Welcome to a new year (and decade) with HLC!
I am very happy to be here with all of you, my dear followers, and I hope that HLC will continue to grow during this new decade! In order to do that, please let me know if there is anything you’re missing from the HLC and I will do my best to provide it!
In the meantime, while you contemplate what you would like to see more of here at the HLC, let’s get back to HEL!
Today, let’s have a look at Old English phonology!
As I am sure you know, the HLC has done some work on this before (like here), but today, let’s have a closer look, shall we?
First, two words of warning: First, Old English underwent a lot of changes. It’d be a very long blog post if I tried to cover them all! Therefore, this will merely provide a bit of an inkling, outlining the sound system of Old English. On the topic of phonological changes that Old English underwent, Wikipedia has an abundance of interesting information – do check it (and my other sources) out!
Second, Old English phonology is, of course, somewhat speculative. This is necessarily the case because, obviously, we can’t exactly ask the speakers of the language how they would pronounce this or that, or listen to recordings of speakers.
But (!) there is a relatively large corpus of the language (check out the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, which consists of at least one copy of every surviving Old English text 1 – isn’t that remarkable?!). This means that we can look at orthography, which is deemed to be quite faithful to pronunciation, to draw some tentative conclusions about how words were pronounced.
Now, let’s start with something fairly simple: a consonant sound inventory of Old English, which looks something like this:
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | (n̥) n | (ŋ) | ||||
| Stop | p b | t d | k g | ||||
| Affricate | tʃ (dʒ) | ||||||
| Fricative | f (v) | θ (ð) | s (z) | ʃ | (ç) | (x ɣ) | h |
| Approximant | (l̥) l | j | (ʍ) w | ||||
| Trill | (r̥) r | ||||||
(Want to hear how they sound? Check out this amazing interactive IPA chart!)
Now, I won’t go into detail about allophonic variations and when they occur, simply because a blog post can only be so long. However, there are numerous, great books listed in my notes below if you want to take a closer peek at Old English phonology.
Alright, so we have the consonants. But what kind of vowels did Old English have?
Well, they had seven or eight vowels, depending on dialect:
| Front | Back | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unrounded | rounded | unrounded | rounded | |
| Close | i i: | y y: | u u: | |
| Mid | e e: | (ø ø:) | o o: | |
| Open | æ æ: | ɑ ɑ: | ||
The front mid rounded vowel [ø] appears in the Northumbrian dialect (remember the Old English dialects?) but corresponds to [e] in late West Saxon, which is why it’s in parenthesis here in our table.
What about diphthongs, though? Surely, Old English had diphthongs!
It did! And here they are!
| First element | Short | Long | Spelling (Old English) | Spelling (modern) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | iu̯ | iːu̯ | io | io, īo |
| Mid | eo̯ | eːo̯ | eo | eo, ēo |
| Low | æɑ̯ | æːɑ̯ | ea | ea, ēa |
*These are representative of the diphthongs that occur in the Anglian dialects of Old English – the high diphthongs io and īo had merged into eo and ēo in Late West Saxon.
And that is a very brief outline of the sound system of Old English!
Join me next week as we watch this vital part of a language change quite a bit in Middle English!
.
Notes and references
If you want to have a closer look at Old English phonology (or Old English generally), there are a number of really great books for you. Here are some of my favorites, with my own thoughts on the source in parenthesis 2 !
Alistair Campbell. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This is a classic – you won’t be disappointed.)
Roger Lass. 1994. Old English: A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (I will personally always recommend pretty much anything written by Roger Lass. The works are always filled with great information, written in an engaging and interesting way.)
Bruce Mitchell & Fred Robinson. A guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell. (A very good overview with a lot of information.)
Richard Hogg. 2002. An introduction to Old English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A thin volume, with easy access to a lot of difficult matters!)
Richard Hogg. 1992. Chapter 3: Phonology and Morphology (in The Cambridge History of the English language, vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67-168. (Again, just as above, easy access to a lot of information – definitely worth a read.)
Donka Minkova. 2014. A historical phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (This is one of my absolute favorites – I used it extensively for my master’s thesis and found it extremely useful, not just regarding Old English but generally about the phonology of English.)
- Check out About the DOE Corpus here
- Note that these are the personal opinions of the author, based on her own use of the resource. The commentary should not be understood as a summarised review of the work.