1 Old English Phonology After our first few lessons using This Language, A River, I’ve decided that you need supplementary materials that are a little bit clearer and more schematic, as well as a little bit more complete. The following pages are intended to supplement the material on pp. 125-132. The Old English Alphabet The Anglo-Saxons acquired the alphabet that they used in manuscripts from Christians who led efforts to convert them from the 580s onward. The Christians, as the inheritors of Roman textual traditions, used the Latin alphabet. When Christian monks began writing down Old English texts, they discovered that Old English included a number of sounds that the Latin alphabet did not represent easily. For this reason, they adapted a few runic characters into the Latin alphabet that they used to represent Old English. A momentary digression about Runes The runic alphabet was used throughout Northern Europe among communities who spoke languages that were part of the larger Germanic language family, but it was an alphabet that was best adapted for carving and inscription on stone, wood, metal, and bone rather than for writing on parchment or vellum. The oldest surviving artifact that certainly reflects a runic text is a bone comb from approximately 150AD found in a bog in Denmark (Looijenga 161). The inscription reads ᚺᚫᚱᛃᚫ: “harja.” The text may mean “warrior,” or “member of the Harii tribe,” or “hair.” Personally, I have always preferred the last interpretation because it seems like an amusingly obvious thing to put on a comb. In any case, the runic alphabets employed single graphical representations for phonemes that Germanic languages had but that Latin did not: <æ> ‘æsh’, which is also the character used in the IPA for the low front vowel phoneme in English /æ/; <þ> ‘thorn’, which represented the phoneme /θ/; <ƿ> ‘wynn’, which represented the phoneme /w/. The Old English alphabet also used the character <ð> ‘eth’, which was adapted from a crossed <d> in Irish manuscripts. We also use this character in the IPA to indicate the voiced interdental fricative sound / ð/. Back to the Old English Orthography and Phonology When we start talking about orthography (writing and spelling systems), we follow one aphorism: Old English spelling is comparatively more phonemic than present day English spelling. Anglo-Saxon scribes represented the phonemes that they perceived and recorded them. As a result, the spelling of Old English words gives us a consistent picture of how things sounded from approximately 500 AD to about 1100 AD, the six hundred years that we can describe as the “Old English period” in England. So this is the “Old English Alphabet” used in England until about 1100 (with a few exceptions, particularly in the north of England): Capital forms (known in manuscripts as “majuscule”): A Æ B C D E F Ȝ[rendered as G in editions] H I L M N O P R S T U Ƿ [W] Y X Ð Þ 2 Lower case (known as “miniscule” forms): a b c d e f ȝ[g] h i l m n o p r s t u ƿ[w] y x ð þ In addition, two “digraphs” are used to represent two other sounds: <sc> /ʃ/ <cg> /ʤ/ One other combination of letters can be disconcerting to speakers of Present Day English (PDE): <cw> /kw/. In PDE, this sound sequence is usually represented by <qu>. You will not see a ‘wynn’ or ‘yogh’ (the Old English letterform used for the /g/ phoneme) in any edition you encounter in this class, although you would encounter them if you looked at original manuscripts. Old English Consonant Phonemes and their Allophones Old English had two categories of phonemes that had radically different allophones based on the context in which they were found: voiceless fricatives and velar consonants. Old English did not have any “voiced fricative” phonemes as PDE does. PDE has both voiceless fricative phonemes and voiced fricative phonemes. Here is a little review of the fricative inventory of English. PDE Voiceless phonemes: Voiceless labio-dental phoneme: /f/ as in the following words <fan> /fæn/, <flood> /flʌd/ Voiceless interdental phoneme: /θ/ as in <thing> /θɪŋ/, <thin> /θɪn/ Voiceless alveolar phoneme: /s/ as in <set> /sɛt/, <house> (noun) /hɑus/ PDE Voiced phonemes: Voiced labio-dental phoneme: /v/ as in the following words <van> /væn/, <oven> /ʌvn̩/ Voiced interdental phoneme: /ð/ as in the following words <that> /ðæt/, <bathe> /beð/ Voiced alveolar phoneme: /z/ as in the following words <zip> /zɪp/, <house> (verb) /hɑuz/ Old English only had the first set of fricatives above as phonemes, as mental representations that speakers accessed in their word patterns, while the second set (the voiced fricatives) were realized as allophones. When voiceless fricative phonemes appeared at the beginning or end of a word, or when they were doubled, they were voiceless: Old English Word IPA Transcription PDE Meaning felda, n. [feldɑ] field (dative singular) ġedeorf. n. [jedeorf] hardship þearle, adv. [θæɑrle] severely oþþe, conj. [oθθe] or sume, adj. [sume] certain fisceras, n. [fiʃerɑs] fishermen (nom. plural) 3 When voiceless fricative phonemes appeared between two voiced sounds, they became voiced. Remember that all vowels are voiced, as are the following sounds /w, m, n, l, r, ʤ/ that frequently appear in Old English words around voiceless fricatives. Verbal prefixes, such as ā- and ġe-never triggered the voicing of the following consonant, most likely because the stress appears on the vowel following the initial consonant of the root. Thus, the word <ġefēran> 'companions' would be transcribed /jefe:rɑn/, and <āfyllan> 'to fill up' would be transcribed /ɑ:fyllɑn/. Old English Word IPA Transcription PDE Meaning wulfas, n. [wulvɑs] wolves leþerhosa, n. [leðerhoza] leather leggings (accusative plural) In linguistic terms, we can describe this voicing rule as a type of assimilation, a phonetic process where one sound takes on the traits of the sounds around it. In the case of the Old English voiceless fricatives, /f, θ, s/, they "catch" the voicing from the voiced sounds around them. The other major category of consonants that showed significant allophonic variation is the velar consonants. Old English included three velar phonemes: two stops--/k/ and /g/--and one fricative--/x/. The voiceless velar fricative was spelled with the letter <h>. Many of the words that historically had this phoneme after a vowel are now spelled with a <gh>. For example, the Old English word <leoht> /leoxt/ becomes PDE <light>. While the voiceless fricative phonemes show voicing assimilation, the velar consonants in Old English reflect another kind of assimilation called "palatalization"—the movement of velar consonants forward in the mouth to the palate. We can still feel palatalization in PDE, but just like with other allophones, the change in pronunciation doesn't change the way we conceptualize the velar consonant in our mind. Compare how you say the word <cot> and the word <kit>. Pay close attention to the position of the back of your tongue. When you say <cot> [kʰɑt], the back of your tongue rises to make a seal against your velum. When you say <kit> [kʲɪt], the back of your tongue moves forward and makes a seal against your palate instead of your velum. The trigger for this palatalization is the vowel that follows /k/: in <kit> the vowel that follows is a front vowel /ɪ/ rather than the back vowel /ɑ/ that appears in <cot>. In Old English, the palatalized allophones of the velar phonemes had a more dramatic result, but they had the same trigger. When a velar consonant appears adjacent to a front vowel, it becomes palatalized. In all of the Old English texts that you encounter, palatalized consonants will appear with a dot above them: <ċ> and <ġ>. The voiced velar stop /g/ had one additional allophone that results from a different set of triggers. When the sound /g/ appeared after or between back vowels or after a liquid consonant /l/ or /r/, it became a voiced velar fricative [ɣ]. Some words show exceptions to the palatalization rule with some stops in Old English, so make sure that you pay close attention to whether a velar stop is marked as a palatalized sound. Phoneme and Old English Word IPA Transcription PDE Translation Allophone /k/-->[tʃ]/front vowels ċiele, n. [tʃiele] cold 4 /k/-->[k] elsewhere cræft, n. [kræft] occupation /g/--> [j] / front vowels ġeġeocod, ppl. [jejeokod] yoked /g/--> [ɣ] /between two fugleras, n. [fuɣlerɑs] fowlers (bird- back vowels or between farmers/bird-catchers) back vowel and /l, r/ /g/--> [g]/ initially and gāde, n. [gɑ:de] goad (or prod) in consonant clusters /x/--> [h] initially hæbbe, v. [hæbbe] have (1st p. pres.) /x/--> [ç] after a front āwihte, n. [ɑwiçte] anything vowel /x/--> [x] elsewhere sylh, n. [sylx] plow Old English Vowels Phonologists differ about how to represent the Old English vowel system. Smith and Kim have decided to follow the "cardinal vowel" principle. They argue that Old English was, in effect, a fourteen vowel system: six short vowels and six long vowels. In our Old English texts, long vowels are indicated with a macron. A long [ɑ] is spelled <ā>, for example. In Old English, vowel length was a phonemic property, not an allophonic one. In other words, a word with a long vowel in it was distinctive from a word that had the same structure but a short vowel. Thus, the word <man> 'man', with a short vowel, was distinct from the word <mān> 'crime'. Front Back High i i: y y: u u: Mid e e: o o: Low æ æ: ɑ ɑ: In addition, Old English had at least six diphthongs: three short and three long.