Lecture 1 First Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law) ie g aspirated Voiced voiced stops stops bh > b

palatalization

The letter k was not normally used: /k/ being represented by c (cyssan - “to kiss”). However, when in prehistoric OE this /k/ preceded a front vowel, it developed into a palatal stop instead of a velar one., that is: it was articulated farther forward in the mouth, somewhere between /k/ and /t/. In the course of OE period, the differences between the velar and the palatal variants became greater, so in ModE it has developed into a palatal stop /t∫/ (as in church). Indeed it had probably reached this stage by the end of OE: OE symbol c then represented either /k/ or / t∫/.
It is not always possible by looking at an OE word to know which pronunciation to use, because the vowel, following c, may also have changed since prehistoric times. Thus: cēlan “to cool” and cynn “kin” both have the velar stop /k/, even though they have front vowels, because they derived from prehistoric OE forms *kōljan and *kunni (Note: ō and u are not front vowels but back).
So, in OE the two sounds /k/ and /t∫/ were merely variants of a single phoneme: /k/ was tha allophone used before back vowels and and /t∫/ - the allophone used before front vowels; but in the course of the OE period they developed into two separate phonemes. Thus OE cinn and cynn we pronounce as ModE chin and kin.
In most positions, OE /k/ also became palatalized when it followed /s/, and the combination represented by OE spelling sc normally developed into ModE /∫/. This pronunciation had been reached by the end of OE period. Examples are scip “ship”, scrūd “dress”, fisc “fish”. In some positions, however, /sc/ remained unchanged., as in ascian “to ask” and tusc “tooth”.
OE c never represents /s/, as it does in ModE centre, lace, century.
The letter h was used to represent two different phonemes. On the one hand there was a /j/ phoneme (similar to ModE yes): OE hēar “year”, fæher “fair”, cæh “key”. On the other hand there was a /g/ phoneme (similar to ModE go): OE gōd “good”, gēs “geese”, dogga “dog”. When, however, this phoneme occurred undoubled between vowels, a different allophone was used: a voiced velar fricative //, made by narrowing the passage between the back of the tongue and the soft palate: e.g. fuhol “bird”, lahu “law”. In middle English this velar fricatives developed into the semi-vowel /w/ (ModE fowl, law).
When the /g/ phoneme was doubled, it was usually spelt like [gg], as in frogga, dogga, but sometimes the spelling [cg] was used instead, and we can find frocga, docga. At the same time the spelling [cg] was also used to represent a /dh/ phoneme, as in OE ecg “edge”, brycg “bridge”.
(B.Ilyish: sc, h and cg were palatalized before front vowels and in the final position by the end of Old English).