HIS121 - The Sound System of OE

the goal of this election is to introduce you to the sound system of Old English you might ask how can we set up a sound system of a language where we have no audio recordings let alone native speakers well the details of the sound system of an extinct language uh normally inferred from the written remains and if they don't exist either the principles of comparative phonology are applied sound shifts losses and so on in the case of Old English we have written records especially from the later history but even with these we can only arrive at an approximation and have to set up a sound system where no auditory verification is possible nevertheless we will try and even more so I will produce the sounds of Old English so let's start this is what we will be doing first we will define a reference variety of Old English then we will look at the Old English phonemes in detail we will take a look at the orthography of Old English and we'll finally try and exemplify the sounds of Old English on the basis of a written text so let's start now surviving texts from the Old English period occur in four main varieties West Saxon Kentish Mershon and Northumbrian towards the end of the Old English period the West Saxon Kingdom Wessex became dominant and the West Saxon variety became the literary standard thus most scholars treat West Saxon as the leading variety of Old English today the following classes of phonemes are assumed for the West Saxon variety of all English we have 15 monophthongs that can be subdivided into seven long ones and seven short ones and one central monophthong we have for the fungal phonemes and we have seventeen consonantal phonemes the consonantal phonemes had much the same value as they have in present-day English but they have a different distribution the vowels by contrast differed considerably from their modern counterparts so let's look at all phonemes in detail and let's start with the monophthongs here first of all with the long monophthongs we already said there were seven long monophthongs in Old English so let's look at them in detail here is the first one tidak the e as in Teeter present-day English this is of course tied then we have an e as in greener present-day English green all English had an air as in dal present-day English deal there was a low back vowel R as in got present-day English goat a mid high back vowel o as in father present-day English food and a high back vowel who as in who's present-day English this is of course house and then a vowel which did not exist or does not exist in present-day English any longer the rounded high front vowel boo as in moose present-day English mice as you can see orthographically these long monophthongs were all indicated by means of a matron on top of the vowel so this is the indication of vowel length in orthography the pattern of the long monophthongs in Old English is a highly congruent pattern let us now add the short monophthongs and as I already said there are seven short monophthongs too so here they are each long bond of song had a short counterpart the representation is overlapping because we cannot put them in the same position on a chart like that here is the first one Kissin short e a height front vowel as in the present-day English verb to kiss sure a which is slightly lower than the high one bed a mid high front vowel which is approaching the mid position and a low front vowel short vowel at as in fat present-day English this is that and then a low back vowel here it is McKean present-day English make here is a counterpart of the long mid high back vowel o as in hope Ian short o this is the short ooh a high back val full present-day English full of course and here is the equivalent of the front rounded front vowel fillin as in present-day English fill and last but not least there was one central vowel namely the schwa sorry I switch off this one this is the one in your liver which means present-day English bill leave so in unstressed position we have this short central vowel so the whole monophthong good system was a relatively congruent pattern each front vowel had a back vowel counterpart however the quality of the mid hi front vowel air was a bit lower than that of its back vowel counterpart the most important difference as compared with present-day English was the availability of rounded front vowels long and short you like in German for example like present-day English Old English also had the central vowel sha which occurred in most unstressed syllables for example in the prefix ei or in suffixes for example there let's continue with the four diphthongs in Old English now the diphthongs in Old English occurred in two pairs long and short they were all centering that is their second vocalic element was the central vow of our this movement towards the central target can also be referred to as in gliding so all Old English diphthongs were in gliding diphthongs here they are let's start with the short ones the first one is air as in character present the English heart the second one is a little bit has a lower onset it is air as in Ella which means present-day English all and the two long ones here is the first long one air bear which means present a English beer and the second one is air which occurs in the word chap present-day English sheep a relatively straightforward Istanbul system here are the 17 consonants and again I want to stress that they are consonantal phonemes Old English retained all consonants of common Germanic although the distribution of some of them have been affected by some sound changes so let us compare the Continental System with that of present-day English and let's first of all look at the inventory now there were some strange or amazing inventory 'old if uhrin psa's for example the here the first one here as in leashed and v huh as in thought were part of the sound inventory however as you can see here there were other phones of the phoneme her that is the glottal fricative similarly the Oh as in argon was a special allophone of God so this is an inventory of difference however on an allophonic level now secondly we have distributional differences and this is quite interesting the voiced fricatives whereas in driven the as in Balian aza has in reason they were only used in voiced contexts elsewhere for example word initially their voiceless counterparts are you so let's look at them in detail so here is the dental the labial dental fricative phoneme with two allophones the invoiced environments and the voiceless allophone elsewhere and similarly we have the dental fricative phoneme again with the voiced elephone in voiced contexts and the voiceless one elsewhere body and versus funa and likewise the alveolar fricative voiceless sona and voiced in a voice environment reason thus we can establish the following rule a well it's called it fricative rule for Old English whenever we have one of these fricatives labia dental dental or alveolar we have two allophones one elephone occurs in a voiced environment and it is voiced over the and Z and the second one occurs in voiceless veux environments finally we have some special sounds in Old English and these of course concern the pronunciation of the are now one thing is assumed for Old English and that is a high degree of rotisserie which means that the R was pronounced in all contexts even after vowels and secondly it is hard to say what type of our was used was it the alveolar trill as in driven was it the alveolar approximant as in driven all the alveolar flap as in driven well it is hard to say thus it's up to you which one you use I normally use the alveolar trill as the primary elephone of the R but we could say that the elephant's of our are in free variation further differences between present-day English and Old English concern the use of the velar nasal and the allophonic realization of curve well having talked about the phonemic system let's now talk about the orthography of Old English the anglo-saxons first used a runic alphabet now this alphabet was called food AK after the initial letters of these symbols that had all names and so here we have the fail the or the Thorin the O's the are and the kin and so if you combine these letters the initial letters primarily then you get food arc now each rune was a letter in the alphabet and it also stood for a word the earliest use of runes and this is just an excerpt was for magical purposes there were many different food arcs the fragment used here is an older Germanic food Ock later Irish monks brought the Latin alphabet to England and some new letters with it and the old English writing system was based from now on on a modified Latin alphabet now here are some symbols that were used in Old English but are no longer used in present-day English I just marked some significant ones this one for example is the so called ash you know that from the phonetic alphabet and then of course we have here the matrons as length marks on top of the vowels quite interesting is this one here we have representations of the dental fricative the F the second one is the so called is and the first one is a capitalization of a character which is represented normally over here and that is the character form used for dental fricatives let's finally exemplify Old English and read a textual excerpt now here I have a little book which is entitled old English literature and it was published by Randolph quark Valerie Adams and Derek Davey a long time ago but these texts obviously don't change anymore and I will read a little passage from the anglo-saxon Chronicle which was published or which was written in 991 as a short excerpt of the famous Battle of Malden so here it is so flawed would give at the floatin store Daniela V King a fella vyas Yana hate ha Halla de Clare held on table richer we in we heard nur save as hat and whilst on Kavner mid his schooner that was Carolyn Sulu faith on a foreman man with his Franken of shared fair boldly cost onthe britches dope fair stowed on mid Wolf's Tanner Wien in Forester alvera and MCOs moody Etrian far nolden add some father phlegm you Wilkin a key fast leecher with a fiend Riordan far wheeler for he Wagner Weldon Muslim this may suffice as an impression of Old English now let us summarize the Old English sound system is still very much Germanic in character and much closer to German than to present-day English the 15 monophthongs the four diphthongs and the 17 consonant constitute the heart of the old English sound system in this lecture please consider it only as an attempt I try to do my very best to pronounce all these phonemes with their allophonic realizations and I hope the last passage of the Battle of Malden gave you some impression about what Old English could have sounded like thanks for your attention

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Keywords: Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, History of English, English, OE, Old English, OE Phonemes, Jürgen Handke, Handke, Indo-European, Germanic, Linguistics Online, VLC, Virtual Linguistics Campus, Inverted Classroom, Flipped Classroom, E-Lecture, University, College, Student, Education, Community, educational, mobile device, Marburg, University of Marburg, IWB072

Id: x2fd22bXooI

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2012