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The history of Old English can be subdivided into: Prehistoric Old English (c. 450 to 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 ...
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 possessed palatal consonants, transcribed in the above table as [tʃ, dʒ, j, ʃ], but they were represented in Old English spelling with the same letters as velar consonants or clusters [k, ɡ, ɣ, sk]: c represented either palatal [tʃ] or velar [k]. g represented either palatal [j] or velar [ɣ].
These included: Gregory the Great's Cura Pastoralis, a manual for priests on how to conduct their duties, which became the Hierdeboc ('Shepherd-book') [66] in Old English; Boethius' De Consolatione philosophiae (the Froforboc or 'book of consolation'); [67] and the Soliloquia of Saint Augustine (known in Old English as the Blostman or 'blooms ...
They were first adopted into English from early Old French, and the ending was spelled ‑our, ‑or or ‑ur. [9] After the Norman conquest of England, the ending became ‑our to match the later Old French spelling. [10] The ‑our ending was used not only in new English borrowings, but was also applied to the earlier borrowings that had used ...
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Noah Webster wrote what was known as the American Spelling Book, or the Blue Backed Speller, which would become one of the most influential books in the history of the English language, Webster's Dictionary. This dictionary created simpler spellings, eliminating the "u" in words like "colour" and ...
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.).
This occurred with the word how in the Old English period, and with who, whom and whose in Middle English (the latter words having had an unrounded vowel in Old English). Reduction to /w/ , a development that has affected the speech of the great majority of English speakers, causing them to pronounce wh- the same as w- (sometimes called the ...