5. Old English phonetics

5.1. Word stress

The phonetics of the Old English period was characterised by a system of dynamic stress. The rule for the accentuation of uncompounded words is the same in OE as in the other Germanic languages, i.e. the chief stress fell upon the stem syllable and always remained there even when suffixes and inflexional endings followed it, e.g. beran ‘to bear’, daas ‘days’, rētin ‘greeting’, lēofosta ‘dearest’, berende ‘bearing’, ædelin ‘companion’, æþelinas ‘noblemen’, fultumian ‘to help’.

Many nouns and adjectives were formed from verbs containing an inseparable particle, and accordingly had the chief stress on the second syllable, as bebod ‘command’, bebyrines ‘burying’, forbod ‘prohibition’, forietol ‘forgetful’. The prefix e- was unaccented and therefore words, compounded with it, had the chief stress on the second element, as efeoht ‘fight’, efēra ‘companion’, ecoren ‘chosen’, esund ‘healthy’, ewider ‘bad weather, storm’.

In compound words it is necessary to distinguish between compounds whose second element is a noun or adjective, and those whose second element is a verb. In the former case the chief stress was on the first syllable, e.g. ācbēam ‘oak-tree’, dēaþstede ‘death-place’, odbearn ‘godchild’, lārhūs ‘school’, æfterboren ‘posthumous’, earowyrdi ‘eloquent’; in the latter case the second element nearly always had the chief accent, e.g. onietan ‘to understand’, onsacan ‘to deny’, āþencan ‘to devise’, behealdan ‘to behold’, oþfeallan ‘to fall off’.

5.2. The system of Old English sounds

The vowels in OE had the following characteristic features:

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

2. The length of the stressed vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) was phonemic, which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel, e.g.

metan ‘to mete, to measure’ – mētan ‘to meet’

pin ‘pin’ – pīn ‘pain’

god ‘god’ – gōd ‘good’

ful ‘full’ – fūl ‘foul’

c) there was an exact parallelism of long and short vowels:

Short: a o e u i æ y ea eo

Long: ā ō ē ū ī æ: y: ēa ēo

The consonants were few. Some of the modern sounds were non-existent ([], [], [], []).

The quality of the consonant very much depended on its position in the word, especially the resonance (voiced and voiceless sounds: hlāf [f] ‘loaf’ – hlāford [v] ‘lord, "bread-keeper” and articulation (palatal and velar sounds: climban [k] ‘to climb’ – cild [k’] ‘child’, etc.

5.3. Basic phonetic changes in Old English

5.3.1. Changes of vowels

5.3.1.1. Fronting (palatalisation) of [a] > [æ] and [a:]>[æ:]

The Proto-Germanic (Gothic) short [a] and the long [a:] in OE were fronted and, in the process of fronting, they split into several sounds.

The principal regular direction of the change – [a] > [æ] and [a:] > [æ:] – is often referred to as the fronting or palatalization of [a, a:]. At the same time, short [a] could change to [o] or [ā] and long [a:] became [o:] before a nasal; the preservation of the short [a] was caused by a back vowel in the next syllable (see Table 2.1).

Table 2.1