OE Consonants

Old English Phonetics

OE 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 OE phonetics deals with word accentuation, the systems of vowels and consonants and their origins. The OE sound system developed from the PG system. It underwent multiple changes in the pre-written periods of history, especially in Early OE.

From the following chart we see that the consonants of Old English were very similar to those of Modern English:

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Inter-dental	Alveolar	Alveo-palatal	Velar
Voiceless stop	p			t		k
Voiced stop	b			d		g
Voiceless affricate					t
Voiced affricate					d
Fricative		f	θ	s		h
Nasal	m			n
Lateral				l
Retroflex				r
Semivowel	w				j

The differences between this set of consonants and that of modern English are essentially orthorgraphic in nature, as some graphemes can represent a variety of sounds:

1) The consonants w, b, d, m, l, t and p were all similar to their counterparts in Modern English.

2) OE r was not like retroflex /r/ of British or American English, but was trilled.

3) sc and cg were pronounced [ ] and [ ] respectively: disc ‘dish’ was pronounced [ ] and ecg ‘edge’ was pronounced [ ]. Since /sk/ becomes [ ] in OE, all OE words that pronounce sc as [sk] are clearly loans from Scandinavian.

4) The fricatives f, þ, ð and s each represented two separate sounds:

f þ,ð s

f v θ ð s z

Voicing was predictable by context; that is to say whenever the sound in question was between voiced sounds it was itself voiced: ceosan – [ ] ‘choose’. Elsewhere it was unvoiced.

5) The sound spelled with the letter <n> was either [n] or, before [g] and [k], the velarized nasal [ ]: singan – [ ] ‘to sing’.

6) The sounds represented by the letter <h> were: [h] initially, including the clusters /hl-/, /hr-/, /hw-/, [x] after back vowels, and [x’] after front vowels: ham –

[ ] ‘home’; leoht – [ ] ‘light’; hlaf – [ ] ‘loaf’; miht – [ ] ‘might, could’.

7) The sound spelled with the letter <c> was either [k] before a consonant or back vowel or [ ] next to a front vowel: ceosan – [ ]; clæne [ ] ‘clean’.

8) Similarly, <g> was either [j] before or between front vowels and finally after a front vowel:; or [g] before consonants, back vowels and front vowels resulting from umlaut.

9) <cg> was pronounced as [ ] in medial or final position: brycg ‘bridge’.

10) OE had phonemically long consonants so that bed ‘prayer’ contrasts with bedd ‘bed’.

11) OE had a number of consonant clusters that are no longer in the language. As well as /h/ clusters discussed above, there were /kn/ and /gn/, which are no longer pronounced as [kn] and [gn], but whose origin remains visible in the modern spellings knee and gnaw.

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