Old English Phonetics

Lecture 7. Linguistic Features of Old English

1. Old English Phonetics

2. Old English Grammar.

3. Uld English Vocabulary.

Old English is so far removed from Modern English that one may take it for an entirely different language. This is largely due to the peculiarities of its pronunciation. The survey of Old English phonetics deals with word stress, the system of vowels and consonants and their origin. The Old English sound system developed from the Proto Germanic system. It underwent multiple changes in the pre-written periods of history, especially in Early Old English. The system of word stress inherited from Proto Germanic underwent no changes in Early Old English. Word stress was fixed. It remained on the same syllable in different grammatical forms of the word and, as a rule, did not shift in word building either. The development of vowels in Early Old English consisted of the modifications of separate vowels, and also of the modification of entire sets of vowels.

Old English Vowels:

Monophongs Diphtongs

Short: i, e, (œ), æ, a, o, u, y (ie), ea, eo

Long: i:, e:, (œ:), æ:, a:, o:, u:, y: (ie:), ea:, eo:

The Old English vowel system displayed an obvious tendency towards a symmetrical, balanced arrangement since almost every long vowel had a corresponding short counterpart. On the whole, consonants were historically more stable than vowels, though certain changes took place in all historical periods. The system of Old English consonants consisted of several correlated sets of consonants. All the consonants fell into noise consonants and sonorants. The noise consonants were subdivided into plosives and fricatives. Plosives were further differentiated as voiced and voiceless, the difference being phonemic. The fricative consonants were also subdivided into voiced and voiceless. In this set, however, sonority was merely a phonetic difference between allophones. The most universal distinctive feature in consonant system was the difference in length. During the entire Old English period long consonants are believed to have been opposed to short ones on a phonemic level. They were mostly distinguished in intervocal position.

Most Old English consonants are pronounced as in Modern English, and most of the differences from Modern English are straightforward:

1. Old English scribes wrote the letters þ (“thorn”) and ð (“eth”) interchangeably to represent [θ] and [ð], the sounds spelled th in Modern English. Examples: þing ‘thing’, brōðor ‘brother’.

2. There are no silent consonants. Old English cniht (which comes to Modern English as knight) actually begins with [k]. Similarly hlāf (Modern English loaf) and hring (ring) begin with [h], gnæt (gnat) with [ɡ], and wrīðan (writhe) with [w]. Some Old English consonant combinations may be difficult to pronounce because they are not in Modern English

3. The consonants spelled f, s and þ/ð are pronounced as voiced [v], [z] and [ð] (as in then) when they fall between vowels or other voiced sounds. For example, the f of heofon ‘heaven’, hæfde ‘had’ and wulfas ‘wolves’ is voiced. So are the s of ċēosan ‘choose’ and the ð of feðer ‘feather’. This distinction remains not only in such Modern English singular/plural pairs as wolf / wolves, but also in such pairs as noun bath and verb bathe, noun cloth and derivative clothes.

4. These same consonants were pronounced as unvoiced [f], [s], and [θ] (as in thin) when they came at the beginning or end of a word or adjacent to at least one unvoiced sound. So f is unvoiced in ful ‘full’, cræft ‘craft’ and wulf ‘wolf’. Similarly s is unvoiced in settan ‘set’, frost ‘frost’, and wulfas ‘wolves’, and þ/ð is unvoiced in þæt ‘that’ and strengð ‘strength’.

5. When written double, consonants must be pronounced double, or held longer. We pronounce consonants long in Modern English phrases like “big gun” and “hat trick,” though never within words. In Old English, wile ‘he will’ must be distinguished from wille ‘I will’, and freme ‘do’ (imperative) from fremme ‘I do’.

6. Undotted c is pronounced [k]; dotted ċ is pronounced [ʧ], like the ch in Modern English chin. This letter is never pronounced [s] in Old English. It has a special function in the combination sc (see item 10 below).

7. The letter g, like c, is sometimes printed with a dot and sometimes without. Dotless g is pronounced [ɡ], as in good, when it comes at the beginning of a word or syllable. Between voiced sounds dotless g is pronounced [ɣ], a voiced velar spirant. This sound became [w] in Middle English, so English no longer has it. Dotted ġ is usually pronounced [j], as in Modern English yes, but when it follows an n it is pronounced [ʤ], as in Modern English angel.

8. The combination cg is pronounced [ʤ], like the dge of Modern English sedge. Examples: hrycg ‘ridge, back’, brycg ‘bridge’, ecg ‘edge’.

9. Old English h is pronounced [h], as in Modern English, at the beginnings of syllables, but elsewhere it is pronounced approximately like German ch in Nacht or ich —that is, as a velar [x] or palatal [ç] unvoiced spirant (pronounced with the tongue against the velum [soft palate] or, after front vowels, against the hard palate). Examples: nēah ‘near’, niht ‘night’, þēah ‘though’, dweorh ‘dwarf’.

10. The combination sc is usually pronounced [ʃ], like Modern English sh: scip ‘ship’, æsc ‘ash (wood)’, wȳscan ‘wish’. But within a word, if sc occurs before a back vowel (a, o, u), or if it occurs after a back vowel at the end of a word, it is pronounced [sk]: ascian ‘ask’ (where sc was formerly followed by a back vowel), tūsc ‘tusk’. When sc was pronounced [sk] it sometimes underwent metathesis (the sounds got reversed to [ks]) and was written x: axian for ascian, tux for tusc. Sometimes sc is pronounced [ʃ] in one form of a word and [sk] or [ks] in another: fisc ‘fish’, fiscas/fixas ‘fishes’.

2. Old English Grammar

Old English was a synthetic, or inflected type of language. It showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms Old English employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formation. Grammatical endings (inflections) were certainly the principle form-building means used. They were found in all the parts of speech that could change their forms. They were usually used alone but could also occur in combination with other means. Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants. The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.

The parts of speech to be distinguished in Old English are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories. They displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech, and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb. There were five grammatical categories in Old English: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness / indefinitness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and number of members within the category. The noun had only two grammatical categories proper – number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories – five. Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood – verbal categories proper – and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence. The distinction of categorical forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes – declensions and conjugations.

The syntactic structure of Old English was determined by two major conditions: the nature of Old English morphology and the relations between forms of the language. As Old English was largely a synthetic language it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words. Consequent ly, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech – unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. So the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple. Coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination. Complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

3. Old English Vocabulary

The full extent of the Old English vocabulary is not known to present-day scholars. There is no doubt that many words have not been recorded in the extant texts at all. The evidence of the records has been supplemented from other sources: from the study of the words of closely related Old Germanic languages and from later, more extensive Middle English texts. Modern estimates of the total vocabulary of Old English range from about thirty thousand words to almost one hundred thousand – the latter figure being probably too high and unrealistic. Despite the gaps in the accessible data, philological studies in the last centuries have given us a fairly complete outline of the Old English vocabulary as regards its etymology, word structure, word-building and stylistic differentiation. Examination of the origin of words is of great interest in establishing the interrelations between languages and linguistic groups. Word etymology throws light on the history of the speaking community and on its contacts with other peoples. The Old English vocabulary was almost purely Germanic. Except for a small number of borrowings, it consisted of native words inherited from Proto Germanic or formed from native roots and affixes. Native Old English words can be subdivided into a number of etymological layers coming from different historical periods. The tree main layers in the native Old English words are: - common Indo-European words; - common Germanic words; - specifically Old English words.

Although borrowed words constituted only a small portion of the Old English vocabulary, they are of great interest for linguistic and historical study. The borrowings reflect the contacts of English with other tongues resulting from diverse political, economic and cultural events in the early periods of British history. Old English borrowings come from two sources – Celtic and Latin. In the course of the Old English period the vocabulary grew. It was mainly replenished from native sources, by means of word formation.

According to their morphological structure Old English words (like Modern English words) fell into three main types:

a) simple words (root-words) or words with a simple stem, containing a root-morpheme and no derivational affixes: land;

b) derived words consisting of one root-morpheme and one or more affixes:

be- innan, e-met-in;

c) compound words, their stems were made up of more than one root- morpheme: mann-cynn.

In late Proto Germanic the morphological structure of the word was simplified. By the age of writing many derived words had lost their stem-forming suffixes and had turned into simple words. The loss of stem-suffixes as means of words derivation stimulated the growth of other means of word-formation, especially the growth of suffixation.

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