Phonological history of Old English


The phonological system of the Old English language underwent many changes during the period of its existence. These included a number of vowel shifts, and the [|palatalization] of velar consonants in many positions.
For historical developments prior to the Old English period, see Proto-Germanic language.

Phonetic transcription

Various conventions are used [|below] for describing Old English words, reconstructed parent forms of various sorts and reconstructed Proto-West-Germanic, Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European forms:
The following table indicates the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For details of the relevant sound systems, see Proto-Germanic phonology and Old English phonology.
SoundSpellingPronunciation
Short vowelso e etc. etc.
Short nasal vowelsǫ ę etc. etc.
Long vowelsō ē etc. etc.
Long nasal vowelsǭ ę̄ etc. etc.
Overlong vowelsô ê
Overlong nasal vowelsǫ̂ ę̂
"Long" diphthongsēa ēo īo īe
"Short" diphthongsea eo io ie
Old English unpalatalized velars1c sc g ng gg
Old English palatalized velars1ċ sċ ġ nġ ċġ
Proto-Germanic velars1k sk g; sometimes also ɣ
Proto-Germanic voiced stops/fricatives1b d g; sometimes also β, ð or đ, ɣ''

1Proto-Germanic had two allophones each: stops and fricatives. The stops occurred:
  1. following a nasal;
  2. when geminated;
  3. word-initially, for and only;
  4. following, for only.
By West Germanic times, was pronounced as a stop in all positions. The fricative allophones are sometimes indicated in reconstructed forms to make it easier to understand the development of Old English consonants. Old English retained the allophony, which in case of palatalization became. Later, non-palatalized became word-initially. The allophony was broken when merged with, the voiced allophone of.

Phonological processes

A number of phonological processes affected Old English in the period before the earliest documentation. The processes affected especially vowels and are the reason that 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 roughly the order described below.

Absorption of nasals before fricatives

This is the source of such alternations as modern English five, mouth, us versus German fünf, Mund, uns. For detail see Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law.

First [|a-fronting]

The Anglo-Frisian languages underwent a sound change in their development from Proto-West-Germanic by which ā, unless followed by or nasalized, was fronted to ǣ. This was similar to the later process affecting short a, which is known as Anglo-Frisian brightening or First Fronting. Nasalized ą̄ and the sequences ān, ām were unaffected and were later raised to ǭ, ōn, ōm. In the non-West-Saxon dialects of English the fronted vowel was further raised to ē : W.S. slǣpan, sċēap versus Anglian slēpan, sċēp. The Modern English descendants sleep and sheep reflect the Anglian vowel; the West Saxon words would have developed to *sleap, *sheap.
The vowel affected by this change, which is reconstructed as being a low back vowel ā in Proto-West-Germanic, was the reflex of Proto-Germanic. It is possible that in Anglo-Frisian, Proto-Germanic /ɛː/ simply remained a front vowel, developing to Old English ǣ or ē without ever passing through an intermediate stage as the back vowel However, borrowings such as Old English strǣt from Latin strāta and the backing to ō before nasals are much easier to explain under the assumption of a common West Germanic stage *ā.

Monophthongization

Proto-Germanic /ai/ was monophthongized to . This occurred after first a-fronting. For example, Proto-Germanic *stainaz became Old English stān . In many cases, the resulting was later fronted to by i-mutation: dǣlan "to divide".
It is possible that this monophthongization occurred via the height harmonisation that produced the other diphthongs in Old English.

Second a-fronting

The second part of a-fronting, called Anglo-Frisian brightening or First Fronting, is very similar to the [|first part] except that it affects short a instead of long ā. Here a is fronted to æ unless followed by or nasalized, the same conditions as applied in the first part.
Importantly, a-fronting was blocked by n, m only in stressed syllables, not unstressed syllables, which accounts for forms like ġefen "given" from Proto-Germanic *gebanaz. However, the infinitive ġefan retains its back vowel due to a-restoration.

Diphthong height harmonization

Proto-Germanic had the closing diphthongs . In Old English, these developed into diphthongs of a generally less common type in which both elements are of the same height, called height-harmonic diphthongs. This process is called diphthong height harmonization. Specifically:
Old English diphthongs also arose from other later processes, such as breaking, palatal diphthongization, [|back mutation] and i-mutation, which also gave an additional diphthong ie. The diphthongs could occur both short and long.
Some sources reconstruct other phonetic forms that are not height-harmonic for some or all of these Old English diphthongs. The first elements of ēa, ēo, īo are generally accepted to have had the qualities , , . However, the interpretations of the second elements of these diphthongs are more varied. There are analyses that treat all of these diphthongs as ending in a schwa sound ; i.e. ēa, ēo, īo = , , . For io and ie, the height-harmonic interpretations and are controversial, with many sources assuming that the pronunciation matched the spelling, and hence that these diphthongs were of the opening rather than the height-harmonic type. Late in the development of the standard West Saxon dialect, io merged with eo, which is, in fact, one of the most noticeable differences between early Old English and late Old English.

Breaking and retraction

in Old English is the diphthongization of the short front vowels to short diphthongs when followed by, or by or plus another consonant. Long similarly broke to, but only when followed by. The geminates rr and ll usually count as r or l plus another consonant, but breaking does not occur before ll produced by West Germanic gemination.
were lowered to in late Old English.
The exact conditions for breaking vary somewhat depending on the sound being broken:
Examples:
The i-mutation of broken is spelled ie.
Examples:
Note that in some dialects was backed to rather than broken, when occurring in the circumstances described above that would normally trigger breaking. This happened in the dialect of Anglia that partially underlies Modern English, and explains why Old English ceald appears as Modern English "cold" rather than "*cheald".
Both breaking and retraction are fundamentally phenomena of assimilation to a following velar consonant. While is in fact a velar consonant,,, and are less obviously so. It is therefore assumed that, at least at the time of the occurrence of breaking and retraction, was pronounced or similar – at least when following a vowel – and and before a consonant had a velar or retroflex quality and were already pronounced and, or similar.

A-restoration

After breaking occurred, short was backed to when there was a back vowel in the following syllable. This is called a-restoration, because it partly restored original, which had earlier been fronted to .
Because strong masculine and neuter nouns have back vowels in plural endings, alternations with in the singular vs. in the plural are common in this noun class:
A-restoration occurred before the *ō of the weak verb suffix *-ōj-, although this surfaces in Old English as the front vowel i, as in macian "to make" < *makōjan-.
Breaking occurred between a-fronting and a-restoration. This order is necessary to account for words like slēan "to slay" from original *slahan: > > > > .
A-restoration interacted in a tricky fashion with a-fronting to produce e.g. faran "to go" from Proto-Germanic *faraną but faren "gone" from Proto-Germanic *faranaz. Basically:
Step"to go""gone"Reason
1*faraną*faranazoriginal form
2*faraną*faranaloss of final z
3*faræną*farænæAnglo-Frisian brightening
4*faraną*farænæa-restoration
5*faran*farænloss of final short vowels
6faranfarencollapse of unstressed short front vowels to

Note that the key difference is in steps 3 and 4, where nasalized ą is unaffected by a-fronting even though the sequence an is in fact affected, since it occurs in an unstressed syllable. This leads to a final-syllable difference between a and æ, which is transferred to the preceding syllable in step 4.

Palatalization

of the velar consonants and occurred in certain environments, mostly involving front vowels. This palatalization is similar to what occurred in Italian and Swedish. When palatalized:
The contexts for palatalization were sometimes different for different sounds:
The palatals and reverted to their non-palatal equivalents and when they came to stand immediately before a consonant, even if this occurred at a significantly later period, as when *sēċiþ became sēcþ, and *senġiþ became sengþ.
Palatalization occurred after a-restoration and before i-mutation. Thus, it did not occur in galan "to sing", with the first backed from due to a-restoration. Similarly, palatalization occurred in dæġ, but not in a-restored dagas or in dagung. Nor did it occur in cyning, cemban or gēs, where the front vowels developed from earlier due to i-mutation.
In many instances where a ċ/c, ġ/g, or sċ/sc alternation would be expected within a paradigm, it was leveled out by analogy at some point in the history of the language. For example, the velar of sēcþ "he seeks" has replaced the palatal of sēċan "to seek" in Modern English; on the other hand, the palatalized forms of besēċan have replaced the velar forms, giving modern beseech.
The sounds and had almost certainly split into distinct phonemes by Late West Saxon, the dialect in which the majority of Old English documents are written. This is suggested by such near-minimal pairs as drincan vs. drenċan , and gēs vs. ġē . Nevertheless, there are few true minimal pairs, and velars and palatals often alternate with each other in ways reminiscent of allophones, for example:
The voiced velars and were still allophones of a single phoneme ; similarly, their respective palatalized reflexes and are analysed as allophones of a single phoneme at this stage. This also included older instances of which derived from Proto-Germanic, and could stand before back vowels, as in ġeong and ġeoc .
Standard Old English spelling did not reflect the split, and used the same letter for both and, and for both and . In the standard modernized orthography, the velar and palatal variants are distinguished with a diacritic: stands for, for, for and, and for and. The geminates of these are written,,,.
Loanwords from Old Norse typically do not display any palatalization, showing that at the time they were borrowed the palatal–velar distinction was no longer allophonic and the two sets were now separate phonemes. Compare, for example, the modern doublet shirt and skirt; these both derive from the same Germanic root, but shirt underwent Old English palatalization, whereas skirt comes from a Norse borrowing which did not. Similarly, give, an unpalatalized Norse borrowing, existed alongside the regularly palatalized yive. Other later loanwords similarly escaped palatalization: compare ship with skipper.

Second fronting

Second fronting fronted to, and to, later than related processes of a-fronting and a-restoration. Second fronting did not affect the standard West Saxon dialect of Old English. In fact, it took place only in a relatively small section of the area where the Mercian dialect was spoken. Mercian itself was a subdialect of the Anglian dialect.

Palatal diphthongization

The front vowels e, ē, æ, and ǣ usually become the diphthongs ie, īe, ea, and ēa after ċ, ġ, and sċ:
In a similar way, the back vowels u, o, and a were spelled as eo and ea after ċ, ġ, and sċ:
Most likely, the second process was simply a spelling convention, and a, o, u actually did not change in pronunciation: the vowel u continued to be pronounced in ġeong, o in sċeolde, and a in sċeadu. This is suggested by their developments in Middle and Modern English. If ġeong and sċeolde had the diphthong eo, they would develop into Modern English *yeng and *sheeld instead of young and should.
There is less agreement about the first process. The traditional view is that e, ē, æ, and ǣ actually became diphthongs, but a minority view is that they remained as monophthongs:
The main arguments in favor of this view are the fact that the corresponding process involving back vowels is indeed purely orthographic, and that diphthongizations like → and → are phonetically unmotivated in the context of a preceding palatal or postalveolar consonant. In addition, both some advocates of the traditional view of ie and some advocates of the interpretation believe that the i in ie after palatal consonants never expressed a separate sound. Thus, it has been argued that the pronunciation only applied to the instances of ie expressing the sound resulting from i-mutation. In any case, it is thought plausible that the two merged as at a fairly early stage.

Metathesis of ''r''

Original sequences of an r followed by a short vowel metathesized, with the vowel and r switching places. This normally only occurred when the next following consonant was s or n, and sometimes d. The r could be initial or follow another consonant, but not a vowel.
Not all potential words to which metathesis can apply are actually affected, and many of the above words also appear in their unmetathesized form ", þrescenne "to thresh", onbran "set fire to. Many of the words have come down to Modern English in their unmetathesized forms.
Metathesis in the other direction occasionally occurs before ht, e.g. wrohte "worked", Northumbrian breht ~ bryht "bright", fryhto "fright", wryhta "maker". Unmetathesized forms of all of these words also occur in Old English. The phenomenon occurred in most Germanic languages.

I-mutation (i-umlaut)

Like most other Germanic languages, Old English underwent a process known as i-mutation or i-umlaut. This involved the fronting or raising of vowels under the influence of or in the following syllable. Among its effects were the new front rounded vowels, and likely the diphthong . The original following or that triggered the umlaut was often lost at a later stage. The umlaut is responsible for such modern English forms as men, feet, mice, elder, eldest, fill, length, etc.
For details of the changes, see Germanic umlaut, and particularly the section on i-mutation in Old English.

Final a-loss

Absolutely final unstressed low vowels were lost. Note that final -z was lost already in West Germanic times. Preceding -j-, -ij-, and -w- were vocalized to -i, -ī and -u, respectively. This occurred after breaking, since PG barwaz was affected, becoming OE bearu, while words in PG *-uz were not. It also probably occurred after a-restoration; see that section for examples showing this. It apparently occurred before [|high vowel loss], because the preceding vocalized semivowels were affected by this process; e.g. gād "lack" < *gādu < PG gaidwą. It is unclear whether it occurred before or after i-mutation.

Medial syncopation

In medial syllables, short low and mid vowels are deleted in all open syllables.
Short high vowels are deleted in open syllables following a long syllable, but usually remain following a short syllable; this is part of the process of high vowel loss.
Syncopation of low/mid vowels occurred after i-mutation and before high vowel loss. An example demonstrating that it occurred after i-mutation is mæġden "maiden":
StageProcessResult
Proto-Germanicoriginal form*magadīną
Anglo-FrisianAnglo-Frisian brightening*mægædīną
palatalization*mæġædīną
i-mutation*mæġedīną
[|final a-loss]*mæġedīn
medial syncopation*mæġdīn
Old Englishunstressed vowel reductionmæġden

If the syncopation of short low/mid vowels had occurred before i-mutation, the result in Old English would be **meġden.
An example showing that syncopation occurred before high vowel loss is sāwl "soul":
Had it occurred after high vowel loss, the result in Old English would be **sāwlu.

High vowel loss

In an unstressed open syllable, and were lost when following a long syllable, but not when following a short syllable. This took place in two types of contexts:
  1. Absolutely word-final
  2. In a medial open syllable
;Word-final
[|High-vowel loss] caused many paradigms to split depending on the length of the root syllable, with -u or -e appearing after short but not long syllables. For example,
This loss affected the plural of root nouns, e.g. PrePG * > PG fōtiz > fø̄ti > OE fēt "feet ". All such nouns had long-syllable stems, and so all were without ending in the plural, with the plural marked only by i-mutation.
Note that two-syllable nouns consisting of two short syllables were treated as if they had a single long syllable — a type of equivalence found elsewhere in the early Germanic languages, e.g. in the handling of Sievers' law in Proto-Norse, as well as in the metric rules of Germanic alliterative poetry. Hence, final high vowels are dropped. However, in a two-syllable noun consisting of a long first syllable, the length of the second syllable determines whether the high vowel is dropped. Examples :
Note also the following apparent exceptions:
In reality, these aren't exceptions because at the time of high-vowel loss the words had the same two-syllable long-short root structure as hēafod.
As a result, high-vowel loss must have occurred after i-mutation but before the loss of internal -j-, which occurred shortly after i-mutation.
;Word-medial
Paradigm split also occurred medially as a result of high-vowel loss, e.g. in the past tense forms of Class I weak forms:
Normally, syncopation does not occur in closed syllables, e.g. Englisċe "English", ǣresta "earliest", sċēawunge "a showing, inspection". However, syncopation passes its usual limits in certain West Saxon verbal and adjectival forms, e.g. the present tense of strong verbs carry" < PG *beris-tu, birþ " carries" < PG *beriþ, similarly dēmst, dēmþ " judge, and comparative adjectives.
When both medial and final high-vowel loss can operate in a single word, medial but not final loss occurs:
This implies that final high-vowel loss must precede medial high-vowel loss; else the result would be **strengþ, hēafd.

Loss of -(i)j-

Internal -j- and its Sievers' law variant -ij-, when they still remained in an internal syllable, were lost just after high-vowel loss, but only after a long syllable. Hence:
Note that in Proto-Germanic, the non-Sievers'-law variant -j- occurred only after short syllables, but due to West Germanic gemination, a consonant directly preceding the -j- was doubled, creating a long syllable. West Germanic gemination didn't apply to, leaving a short syllable, and hence wasn't lost in such circumstances:
By Sievers' law, the variant occurred only after long syllables, and thus was always lost when it was still word-internal at this point.
When -j- and -ij- became word-final after loss of a following vowel or vowel+/z/, they were converted into -i and -ī, respectively. The former was affected by high-vowel loss, surfacing as -e when not deleted, while the latter always surfaces as -e:
It is possible that loss of medial -j- occurred slightly earlier than loss of -ij-, and in particular before high-vowel loss. This appears to be necessary to explain short -jō stem words like nytt "use":
If high-vowel deletion occurred first, the result would presumably be an unattested **nytte.
A similar loss of -j- occurred in the other West Germanic languages, although after the earliest records of those languages. Some details are different, as the form kunni with retained -i is found in Old Saxon, Old Dutch and Old High German.
This did not affect the new formed from palatalization of PG, suggesting that it was still a palatal fricative at the time of the change. For example, PG wrōgijaną > early OE * > OE wrēġan.

Back mutation

Back mutation is a change that took place in late prehistoric Old English and caused short e, i and sometimes a to break into a diphthong when a back vowel occurred in the following syllable. Examples:
Note that io turned into eo in late Old English.
A number of restrictions governed whether back mutation took place:
In the Anglian dialects of Old English, a process called smoothing undid many of the effects of breaking. In particular, before a velar or before an or followed by a velar, diphthongs were reduced to monophthongs. Note that the context for smoothing is similar to the context for the earlier process of breaking that produced many of the diphthongs in the first place. In particular:
This change preceded [|h-loss] and vowel assimilation.
Note also that the diphthongs ie and īe did not exist in Anglian.

H-loss

In the same contexts where the voiceless fricatives become voiced, i.e. between vowels and between a voiced consonant and a vowel, is lost, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel if it is short. This occurs after breaking; hence breaking before and takes place regardless of whether the is lost by this rule. An unstressed short vowel is absorbed into the preceding long vowel.
Examples:
Two vowels that occurred in hiatus collapsed into a single long vowel. Many occurrences were due to h-loss, but some came from other sources, e.g. loss of or after a front vowel. If the first vowel was e or i, and the second vowel was a back vowel, a diphthong resulted. Examples:
Palatal umlaut is a process whereby short e, eo, io appear as i before final ht, hs, hþ. Examples:
There was steady vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, in a number of stages:
  1. In West Germanic times, absolutely final non-nasal *-ō was raised and shortened to -u.
  2. All other final-syllable *ō were lowered to *ā. By Anglo-Frisian brightening, these ended up as *-ǣ. Overlong *ô, as well as *ō in medial syllables, were unaffected.
  3. Although vowel nasality persisted at least up through Anglo-Frisian times and likely through the time of a-restoration, it was eventually lost, with non-nasal vowels the result.
  4. Final a-loss deleted word-final short unstressed low vowels, causing preceding semivowels -j- -ij- -w- to become vocalized to -i -ī -u.
  5. Medial syncopation deleted word-medial short unstressed low/mid vowels in open syllables. This may be the same process as final a-loss.
  6. High-vowel loss deleted short unstressed high vowels and in open syllables following a long syllable, whether word-final or word-medial.
  7. All unstressed long and overlong vowels were shortened, with remaining long ō, ô shortening to a.
  8. This produced five final-syllable short vowels, which remained into early documented Old English. By the time of the majority of Old English documents, however, all three front short vowels had merged into e.
  9. Absolutely final -u tends to be written u ; but before a consonant, it is normally written o. Exceptions are the endings -ung, -um, -uc and when the root has u in it, e.g. duguþ "band of warriors; prosperity".
  10. Final-syllable e is written i in the endings -ing, -iġ, -iċ, -isċ, -iht.
A table showing these developments in more detail is found in Proto-Germanic: Later developments.

Vowel lengthening

In the late 8th or early 9th century, short stressed vowels were lengthened before certain groups of consonants: ld, mb, nd, ng, rd, rl, rn, rs+vowel. Some of the lengthened vowels would be shortened again by or during the Middle English period; this applied particularly before the clusters beginning r. Examples of words in which the effect of lengthening has been preserved are:
In Late West Saxon io and īo were merged into eo and ēo. Also, the earlier West Saxon diphthongs ie and īe had developed into what is known as "unstable i", merging into in Late West Saxon. For further detail, see Old English diphthongs. All of the remaining Old English diphthongs were monophthongized in the early Middle English period: see Middle English stressed vowel changes.

Dialects

had four major dialect groups: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish. West Saxon and Kentish occurred in the south, approximately to the south of the River Thames. Mercian constituted the middle section of the country, divided from the southern dialects by the Thames and from Northumbrian by the Humber and Mersey rivers. Northumbrian encompassed the area between the Humber and the Firth of Forth. In the south, the easternmost portion was Kentish and everywhere else was West Saxon. Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as "Anglian".
The biggest differences occurred between West Saxon and the other groups. The differences occurred mostly in the front vowels, and particularly the diphthongs.
The early history of Kentish was similar to Anglian, but sometime around the ninth century all of the front vowels æ, e, y merged into e. The further discussion concerns the differences between Anglian and West Saxon, with the understanding that Kentish, other than where noted, can be derived from Anglian by front-vowel merger. The primary differences were:
As mentioned above, Modern English derives mostly from the Anglian dialect rather than the standard West Saxon dialect of Old English. However, since London sits on the Thames near the boundary of the Anglian, West Saxon, and Kentish dialects, some West Saxon and Kentish forms have entered Modern English. For example, "bury" has its spelling derived from West Saxon and its pronunciation from Kentish.
The Northumbrian dialect, which was spoken as far north as Edinburgh, survives as the Scots language spoken in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland. The distinguishing feature of Northumbrian, the lack of palatalization of velars, is still evident in doublets between Scots and Modern English such as kirk / "church", brig / "bridge", kist / "chest", yeuk / "itch".

Summary of vowel developments

Changes leading up to Middle and Modern English

For a detailed description of the changes between Old English and Middle/Modern English, see the article on the phonological history of English. A summary of the main vowel changes is presented below. Note that the spelling of Modern English largely reflects Middle English pronunciation. Note also that this table presents only the general developments. Many exceptional outcomes occurred in particular environments, e.g. vowels were often lengthened in late Old English before ; vowels changed in complex ways before, throughout the history of English; vowels were diphthongized in Middle English before ; new diphthongs arose in Middle English by the combination of vowels with Old English w, g >, and ġ ; etc. The only conditional development considered in detail below is Middle English open-syllable lengthening. Note that, in the column on modern spelling, CV means a sequence of a single consonant followed by a vowel.
Note that the Modern English vowel usually spelled au does not appear in the above chart. Its main source is late Middle English /au/, which come from various sources: Old English aw and ag ; diphthongization before ; borrowings from Latin and French. Other sources are Early Modern English lengthening of before ; occasional shortening and later re-lengthening of Middle English ; and in American English, lengthening of short o before unvoiced fricatives and voiced velars.
As mentioned above, Modern English is derived from the Middle English of London, which is derived largely from Anglian Old English, with some admixture of West Saxon and Kentish. One of the most noticeable differences among the dialects is the handling of original Old English. By the time of the written Old English documents, the Old English of Kent had already unrounded to, and the late Old English of Anglia unrounded to. In the West Saxon area, remained as such well into Middle English times, and was written u in Middle English documents from this area. Some words with this sound were borrowed into London Middle English, where the unfamiliar was substituted with. Hence:
Note that some apparent instances of modern e for Old English y are actually regular developments, particularly where the y is a development of earlier ie from i-mutation of ea, as the normal i-mutation of ea in Anglian is e; for example, "stern" < styrne < *starnijaz, "steel" < stȳle < *stahliją. Also, some apparent instances of modern u for Old English y may actually be due to the influence of a related form with unmutated u, e.g. "sundry" < syndriġ, influenced by sundor "apart, differently".