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Forms in italics denote either Old English words as they appear in spelling or reconstructed forms of various sorts. Where phonemic ambiguity occurs in Old English spelling, extra diacritics are used (ċ, ġ, ā, ǣ, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ). Forms between /slashes/ or [brackets] indicate, respectively, broad or narrow pronunciation
Old English did possess a voiced velar fricative sound [ɣ], which developed from Proto-Germanic *ɡ, but [ɣ] is usually analyzed as a separate phoneme from /x/: the sounds were normally distinguished in spelling, with [ɣ] written as g and /x/ as h , although some unetymological interchange of these spellings occurs, especially in word-final ...
The history of Old English can be subdivided into: Prehistoric Old English (c. 450–650); for this period, Old English is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive (with the exception of limited epigraphic evidence). This language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre ...
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 spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
However, this earlier Middle English vowel /a/ is itself the merger of a number of different Anglian Old English sounds: the short vowels indicated in Old English spelling as a , æ and ea ; the long equivalents ā , ēa , and often ǣ when directly followed by two or more consonants (indicated by ā+CC, ǣ+CC, etc.);