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The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ).
In contrast with Modern English orthography, Old English spelling was reasonably regular, with a mostly predictable correspondence between letters and phonemes. There were not usually any silent letters —in the word cniht , for example, both the c and h were pronounced ( /knixt ~ kniçt/ ) unlike the k and gh in the modern knight ( /naɪt/ ).
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
The Story of English in 100 Words. Picador. ISBN 978-1250024206. David Crystal (2015). Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198729136. John McWhorter (2017). Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally). Picador. ISBN 978-1250143785.
The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wen , which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w ...
The letters þ and ð are still used in present-day Icelandic (where they now represent two separate sounds, /θ/ and /ð/ having become phonemically-distinct – as indeed also happened in Modern English), while ð is still used in present-day Faroese (although only as a silent letter). Wynn disappeared from English around the 14th century ...
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Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE [1] or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.