization. Some cases of /j/ developed from palatalization of /ɣ/, while others developed from Proto-Germanic *j. Those historical sound changes resulted in certain common patterns to where the palatal sounds occurred: for example, ⟨c⟩ often has the palatalized sound before the front vowels ⟨i⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨æ⟩. However, although palatalization was originally a regular sound change, later vowel changes and borrowings meant that the occurrence of the palatal forms was no longer predictable and so the palatals and the velars had become separate phonemes. (Note that Old English had palatalized ⟨g⟩ in certain words that have hard G in Modern English because of Old Norse influence such as ġiefan "give" and ġeat "gate".)
The voiced velar fricative [ɣ] was in mostly complementary distribution with the voiced velar plosive [ɡ]. The same applied to the corresponding palatal consonant sounds [j] and [dʒ]. The plosive [ɡ] and affricate [dʒ] were found only as geminates or after a nasal. However, phonetic [nɣ] and [nj] could be found in some words such as syngian and menġan because of the syncope of an intervening short vowel sound.[3] The transcription in this article ignores such exceptional cases and treats [ɡ] as an allophone of /ɣ/ and [dʒ] as an allophone of /j/. In late Old English, [ɡ] came to be used in initial position as well, and for this time period the underlying phoneme can be analyzed as /ɡ/, with [ɣ] an allophone used after a vowel.
The voiceless velar fricative [x] seems to have been just one of several allophones of the phoneme /x/. At the start of a word or morpheme, /x/ was pronounced as a glottal fricative [h], and after a front vowel, /x/ was likely pronounced as a palatal fricative [ç]. All three allophones were spelled ⟨h⟩:
The evidence for the allophone [ç] after front vowels is indirect, as it is not indicated in the orthography. Nevertheless, the fact that there was historically a fronting of *k to /tʃ/ and of *ɣ to /j/ after front vowels makes it very likely. Moreover, in late Middle English, /x/ sometimes became /f/ (e.g. tough, cough),but only after back vowels, never after front vowels. That is explained if it is assumed that the allophone [x] sometimes became [f] but that the allophone [ç] never did so.
In late Old English, [ɣ] was devoiced to /x/ at the ends of words. That and the palatalization referred to above made the phonemes /ɣ/, /j/, and /x/ alternate in the inflectional paradigms of some words.
[ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ occurring before [k] and [ɡ]. Words that have final /ŋ/ in standard Modern English have the cluster [ŋɡ] in Old English.
The exact nature of Old English /r/ is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant [ɹ], as in most Modern English accents; an alveolar flap [ɾ]; or an alveolar trill [r].
/w, l, n, r/ were pronounced as voiceless sonorants [ʍ, l̥, n̥, r̥] following /x/.
However, it is also commonly theorized that the ⟨h⟩ in those sequences was unpronounced and stood only for the voicelessness of the following sonorant.
/l r/ apparently had velarized allophones [ɫ] and [rˠ] or similarly sounds when they were followed by another consonant or were geminated. That is suggested by the vowel shifts of breaking and retraction before /l r/, which could be cases of assimilation to a following velar consonant:
Phonotactic constraints on initial clusters cause ⟨wr⟩ and ⟨wl⟩ to be thought by some to be digraphs that represent th velarized sounds in which case the distinction was phonemic:[4]
However, that theory is inconsistent with orthoepic and orthographic evidence from the Early Modern English era,[5] as well as borrowings into and from Welsh, which has [wl] and [wr] as genuine initial clusters.
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.
Old English had seven or eight vowel qualities, depending on dialect, and each could appear as a long or a short monophthong. An example of a pair of words that are distinguished by vowel length is god [god] ('god') and gōd [goːd] ('good').
The front mid rounded vowel /ø(ː)/ occurs in the Anglian dialects, for instance, but merged into /e eː/ in the West Saxon dialect.
The long–short vowel pair /æ æː/ developed into the Middle English vowels /a ɛː/, with two different vowel qualities distinguished by height, and so they may have had different qualities in Old English as well.[6]
The short open back vowel /ɑ/ before nasals was probably rounded to [ɒ], as is suggested by the fact that the word for "person", for example, is spelled as mann or monn.[6]
In unstressed syllables, only three vowels (/ɑ e u/) were distinguished.[7] /æ, e, i/ were reduced to /e/; /ɑ, o/ were reduced to /ɑ/, and /u/ remained. Unstressed /e, u/ were sometimes pronounced or spelled as [i, o] in closed syllables, as in hāliġ and heofon.
All dialects of Old English had diphthongs, which were written with digraphs composed of two vowel letters, such as ⟨ea⟩, ⟨eo⟩, ⟨io⟩. Like monophthongs, diphthongs could be short or long. Phonologically, the short versions behave like short monophthongs, and the long versions like long monophthongs. In modern texts, long diphthongs are marked with a macron on the first letter. The phonetic realization of Old English diphthongs is controversial.[8][9][10] According to some analyses, Old English ea eo io ēa ēo īo were height-harmonic diphthongs where both parts of the diphthong had the same vowel height (high, mid or low): [æɑ̯ eo̯ iu̯ æːɑ̯ eːo̯ iːu̯].
Other scholars view a contrast between long and short diphthong phonemes as phonologically implausible and have interpreted short ea eo io not as diphthongs but as centralized monophthongs[11] or simply as allophones of /æ, e, i/.[9] Hogg argues that such objections are unfounded and says that a contrast between long and short diphthongs is attested in some modern languages, such as Scots, where the short diphthong in tide /təid/ contrasts with the long diphthong in tied /taid/.[12]
Another debated point is the phonetic quality of the offglide (the second part of the diphthong) in Old English. Some scholars reconstruct ēa ēo īo as ending in an unrounded schwa-like glide: for example, Minkova 2014 transcribes what are traditionally referred to as 'long diphthongs' as [æə eə iə] (and assumes that what are traditionally referred to as 'short diphthongs' did not end in a stable or fully contrastive offglide, suggesting that ea and eo were allophones of /æ, e/ that could be given transcriptions such as [ɛᵊ] or [eᵊ]).[9] In contrast, Fulk 2014 describes ea eo io ēa ēo īo as phonetically [æu̯ eu̯ iu̯ æːu̯ eːu̯ iːu̯], citing the etymological origin (in some but not all cases) of the long diphthongs from Proto-Germanic diphthongs ending in a high back rounded offglide [u̯], as well as evidence that eo io ēo īo had rounded outcomes in some dialects of Middle English.[10]
The Anglian dialects had the following diphthongs:[12]
The high diphthongs io and īo were not present in West Saxon and had merged into eo and ēo. Early West Saxon, however, had an additional pair of long and short diphthongs that was written ie (distinguished as ie and īe in modern editions), 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 [ie̯ iːe̯] or [iy̯ iːy̯]. They were apparently monophthongized by Alfred the Great's time to a vowel; its pronunciation is still uncertain and is known as "unstable i". It later went on to merge with /y yː/ according to spellings such as gelyfan for earlier geliefan and gelifan ('to believe').[13] (According to another interpretation, however, the "unstable i" may simply have been /i/, and the later /y/ can be explained by the fact that Late West Saxon was not a direct descendant of Early West Saxon. See Old English dialects.)
That produced additional instances of /y(ː)/ alongside those that developed from i-mutation and from sporadic rounding of /i(ː)/ in certain circumstances (e.g. myċel 'much' from earlier miċel with rounding perhaps triggered by the rounded /m/). All instances of /y(ː)/ were normally unrounded next to ⟨c⟩, ⟨g⟩ and ⟨h⟩: hence ġifan from earlier ġiefan 'to give'.
Old English diphthongs have several origins, from Proto-Germanic or from Old English vowel shifts. Long diphthongs developed partly from the Proto-Germanic diphthongs *iu, *eu, *au and partly from the Old English vowel shifts, while the short diphthongs developed only from Old English vowel shifts. Here are examples of diphthongs inherited from Proto-Germanic:
Three vowel shifts produced diphthongs: breaking, back mutation, and palatal diphthongization. Breaking caused Anglo-Frisian short *i, *e, *æ to develop into the short diphthongs io, eo, ea before /x, w/ or a consonant cluster beginning with /r, l/. Anglo-Frisian long *ī, *ǣ developed into the diphthongs īo and ēa before /x/:
Back mutation changed i, e and sometimes a to io, eo and ea before a back vowel in the next syllable:
Palatal diphthongization changed æ, ǣ, e, ē to the diphthongs ea, ēa, ie, īe respectively after the palatalized consonants ġ, sċ, and ċ:
In addition, the back vowels a, o, u (long or short) could be spelled as ⟨ea⟩, ⟨eo⟩, ⟨eo⟩ respectively after ċ, ġ, or sċ. However, rather than indicating the development of a diphthong, these spellings might have just been a convention for marking palatal consonants before a back vowel, since the modern English descendants of such words do not display the typical evolution of the diphthong ⟨eo⟩ to a front vowel:
Peter Schrijver has theorized that Old English breaking developed from language contact with Celtic languages. 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. That feature came by language contact to Old English and resulted in backing diphthongs.[14]
Phonotactics is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form. It usually represents consonants in general with the letter C and vowels with the letter V and so a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure. The IPA symbol that shows a division between syllables is the dot [.]. Old English stressed syllables were structured as (C)3V(C)3; that is, up to three consonants in both the onset and coda with one vowel as the nucleus.
Onset clusters typically consist of a fricative /s, ʃ, f, θ/ and a stop /p, t, k, b, d, ɣ/ although /s/ is allowed as a third element before voiceless stops. The other onset consonants /j, tʃ, x, n̥, r̥, l̥, ʍ/ (and /rˠ, ɫ/ if they are accepted as existing) always occur alone. Alternatively, the voiceless sonorants [n̥, r̥, l̥, ʍ] can be analyzed as clusters of /x/ and a voiced sonorant: /xn, xr, xl, xw/. Conversely, the clusters of /s/ and a voiceless stop /sp, st, sk/ may be argued to be phonemic although no analyses do so.
The syllable nucleus was always a vowel.
Like Frisian, Old English underwent palatalization of the velar consonants /k ɣ/ and fronting of the open vowel /ɑ ɑː/ to /æ æː/ in certain cases. Old English also underwent vowel shifts that were not shared with Old 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 (drink and drench, day and dawn), and others have an unpalatalized form loaned from Old Norse (skirt and shirt).
Old English 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 tEngland and was 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 largest differences occurred between West Saxon and the other groups and occurred mostly in the front vowels, particularly the diphthongs. (However, Northumbrian was distinguished from the rest by much less palatalization.[citation needed] Forms in Modern English with hard /k/ and /ɡ/ in which a palatalized sound would be expected from Old English are caused by Northumbrian influence or direct borrowing from Scandinavian. Note that in fact, the lack of palatalization in Northumbrian was probably caused by heavy Scandinavian influence.)
The early history of Kentish was similar to Anglian, but sometime around the 9th century, all front vowels æ, e, y (long and short) merged into e (long and short). This 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 the following:
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[ambiguous] from Kentish (see below).
The prologue to Beowulf:
The Lord's Prayer:
