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| Old English |
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Old English phonology is the pronunciation system of Old English, the Germanic language spoken on Great Britain from around 450 to 1150 and attested in a body of written texts from the 7th–12th centuries. Although its reconstruction is necessarily somewhat speculative, features of Old English pronunciation have been inferred partly from the sounds used in modern varieties of English (including dialects), partly from the spellings used in Old English literature, partly from analysis of Old English poetry, and partly from comparison with other Germanic languages.
Some words were pronounced differently in different dialects of Old English. The dialect called West Saxon is the best documented in surviving texts, and so is commonly treated as a default reference in descriptions of Old English, even though it is not a direct ancestor of the modern English language (which is more closely related to the Mercian dialect).[1]
Old English had a distinction between short and long (doubled) consonants, at least between vowels (as seen in sunne "sun" and sunu "son", stellan "to put" and stelan "to steal"), and a distinction between short vowels and long vowels in stressed syllables. It had a larger number of vowel qualities in stressed syllables (/i y u e o æ ɑ/ and in some dialects /ø/) than in unstressed ones (/ɑ e u/). It had diphthongs that no longer exist in Modern English (such as /eo̯ æɑ̯/), with both short and long versions.
- ^ Murray 2017, §2.