2.1.3. Sermonette

When students of Old English go wrong in translating, it is often because they have done a sloppy job of looking up words in a dictionary or glossary. Remember, when you look up words, that vowel length is significant, and so is the doubling of consonants. Biddan ‘ask, pray’ and bīdan ‘await, experience’ are completely different words, but some students mess up their translations because they look at them as equivalent. Don’t fall into this trap!

On a related point, you will notice as you go along that the spelling of Old English is somewhat variable. Scribes at that time lacked our modern obsession with consistency. Rather than insisting that a word always be spelled the same way, they applied a set of rules for rendering the sounds of their language in writing, and these rules sometimes allowed them to get the job done in more than one way. Further, scribes sometimes mixed up the dialects of Old English, writing (for example) Mercian þēostru ‘darkness’ instead of West Saxon þīestru. These minor inconsistencies sometimes lead students to believe that anything goes in Old English spelling, and this belief leads them into error.

It is not true that anything goes in Old English spelling. Though you will have to get used to frequent variations, such as ie/i/y and iung for ġeong ‘young’, you won’t often see confusion of æ and ea, or indeed of most vowels, or of single and double consonants, or of one consonant with another. For a list of spelling variants that you will frequently see, consult Appendix A.

Get into the habit of recognizing the distinctions that are important in Old English and doing an accurate job of looking up words, and you will avoid a lot of frustration.

2.2 More about vowels

2.2.1. Short a, æ and ea

The short sounds spelled a, æ and ea are all derived from the same vowel (spelled a in most other Germanic languages). The split of one vowel into two vowels and a diphthong, which occurred before the period of our written texts, was conditioned by the sounds that surrounded it in the word (the details are complex and controversial: see Lass 1994, pp. 41-53). The effects of this split were not long-lasting; by the Middle English period a, æ and ea had coalesced into one vowel, spelled a.

The reason it is important for you to know about the relationship of a, æ and ea is that these sounds vary within paradigms. If æ or ea occurs in a short syllable and a back vowel (a, o, u) follows, the æ or ea becomes a. Add the plural ending -as to dæġ ‘day’ and you get dagas; add plural -u to ġeat ‘gate’ and you get gatu.

2.2.2. I-mutation

I-mutation is a shift in the quality of a vowel so that it is pronounced with the tongue higher and farther forward than usual—closer to its position when you pronounce the vowel [i] (as in feet).[4] The correspondences between normal and mutated vowels are shown in table 2.1. Notice that the i-mutation of a produces a different result depending on whether a nasal consonant (m or n) follows.

Table 2.1. i-mutation
short		long
unmutated	mutated	unmutated	mutated
a	æ	ā	ǣ
an/am	en/em
æ	e
e	i
ea	ie (i, y)	ēa	īe (ī, ȳ)
eo	ie (i, y)	ēo	īe (ī, ȳ)
o	e	ō	ē
u	y	ū	ȳ

• I-mutation arose in prehistoric Old English when [i] or [j] followed in the next syllable. It is a subspecies of a common type of sound change called “vowel harmony,” in which one of a pair of neighboring vowels becomes more like the other.

• The vowels ǣ, ē and ĭ/ī are not subject to i-mutation.

• The ĭ/ī that arose by i-mutation of ĕa/ēa and ĕo/ēo occurs mainly in early West Saxon texts; i and y occur in later texts (see above).

• The results of i-mutation are sometimes different in dialects other than West Saxon. In these dialects, the i-mutation of ĕa/ēa was normally ĕ/ē, and i-mutation did not affect ĕo/ēo; in Kentish, the i-mutation of ŭ/ū was ĕ/ē. You will sometimes meet with these spellings in West Saxon texts (see Appendix A).

The effects of i-mutation are still evident in Modern English. The vowels of such athematic plurals as men (singular man), lice (louse) and teeth (tooth) exhibit i-mutation, as does the comparative adjective elder (old); and i-mutation accounts for most of the verbs that both change their vowels and add a past-tense ending (e.g. sell/sold, buy/bought, in which the present has i-mutation but the past does not).

All of these categories of Modern English words exhibiting i-mutation were already present in Old English. I-mutation also appears in some forms of certain nouns of relationship, some comparative adverbs, and many verb forms. Examples: the nominative plural of mann ‘man’ is menn; the nominative plural of lūs ‘louse’ is lȳs; the comparative of eald ‘old’ is ieldra; the comparative of the adverb feor is fier; the third-person singular of the strong verb ċēosan ‘choose’ is ċīest.

• Some Modern English words which we still perceive as being derived from other words have mutated vowels: for example, length from long, feed from food, heal from whole. These words and many more were present in Old English: lengðu from lang, fēdan from fōda, hǣlan from hāl.