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This is a list of English words inherited and derived directly from the Old English stage of the language. This list also includes neologisms formed from Old English roots and/or particles in later forms of English, and words borrowed into other languages (e.g. French, Anglo-French, etc.) then borrowed back into English (e.g. bateau, chiffon, gourmet, nordic, etc.).
The change took place in educated London speech around the end of the 16th century, and explains why there is no [ɡ] sound at the end of words like fang, sing, wrong and tongue in the standard varieties of Modern English. [28] The change in fact applies not only at the end of a word, but generally at the end of a morpheme.
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep, groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry, brush and rock (from French).
Words with (ea) that were shortened (see above) avoided the merger, also some words like steak and great simply remained with an /eː/ (which later becomes /eɪ/ in most varieties) merging with words like name, so now death, great, and meat have three different vowels.
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 (with uncertainty ...
Reduction of /ts/ to /s/ – a Middle English reduction that produced the modern sound of soft c . Medial cluster reduction – elision of certain stops in medial clusters, such as the /t/ in postman. Insertion (epenthesis) of stops after nasals in certain clusters, for example making prince sound like prints, and dreamt rhyme with attempt.
In the 18th century or later, the monophthongs /eː/ and /oː/ (the products of the pane–pain and toe–tow mergers) became diphthongal in Standard English. That produced the vowels /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. In RP, the starting point of the latter diphthong has now become more centralized and is commonly written /əʊ/.
The sound /ʌ/ was often written o (as in son): hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb). [9] The final syllable of words like public was variously spelt but came to be standardised as -ick. The modern spellings with -ic did not come into use until the mid-18th century. [10] y was often used instead of i . [11]