Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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]
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 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.
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").
Fricatives were devoiced again word finally and before voiceless consonants. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period, stops became devoiced word-finally as well. is an allophone of both /h/ and /ɣ/ in these positions. In some regions, it might have been realized as palatal when in contact with front vowels.
It appears to have occurred earliest, and to be most pronounced, in the Schleswig-Holstein area (the home of the Anglo-Saxons), and from there to have spread north and south. However, it is possible that this change already occurred in Proto-Germanic proper, in which case the phenomenon would have remained merely allophonic for quite some time.
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 ...