Old English Phonology - Phonological Processes

Phonological Processes

See also: Phonological history of the English language

A number of phonological processes affected Old English in the period before the earliest documentation. These processes especially affected vowels, and are the reason why many Old English words look significantly different from related words in languages such as Old High German, which is much closer to the common West Germanic ancestor of both languages. The processes took place chronologically in the order described below (with uncertainty in ordering as noted).

Various conventions are used below for describing Old English words, reconstructed parent forms of various sorts, and reconstructed Proto-West-Germanic (PWG), Proto-Germanic (PG) and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) forms:

• Forms in italic denote either Old English words as they appear in spelling, or reconstructed forms of various sorts. Where phonemic ambiguity occurs in Old English spelling, extra diacritics are used (ċ, ġ, ā, ǣ, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ).
• Forms between /slashes/ or indicate, respectively, broad (phonemic) or narrow (allophonic) pronunciation. Sounds are indicated using standard IPA notation.
• Long vowels appear as e.g. ō but /oː/.
• Nasal vowels appear as e.g. oN but /õ/.
• Overlong vowels appear as e.g. ô but /oːː/.
• Nasal overlong vowels appear as e.g. ôN but /õːː/.
• "Long" diphthongs appear as e.g. ēa but /æa/.
• "Short" diphthongs appear as e.g. ea but /æ̆ă/, .
• Velar /k/ appears c in old English spelling and sometimes in reconstructed intermediate forms, but k elsewhere.