OE phonetic structure. OE vowels.

The OE sound system developed from the PG (Proto-Germanic) system.

In OE a syllable was made prominent by an increase in the force of articulation; in other words, a dynamic or a force stress was employed. In disyllabic and polysyllabic words the accent fell on the root-morpheme or on the first syllable. 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.

In Old English, like in other languages, there were vowels and consonants.

The Old English vowels differed from each other not only by quality (i.e. by articulation), but also by quantity (i.e. by length). The length of vowels is denoted by a line above the corresponding letter, e.g.: a, e, o. You know that in modern English it is also important to distinguish long and short vowels, but such a sound as, for instance, [æ] has no long correspondence in today’s English, like there is no corresponding short vowel to [a:]. The situation in Old English was different: all vowels existed in pairs, i.e. alongside with every short vowel there was a long one having the same articulation. That is why the Old English system of vowels is spoken of as symmetric. As a whole the system of monophthongs in Old English looks like this:

[a] [æ] [e] [i] [o] [u] [y] [a/o]

[a:] [æ:] [e:] [i:] [o:] [u:] [y:]

This vowel was a positional variant of the short [a] and was pronounced before the consonants [n] and [m]. The vowel [a/o] was articulated as a sound intermediate between [a] and [o]. That is why in the Old English texts we can see the same words spelt in different variants: land vs. lond, man vs. mon, and vs. ond, etc.

Besides the monophthongs, there were four pairs of diphthongs in the vowel system of Old English:

[ea] [eo] [ie] [io]

[ea:] [eo:] [ie:] [io:]

The Old English diphthongs were descending, i.e. the first element was the strong, accented one. The peculiarity of the Old English diphthongs was also in the following: their second element was wider than the first.

The vowels had the following characteristic features:

- The quantity and the quality of the vowel depended upon its position in the word. Under stress any vowel could be found, but in unstressed position there were no diphthongs or long monophthongs, but only short vowels [a], [e], [i], [o], [u].

- The length of the stressed vowels was phonemic, which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel.

e.g. (OE) is (is) – īs (ice); col (coal) –cōl (cool); god (god) – gōd (good), etc.

- There was an exact parallelism of long and short vowels

OE consonants

The system of consonants included the following sounds:

· labial [p], [b], [m], [f], [v]

· dental [t], ]d], [þ], [n], [s], [r], [l]

· velar [k], [g], [h], [ γ ], [ γ ’], [ х]

The consonant system in OE manifested the following peculiarities:

1. The relatively small number of consonant phonemes – only 14;

2. the absence of affricates and fricative consonants which we now find in the language such as [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], [ʒ].

3. the dependence on th quality of th phoneme upon its environment in the word.

The signs þ (thorn) and ð (eth) denoted the voiceless or voiced interdental sound (like in Modern English ‘thing’ or ‘this’). They are generally voiced in the so-called “intervocalic position” and voiceless otherwise. The same thing with the letters f and s.

The letter g (yogh) had several meanings; it denoted the hard [g] (like in Modern English ‘good’)before consonants and back vowels (u, o, æ, a), the velar fricative [gh] (like the Ukrainian [ г ]) in the middle of the word between back vowels and after l and r, and finally [j] (like in Modern English ‘yes’) before front vowels and after back vowels.

The phoneme denoted by the letter c gave at least 2 vaiants: palatal [k’] generally before the vowel i (cild [k’] – child) and velar [k] (can [k] – can).

The letter h stands for [x] between a back vowel and a consonant, also initially bfore consonants; it stands for [x’] next to front vowels; the distibutin of [h] is uncertain: hlæne [x] – lean, tahte [x] – taught, niht [x’] – night, hē [x] – he.

The most universal distinctive feature in the consonant system was the difference in length. During the entire OE period long consonants are believed to have been opposed to short ones on a phonemic level;

Treatment of Fricatives. Hardening. Rhotacism. Voicing and Devoicing.

The changes under Grimm's Law and Verner's Law PG had the following two sets of fricative consonants: voiceless [f, th, x, s] and voiced [v z y z].

The PG voiced [ð] (due to Verner's Law) was always hardened to [d] in OE and other WG languages. The two other fricatives, [v] and [γ] were hardened to [b] and [g] initially and after nasals, otherwise they remained fricatives.

Hardening (the process of a soft consonant becoming harder) – usually initially and after nasals ([m, n]).

PG [z] underwent a phonetic modification through the stage [z] into [r] and thus became a sonorant, which ultimately merged with the older [r]. This process, termed rhotacism.

In the meantime or somewhat later the PG set of voiceless fricatives [f, q, h, s] and also those of the voiced fricatives which had not turned into plosives, that is, [v] and [y], were subjected to a new process of voicing and devoicing. In Early OE they became or remained voiced intervocally and between vowels, sonorants and voiced consonants; they remained or became voiceless in other environments, namely, initially, finally and next to other voiceless consonants. The mutually exclusive phonetic conditions for voiced and voiceless fricatives prove that in OE they were not phonemes, but allophones.

OE Alphabet

OE scribes used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet. The use of Latin letters in English differed in some points from their use in Latin, scribes made certain modification and additions in order to indicate OE sounds.

OE writing was based on a phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. But some OE letters indicated two or more sounds. The letters could indicate short or long sounds.

The letters of the OE alphabet with transcription symbols:

The Old English Alphabet was borrowed from Latin, but there were also some letters that were borrowed from the Runic Alphabet: (“thorn”) = [θ] and [ð];(“wynn”) = [w]; (“mann”) = stood for OE word “man”; (“dæʒ”) = stood for OE word “day”. Some new letters were introduced:

ʒ = [g] and [j]; ð/þ/Đ/đ = [θ] and [ð]; æ = a ligature of [a] and [e]; œ = a ligature of [o] and [e].