Old English

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Old English Powerpoint

Old English: Largely Phonology

Old English describes the period of the English language spoken between approximately 449 AD (the traditional date of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain) and 1100 AD (about fifty years after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 AD).
The term Anglo-Saxon describes the culture and the people, Old English the language.
Old English had a variety of dialects, but the one that we study as the "standard" is West Saxon, the language of King Alfred and the major works of Anglo-Saxon literature.
Old English used a combination of the Germanic Futhorc and the Latin alphabet: it included four characters adapted from runes—Þ þ ‘thorn’ /θ/, Ƿ ƿ ‘wynn’ /w/, Ææ ‘ash’ /æ/, and Ȝ ȝ ‘yogh’ /g/.
The principal form of writing was called Insular Miniscule.
Old English literature included a number of genres, including poetry, religious prose, and adventure stories.

The phonological inventory of Old English and its major allophonic distributions.
Nouns and adjectives were inflected for three genders.
Verbs had three primary types: strong, weak, and anomalous.
Adjectives' inflections differed based on the presence or absence of a demonstrative pronoun in the phrase.
Old English vocabulary used a great deal of compounding, for example, hlafdige (lady) bread-giver.

Extant vocabulary of Old English is approximately 24,000 words (compared with over half a million in contemporary English), but
Approximately 830 of the most frequent words in English native
The biggest “donor language” to English is Latin.

Vowel length was meaningful in Old English, even though many manuscripts don’t note it.

wite I may see [wɪtə] differs from wīte punishment [wi:tə]
Even though we would likely pronounce wite the same way, Old English speakers treated them differently.

Old English has a smaller phonemic inventory of consonants than Present Day English: /p, b, f, θ, s, x, r, l, w, k, g, n, m/ , because
There is more allophonic variation and pronunciations of two categories of sounds were determined by the phonological context in which they appear.
Two categories of consonants were most affected by variation:
Voiceless fricatives /f, θ, s/ become voiced /v, ð, z/ between voiced sounds:

Velar consonants also changed in position depending upon the vowels and consonants that surrounded them.

Velar stops change dramatically depending upon their phonetic environment.
‘g’ /g/ and ‘c’ /k/ become “palatalized” or “softened” into a glide or an affricate before a front vowel

[h] at the beginnings of words heortan [hɛortɑn] heart
[x] after back vowels leoht [lɛoxt] light
[ç] (a voiceless palatal fricative – “the kitty cat sound”) after front vowels cniht [knɪçt] servant

Old English also had two digraphs (two letter combinations) that were distinctive
‘sk’ /š/ scip [ʃɪp] ship
‘cg’ /ǰ/ ecg [ɛǰ] sword

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