Help:IPA/Old English
 | This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Old English on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Old English in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ]Category:Pages with plain IPA, / /Category:Pages with plain IPA and ⟨ Category:Pages with plain IPA⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
The tables below show how the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Old English pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was an early form of English in medieval England. It is different from Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and from Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer.
See Old English phonology for more detail on the sounds of Old English.
Key
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Notes
- ↑ Old English had geminate (double) consonants, which were pronounced longer than single consonants. Double consonants were written with double consonant letters. The double consonants in habban, missan can be transcribed in IPA with the length symbol ⟨ːCategory:Pages with plain IPA⟩ or by doubling the consonant symbol: [ˈhɑbːɑn]Category:Pages with plain IPA, [ˈmisːɑn]Category:Pages with plain IPA or [ˈhɑbbɑn]Category:Pages with plain IPA, [ˈmissɑn]Category:Pages with plain IPA. The doubled affricate in ƿicce should be transcribed as [ˈwittʃe]Category:Pages with plain IPA or [ˈwitːʃe]Category:Pages with plain IPA, with the stop portion of the affricate doubled.
- 1 2 3 The phoneme /h/Category:Pages with plain IPA had three allophones that diverged in the later language: it was pronounced [h] word-initially, [ç] when it was single and after a front vowel, and [x] otherwise.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 ⟨ċ ċġ sċ⟩, with a dot above, represent postalveolar /tʃ dʒ ʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA in modern renditions but not in the original manuscripts. ⟨ġ⟩ usually represents the palatal approximant /j/Category:Pages with plain IPA but represents /dʒ/Category:Pages with plain IPA after ⟨n⟩. /tʃ ʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA developed from /k sk/Category:Pages with plain IPA by palatalization in Anglo-Frisian, but /dʒ j/Category:Pages with plain IPA developed partly from Proto-Germanic *j and partly from the palatalization of /ɡ/Category:Pages with plain IPA. Here and in some modern texts, the palatal and postalveolar consonants are marked with a dot above the letter, but in old manuscripts they were written as ⟨c g sc⟩ and so were not distinguished from the velars [k ɡ ɣ]Category:Pages with plain IPA and the cluster [sk]Category:Pages with plain IPA.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 ⟨s f ð/þ⟩ represented voiceless fricatives [s f θ]Category:Pages with plain IPA at the beginning and the end of a word or when doubled in the middle but represented voiced fricatives [z v ð]Category:Pages with plain IPA when single, between voiced sounds.
- 1 2 ⟨x⟩ represented the cluster /ks/Category:Pages with plain IPA, as Modern English still does.
- 1 2 /r/Category:Pages with plain IPA and /l/Category:Pages with plain IPA probably had velarised allophones [rˠ]Category:Pages with plain IPA and [ɫ]Category:Pages with plain IPA before a consonant (except at the boundary in a compound word) and in some words in which they were geminated.
- 1 2 3 4 The sonorants /r l n w/Category:Pages with plain IPA had voiceless versions [l̥ r̥ n̥ ʍ]Category:Pages with plain IPA, which developed from the earlier consonant clusters /xl xr xn xw/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
- 1 2 3 The exact nature of the rhotic /r/Category:Pages with plain IPA is unknown. It may have been a trill [r], a tap [ɾ] or, as in most dialects of Modern English, an approximant [ɹ] or [ɻ].
- ↑ The letter ⟨w⟩ did not exist in the Early Middle Ages, when Old English was spoken. Scribes used the borrowed Runic letter wynn, ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩.
- ↑ Old English had a distinction between long and short vowels in stressed syllables. Long monophthongs are marked by placing the length symbol ⟨ːCategory:Pages with plain IPA⟩ after the vowel symbol, and long diphthongs are marked by placing the length symbol after the first vowel symbol. In unstressed syllables, only three vowels /ɑ, e, u/Category:Pages with plain IPA were distinguished, but /e, u/Category:Pages with plain IPA were pronounced [i, o]Category:Pages with plain IPA in certain words.
- 1 2 3 Sometimes after the palatalized consonants ⟨ċ ġ sċ⟩, ⟨eo⟩ represented /u/Category:Pages with plain IPA or /o/Category:Pages with plain IPA and ⟨ea⟩ represented /ɑ/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
- 1 2 ⟨eo o ue⟩ was pronounced /ø øː/Category:Pages with plain IPA in Anglian dialects but merged with /e eː/Category:Pages with plain IPA in all others. In addition, ⟨u⟩ was sometimes pronounced /ø/Category:Pages with plain IPA and ⟨u w we⟩ was sometimes pronounced /øː/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
- 1 2 These dialects include Received Pronunciation and most forms of English English (with some exceptions such as Yorkshire English), Australian English, New Zealand English, Scottish English, Ulster English, Southern American English, Philadelphia-Baltimore English, Western Pennsylvania English and California English. Other dialects of English, such as General American and most other forms of American English, Welsh English and Republic of Ireland English, have no close equiavalent vowel.
- 1 2 The diphthongs ⟨ie īe⟩ occurred in West Saxon and may have been pronounced /ie iːe/Category:Pages with plain IPA or /iy iːy/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
Bibliography
- Fulk, R. D. (April 17, 2012). "An Introduction to Middle English: Grammar and Texts". Broadview Press – via Google Books.