Old English Spelling and Pronunciation

1. SPELLING

After the introduction of Christianity in the 7th century the runic alphabet was superseded by the Latin. Like elsewhere in Western Europe Latin in England was the language of the church and also the language of writing and education. The monks were practically the only literate people; they read and wrote Latin and therefore began to use Latin letters to write down English words. As the OE sound system differed materially from the Latin, the Latin alphabet proved insufficient to denote all OE sounds. To fill this gap Anglo-Saxon scribes borrowed some letters from the runic alphabet.

The letters v and z were not much used by Old English scribes. The letter y is a symbol for a vowel. There were three letters in OE not used today:

E (ash), (thorn), and D (eth or, as the Anglo-Saxons appear to have called it,). The word ‘that’ was written as or, for represents the vowel in ‘that’ and or were used interchangeably for th in ‘that’ or in ‘thin’. stood for w and was called wynn ‘joy’.

2. PRONUNCIATION

Obviously there are no native speakers of Old English alive today; so any attempt to reconstruct the pronunciation can be only approximate. But we can be reasonably confident of the pronunciation as a result of comparing the way words are pronounced in the various Indo-European languages, both reconstructed and existing. The pronunciations given here are in terms of the nearest equivalent in the Received Pronunciation of England today.

Vowels

Old English distinguishes short vowels and long vowels (marked~) by taking longer to articulate the sound. Thus MnE ‘aha’ contains first the sound of OE a (short) and then the sound of OE a. MnE ‘hat’ has the sound of OE and MnE ‘bad’ the sound of OE. Approximate pronunciations are:

Fig. 12 “Spelling, ptonunciation, and punctuation”