Grimm's law and verner's law

n, m

Of them the special attention is always attracted to the letter g. In fact though it was written the same way in every position, it was pronounced in three different ways:
1. as English [g] in gift while standing before any consonant or a, o, u (all back vowels). The example is gód (a god).
2. as Greek [g] or Irish gh while standing after back vowels (these very a, o, u or after r, l. For example dagas, folgian.
3. as English [j] in yellow while preceding or following any front vowel (e, i, y). In this case it is no longer velar, but palatal: giefan (to give), dæg (a day). As we see, this g in dæg later turned into the Modern English y.
Consonants could also be subject to several kinds of mutations which we place here:
1. Voicing of fricative sounds (h, f, s, þ) appears, if a fricative is surrounded by vowels:
wíf (a wife; unvoiced) - wífes (voiced); wearþ (a becoming; unvoiced) - weorðan (to become; voiced).
2. Palatalization appears only in Late Old English, but significantly changes the pronunciation making it closer to today's English:
cild [kild] > [child]; scip [skip] > [ship]; everywhere [g], [cg] sounds turn into [dj]: bricg [bricg] > [bridj]
3. Other changes
any velar cons.+ t > -ht-: sócte > sóhte
any labial cons.+ t > -ft-: sceapt > sceaft
any dental cons.+ t > -ss-: witte > wisse
n was lost before h, f, s, p: bronhte > bróhte, sonfte > sófte
Certainly there were other changes as well, but they are not so important to be placed in our short grammar.
In general, Old English phonetics suffered great changes during the whole period from the 5th to the 11th century. Anglo-Saxons did not live in isolation from the world - they contacted with Germanic tribes in France, with Vikings from Scandinavia, with Celtic tribes in Britain, and all these contacts could not but influence the language's pronunciation somehow. Besides, the internal development of the English language after languages of Angles, Saxons and Jutes were unified, was rather fast, and sometimes it took only half a century to change some form of the language or replace it with another one. That is why we cannot regard the Old English language as the state: it was the constant movement.⁴