Back Mutation (linguistics)
Old English phonology is the pronunciation system of Old English, the Germanic language spoken on Great Britain from around 450 to 1150 and attested in a body of written texts from the 7th–12th centuries. Its reconstruction is necessarily somewhat speculative, but features of Old English pronunciation have been inferred based on the sounds used in modern varieties of English (including dialects), the spellings used in Old English literature, analysis of Old English poetry, and comparison with other Germanic languages. Some words were pronounced differently in different dialects of Old English. The dialect called West Saxon is the best documented in surviving texts, and so is commonly treated as a default reference in descriptions of Old English, even though it is not a direct ancestor of the modern English language (which is more closely related to the Mercian dialect). Old English had a distinction between short and long (doubled) consonants, at least between vowels (as ...
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]