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The Old English phoneme /f/ descended in some cases from Proto-Germanic *f, which became [v] between voiced sounds as described above. But /f/ also had another source. In the middle or at the end of words, Old English /f/ was often derived from Proto-Germanic * [β] (also written *ƀ), a fricative allophone of the phoneme *b.
In many cases, the resulting [ɑː] was later fronted to [æː] by i-mutation: dǣlan "to divide" (cf. Old Frisian dēla vs. Gothic dáiljan, Old High German teilen [Modern English deal]). It is possible that this monophthongization occurred via the height harmonisation that produced the other diphthongs in Old English (presumably through an ...
This was later extended in Pre-Old English times to vowels before all nasals; hence Old English niman "take" but Old High German neman. Loss of /n/ before /x/, with nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. The nasalization was eventually lost, but remained through the Ingvaeonic period.
Great Vowel Shift (English) High German consonant shift; Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (attested in Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon) West Germanic gemination ...
Old High German and Old English initially preserved unstressed i and u, but later lost them in long-stemmed words and then Old High German lost them in many short-stemmed ones as well, by analogy. Old English shows indirect evidence that word-final -ą was preserved into the separate history of the language.
In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes: /f, v, θ, ð, s, z/. See Middle English phonology – Voiced fricatives. Also in the Middle English period, the voiced affricate /dʒ/ took on phonemic status. (In Old English, it is considered to have been an allophone of /j/).
Old English (Englisċ or Ænglisc, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ]), or Anglo-Saxon, [1] was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.