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Old English phonology is the pronunciation system of Old English, the Germanic language spoken on Great Britain from around 450 to 1150 and attested in a body of written texts from the 7th–12th centuries.
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.
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
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.
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.);
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (abbreviated AHD) uses a phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet to transcribe the pronunciation of spoken English. It and similar respelling systems, such as those used by the Merriam-Webster and Random House dictionaries, are familiar to US schoolchildren.
In the approach used by the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Wells [81] claims that consonants syllabify with the preceding rather than following vowel when the preceding vowel is the nucleus of a more salient syllable, with stressed syllables being the most salient, reduced syllables the least, and full unstressed vowels ("secondary stress ...
Among vowel letters, small capitals indicate lax vowels. Most of the original small-cap vowel letters have been modified into more distinctive shapes – e.g. ʊ ɤ ɛ ʌ from U Ɐ E A [citation needed] – with only ɪ ʏ remaining as small capitals.