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In Late West Saxon texts, g and h were in complementary distribution everywhere except for at the start of a word. [49] Word-initial [ɣ] never merged with [h] (/x/), but the eventual replacement of word-initial [ɣ] with the plosive [ɡ] might have been a consequence of the sound becoming phonemically reanalyzed as /ɡ/ in this position. [39]
A chart showing 30 Anglo-Saxon runes A rune-row showing variant shapes. The letter sequence and letter inventory of futhorc, along with the actual sounds indicated by those letters, could vary depending on location and time.
This language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre-dating documented Old English or Anglo-Saxon, has also been called Primitive Old English. [ 11 ] Early Old English ( c. 650–900 ), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon , Bede , Cynewulf and Aldhelm .
The Anglo-Saxon variant is known as futhorc, or fuþorc, due to changes in Old English of the sounds represented by the fourth letter, ᚨ / ᚩ . Runology is the academic study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions , runestones , and their history.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was an early form of English in medieval England. It is different from Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and from Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer. See Old English phonology for more detail on the sounds of Old English.
The sounds /k~tʃ/ and /ɡ~j/ had almost certainly split into distinct phonemes by Late West Saxon, the dialect in which the majority of Old English documents are written. This is suggested by such near- minimal pairs as drincan [ˈdriŋkɑn] ("drink") vs. drenċan [ˈdrentʃɑn] ("drench"), and gēs [ɡeːs] ("geese") vs. ġē [jeː] ("you").
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 meanings of these words do not always correspond to Germanic cognates, and occasionally the specific meaning in the list is unique to English. Those Germanic words listed below with a Frankish source mostly came into English through Anglo-Norman, and so despite ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic, came to English through a Romance ...