The OE sound system. Vowel and consonant changes in Old English

OE vowel system was symmetrical: each short vowel had its long correspondent:

Short: [ĭ, ĕ, æﬞ, ŭ, ŏ, ă] Long: [ī, ē, æ‾, ū, ō, ā]

Before this system of sound the vowels at very early stage of development had undergone certain processes:

BREAKING is a process which led to the split of the short front vowels æﬞ, e into diphthongs.

Early OE OE E.g.

Before:

r + other cons. ǽ → ea ærm → earm

(arm)

l + other cons. ē → eo melcan → meolkan (milk)

h + other cons.

I-MUTATION took place in all Germanic languages in VI – VII cent, except Gothic. It is a case of regressive assimilation with –i- or semivowel ‘j’. Eg: kuning – c y ning (король), fuljan – fūllan (fill – full), saljan – sellan (sell). The suffix j wasn’t preserved, only the mutated root vowel remained. We find traces of i-mutation in NE, especially in irregular plurals: foot – feet, goose – geese; in irregular verbs and adjectives: tell – told, old – elder; in word formation with sound interchange: blood – bleed. After i-mutation we could observe the following correspondences:

1) |ǽ, a, o → e| |a: → ǽ| |ea, eo → ie| No new phonemes appeared because the sounds which appeared existed in the phonetic system before, they just started to be pronounced in different phonetic environment.

2) u → y Appeared the new phoneme y, which has never existed before.

OE Consonants

The OE consonant system was the following: 1) Noise consonants (plosive, fricative); 2) Sonorants

The distinctive feature of the system was the opposition between long and short con-s, they carried different meaning. But unlike the vowel system, which was symmetrical, the consonant system didn’t posses symmetry that means that not all short con-s had their long correspondence.

OE consonants underwent the following changes:

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

[ð] à	[d]	rau ð r (Icelandic)	rēa d (OE) (red)
[v] à	[b]	-	-
[γ] à	[g]	g uma (Gothic)	ζ uma (OE) (man)

2. Voicing (the process when a voiceless consonant becomes voiced in certain positions) – intervocally and between a vowel and a voiced consonant or sonorant

[f, q, h, s] à [v, ð, g, z] e.g. wul f os (Gothic) – wul f [v] as (OE) (wolves)

3. Rhotacism (a process when [z] turns into [r])

e.g. mai z a (Gothic) – mā r a (OE) (more)

4. Gemination (a process of doubling a consonant) – after a short vowel, usually happened as a result of palatal mutation (e.g. fu ll an (OE) (fill), se tt an (OE) (set), etc.).

5. Palatalisation of Consonants (a process when hard vowels become soft) – before a front vowel and sometimes also after a front vowel

[g, γ, k, h] à [g’, γ’, k’, h’] e.g. c [k’] ild (OE) (child); ecз [gg’] (OE) (edge), etc.

6. Loss of Consonants:

· sonorants before fricatives (e.g. fi m f (Gothic) – fīf (OE) (five));