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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
The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule replaced the Insular, along with a shift in spelling conventions toward the Old French alphabet, leading to Middle English. The letter eth ð was an alteration of Latin d , and the runic letters thorn þ and wynn ƿ are borrowings from futhorc.
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 earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first, these were often marginal or interlinear glosses; however, they soon came to be gathered into word-lists such as the Épinal-Erfurt , Leiden and Corpus Glossaries.
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.).
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 book was intended as part of an analysis of the education of his time and as an argument for spelling reform, and he also defended the use of the vernacular in official writing instead of using the lingua franca, which was Latin. [2] [3] Because Mulcaster's focus was on spelling, he left the words in his list undefined.