Old English
Here is my reading of the poem below. I’m going to go through this poem to talk about the phonology of Old English.
First is the word anhaga. When I say this word, I say the g not as [g] but as [ɣ], a voiced velar fricative. It’s articulated in the same place as [g], but it’s a fricative instead of a stop. The letter g often made this sound between vowels, because it was easier for people to not bring their tongue all the way to the velum. The sounds were sometimes distinguished in writing by using the letter g for the stop and the letter yogh (ȝ) to represent the fricative. The other alternative sound that g made was [j], the sound the letter y makes today. This usually happens before front vowels, which is why I pronounced geond like “YAY-uhnd.” However, this wasn’t true for every time a front vowel appeared in front of g, and I don’t really know if there’s a way to tell whether one should say [g] or [j].
The word gebideð contains an odd letter on the end. This letter is called eth and it made the th sound [θ]. The other character that made this sound is at the beginning of the word þeahþe. This character is called thorn. Also, notice the sound I make when I pronounce the h. That’s the sound it made when it came after a vowel. The sound is a voiceless velar fricative [x].
Also, one would expect the ea in the word to be something like “ay-uh,” but it’s actually the sound of the a in cat followed by “uh” ([æə]). Usually, the sound of a in cat is represented by 'æ' in OE, but because ‘æa’ is sort of cumbersome to write and weird to look at, most scribes just went with ea. The letter combination that actually says “ay-uh” is eo.
The reason we know this is that Old English diphthongs, like today’s diphthongs, are falling. The first element is more prominent than the second. So, since the second vowel is less prominent, it must be an unstressed vowel, which is usually back, and it must be a low or mid vowel since it has to come down from a high vowel like [e]. So, it was probably the schwa [ə].
Another part of Old English phonology is gemination, which isn’t demonstrated in the poem, so here’s me saying dogga, which means dog, first without gemination and then with gemination. Gemination (from gemini, ‘twins’) is consonant doubling. For stops, this means stopping for longer on the consonant before continuing with the word. A similar thing to this is consonant elongation, which basically sounds the same, but I found out that there is a difference. Doubling of consonants only happened in the middle of words in Old English, and never at the ends or beginnings. If it did happen in the beginnings or ends of words, it would be called consonant elongation, but since it doesn’t, we call it gemination.
Old English Vowels
[y] is pronounced like [u], except it's a front vowel instead of a back vowel. You can hear it when I say "wyrd" in the recording.
Old English Consonants
Futhorc
This is a runic alphabet that was used to write old English alongside the Latin alphabet.
English Changing
Old English was much more complicated than Modern English. There were a lot more subtleties, like saying come hither instead of come here. Hither had to be used when it referred to a place you were going to. How did it become simpler? The answer is that the language had to be spread. When the Vikings invaded England, some of them stayed there to put themselves English society. However, learning the language was difficult. They often didn’t have access to education on the language or grammar books, so they mostly went by what they heard. They made a lot of mistakes, like saying here when they were supposed to say hither, or saying books when the proper plural was beek. The children of those vikings grew up hearing that kind of English regularly, and with their young brains primed for language acquisition, they learned the broken English perfectly and solidified it as the norm.