Lecture 3 Sound Changes in the History of English

1. Old English sound system

No one knows exactly how OE sounded, for no native speakers have survived to inform us. Rather, linguists have painstakingly reconstructed the pronunciation of the OE language from various kinds of evidence; what we know of Latin pronunciation (since the Anglo-Saxons adapted the Latin alphabet to write their own language), comparisons with other Gmc languages and with later stages of English, and accentuation and quantity of syllables in OE poetry.

1.1. Oe Vowels

The OE vocalic system can be characterized by the following features.

1. The vowels in OE were represented by a set of monophthongs and a set of diphthongs. In both systems there existed an exact parallelism between short vowels and the corresponding long vowels. (The length of a vowel in a text for teaching purposes is marked by a macron):

	monophthongs	diphthtongs
short	a [Q], æ [x], e [F], i [I], o [O], u [V], y [y]	ea [Fq], eo [Fo], ie [Iq]
long	ā [R], æ [x:], ē [e:], i [J], ō [o:], ū [H], y [y:]	ēa [e:q], ēo [e:o], īe[Jq]

2. The vowel length of a stressed vowel is significant because it does make a difference in the meanings of words:

hod [gOd] ‘god’ – hōd [go:d] ‘good’

is [Is] ‘is’ – īs [Js] ‘ice’

ful [fVl] ‘full’ – fūl [fHl] ‘foul’

3. Unstressed vowels were not reduced, and the endings were kept distinct, e.g. stānas ‘stones’ vs. ‘of a stone’ stānes.

4. All the OE diphthongs were falling: the nucleus was stronger than the glide which was more open than the nucleus.

1.2. Oe Consonants

The OE consonants manifested the following features:

1) The system consisted of several correlated sets:

plosives	[p (p), b (b), t (t), d (d), k (c), k' (c), g (h), g' (ch)]
fricatives	[f (f), T (þ or ð), s (s), ç (h), x (h), ɣ (h)]
sonorants	[m (m), n (n), r (r), l (l), j (h), w (w)]

2) There was difference in length of the consonants. Double letters indicated long consonants: e.g., assa [Qs:Q] 'ass', cuppe [kVp:F] 'cup'.

3) A lot of spirants existed in the language: lahu, dohtor, niht, etc.,

4) The quality of fricatives [f, s and T] depended on their environment in a word. They were represented by f, s and þ or ð, respectively. But in intervocalic position, between two vowels or between a vowel and a voiced consonant they sounded as their voiced allophones [v, z and D]. Cf.:

hlāf [hlRf] – hlāford [hlRvOrd]

hōs [ho:s] – hōses [ho:zFs]

tōþ [to:T] – tōþes [to:DFs]

1.2. Sound Changes in oe

In pre-historic OE a number of sound changes took place, which can still be evident in MnE.

– One with far-reaching effects was i-umlaut or palatal mutation, which took place somewhere during the 6–7 cc. This was a series of changes to stressed vowels in the root when there was the sounds [I] or [j] in the following syllable. Almost all vowels, both diphthongs and monophthongs, in the environment described, became further forward and higher, or narrower with the exception of [F] and [I]. Subsequently, the sounds [I] and [j], which were common in suffixes and endings, disappeared, but the muted vowel retained in the words:

ān [Rn] ‘one’ > ān + -ih > ænih [x:nIj] ‘any’

stranh [strQng] ‘strong’ > *stranhiþu > strenhþu [strFngTV] ‘strength’

As a result of the palatal mutation new phonemes entered the vowel system in OE. [y] and [y:] are the result of the mutation of [u] and [u:], respectively:

ful [fVl] ‘full’ > v.*fuljan > fyllan [fy:lQn] ‘to fill’

mūs [mHs] ‘mouse’ > pl. *mūsiz > mys [my:s] ‘mice’

The diphthongs [Iq] (ie) and [Jq] (īe) entered the OE vocalic system as the result of the mutation of [Fq], [Fo], [e:q], [e:o]:

eald [eqld] > comp. *ealdira > ieldra [iqldrQ] ‘elder’

Though the palatal mutation was a phonetic process it left traces in OE grammar and word-stock and is still evident in MnE.

Grammar:

1) As a result of i-umlaut there appeared vowel gradation in the system of OE nominal declension (root-stem declension),eg. tōþ – tēþ. The vowels of MnE irregular plurals still exhibit i-mutation: tooth – teeth

2) There is vowel gradation in the degrees of comparison of some adjectives:

eald – ieldra > old – elder;

3) I-mutation accounts for most of the verbs that both change their vowel and add a past-tense suffix:

tell/told < OE tellan/talde, in which the present has i-mutation but the past does not.