Old English word stress. Old English phonetics.

Word stressTwo types of word accentuation in IE:

-Musical pitch

-Force stress

In CG force stress became the only type of stress used.The system of word accentuation inherited from PG underwent no changes in Early OE.In OE a syllable was made prominent by an increase in the force of articulation; in other words,a dynamic or a force stress was employed. In disyllabic and polysyllabic words theaccent fell on the root-morpheme or on the first syllable. Word stress was fixed, it remainedon the same syllable in different grammatical forms of the word and did not shift in word- building either.Polysyllabic words, especially compounds, may have had two stresses, chief and secondary,the chief stress being fixed on the first root-morpheme.In words with prefixes the position of the stress varied: verb prefixes were unaccented, whilein nouns and adjectives the stress was commonly thrown on the prefix:

-Ā-‘risan, mis- ‘faran – v (NE arise, “go astray”)

-Tō –weard, ‘or-eald – adj (NE toward, “very old”)

-‘mis-dǽd, ‘uð –geng – n (NE misdeed, “escape”)If the words were derived from the same root, word stress, together with other means, served todistinguish the noun from the verb:

-‘and-swaru n – and-‘swarian v (NE answer, answer)

-‘on-gin n – on-‘ginnan v (NE beginning, begin)

-‘forwyrd n – for-‘weorðan v (“destruction”, “perish”)

Stressed and unstressed syllables underwent different changes.

In stressed syllables the difference between sounds was emphasized.

In unstressed syllables the sounds were weakened and lost.

Old English phonetics

In Irish monasteries, a form of the Latin alphabet (Uncial script) evolved which was later adapted and used in English monasteries for copying texts in Latin and later in English.

ORTHOGRAPHY There are a number of letters used in Old English which were later discontinued; of these the following are the main ones: Þ ‘thorn’ and ð ‘eth’ (later replaced by th indicating the voiced and voiceless ambidental fricatives), ʒ ‘yogh’ used for g, ‘wynn’, i.e. ‘joy’, was a form of the letter w used in early texts, æ ‘ash’ a ligature (two letters in one form) composed of a and e and representing a sound intermediate between /a/ and /e/.

PHONOLOGY The writing system of Old English is by and large phonological, i.e. every letter represents a phoneme. This applies above all to fricatives though diphthongs, the affricate /dʒ/ and the fricative /ʃ/ used more than one letter.

fīf [fi:f] ‘five’ frefer [frevər] ‘consolation’ hūs [hu:s]‘house’ rīsan [ri:zan] ‘rise’ þurh [θurx] ‘through’ ōðer [o:ðər] ‘other’ gān [gɑ:n] ‘go’ gift [jift] ‘dowry’ fugol [fuɣol] ‘bird’ cēne [ke:nə] ‘sharp’, cyrice [tʃyritʃə] ‘church’

ALLOPHONY OF /g/ Before back vowels [g] is found, [ɣ] between back vowels and [j] before and between high vowels. There were two affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, the first deriving from palatalisation in early Old English and the second inherited from pre-Old English.

The fricatives /f, θ, s/ had two main allophones, a voiceless one at the beginning or end of a word or in the environment of a voiceless segment and a voiced one when found intervocalically. This alternation can be seen to this day and is responsible for present-day alternations like wife: wives.

The letter c represented the phoneme /k/, when it occurred before a consonant (cwic, ‘alive’), a back vowel (cuman, ‘come’) or a front vowel which had arisen due to i -umlaut (cynelic, ‘kingly’). It also represented the phoneme /tʃ/ which arose due to the early palatalisation of velars cyrice ‘church’.

CONSONANT LENGTH Old English had both long vowels and long consonants. This was an inherited feature of Germanic and has only been maintained in the present-day Scandinavian languages (bar Danish). Examples of long consonants are cyssan ‘kiss’, settan ‘set’, siþþan ‘since’.

PHONOTACTICS Clusters existed in Old English which are not permissible today. These were simplified in the Middle English period chiefly by the reduction of clusters of /h/ or /w/ and a following sonorant: hlāf ‘loaf’, wrītan ‘write’. The other major phonotactic change is the simplification of onsets consisting of a velar stop followed by an alveolar nasal (permissible in German) gnagan ‘gnaw’, cnēo ‘knee’. In nearly all these cases present-day orthography indicates the former phonetic realisation.

OLD ENGLISH VOWEL SYSTEM Note the distinction between two types of low vowels, front and back. Moreover, there are four diphthongs in later Old English ea, æa [æa, æ:a] and eo, ēo [eə, e:ə] which were sensitive to the consonants which followed them.