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In the vowels chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Old English on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Old English in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Likewise, Spanish la bamba (pronounced without a pause) has two different B sounds to the ears of foreigners or linguists— [la ˈβamba] —though a native Spanish speaker might not be able to hear it. Omitting or adding such detail does not make a difference to the identity of the word, but helps to give a more precise pronunciation.
The Old English phoneme /f/ descended in some cases from Proto-Germanic *f, which became [v] between voiced sounds as described above. But /f/ also had another source. In the middle or at the end of words, Old English /f/ was often derived from Proto-Germanic * [β] (also written *ƀ), a fricative allophone of the phoneme *b.
Speakers of dialects with happy tensing (Australian English, General American, modern RP) should read it as an unstressed /iː/, whereas speakers of other dialects (e.g. some Northern England English) should treat it the same as /ɪ/. In Scotland, this vowel can be considered the same as the short allophone of /eɪ/, as in take.
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.
English short vowels are all transcribed by a single letter in the IPA. Because English short vowels a e i o u are closer to the Classical pronunciation (still found in Spanish and Italian) than the long vowels are, it is the short vowels which are transcribed with IPA letters which resemble the English letters a e i o u.
This was later extended in Pre-Old English times to vowels before all nasals; hence Old English niman "take" but Old High German neman. Loss of /n/ before /x/, with nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. The nasalization was eventually lost, but remained through the Ingvaeonic period.