Old English pronunciation: a guide for students

[@msclrhd]

It's interesting how some words are familiar, yet others are completely alien.

[@ColinGorrie]

One of the most fun things about Old English in my opinion - the perfect blend of familiar and foreign

[@codekillerz5392]

Not only that, but some of the words are familiar in pronunciation, yet they're unrecognizable orthographically.

[@JM-ir8lw]

Osweald Bera is amazing in every aspect of the word. I have struggled to learn the hard way by attempting beowulf and this is hands down the best. Breaks it down Barney style and makes learning it fun and anything but a chore. Fantastic work!

[@olivia-rm2yk]

immediately purchased the book the moment you mentioned it!! so excited to receive it. you are my favorite channel to watch and i love every video you release. please continue this kind of content!! id also love to see more conlanging from you, as thats what led me to discovering your channel!!! i love the work you do and you inspire me to learn and grow every day. thank you from the bottom of my heart!!! 🏰💓

[@ColinGorrie]

Thank you so much for your kind words! You've made my day!!

[@KevinArdala01]

I really wish there was a high quality audio dictionary of Old English, it would be such a helpful reference.

[@ColinGorrie]

You and me both!

[@KevinArdala01]

Lol. You'd think with all the people at university this would be done and dusted by now, but, oh well.

[@waelisc]

​ @KevinArdala01 almost all Old English spoken by academics on radio and TV is pronounced terribly, unfortunately - especially diphthongs - so be careful what you wish for 😅

[@KevinArdala01]

@waelisc Yea, I Get what you're saying, which is why it should be a university project. They could do potential dialectical variations and have a tab discussing the word's origin and any other significant information. You'd think with all the money that goes into universities that this would have been completed by now.

[@waelisc]

@@KevinArdala01 something like the excellent Middle English Compendium online dictionary. We can dream 😫

[@codekillerz5392]

My copy arrived just today!

[@graydenhormes5829]

Would love if this had bookmarks so we can revise quickly!

[@ColinGorrie]

Should be in place now - thanks for the suggestion!

[@jeremyconnor8625]

Loving the book so far! I’m on chapter 9 :)

[@ColinGorrie]

I'm so sorry for what happened in chapter 8...

[@jeremyconnor8625]

@@ColinGorrieno spoilers for everyone else, but I’m on the edge of my seat to see how they get out of that predicament! :D

[@mew2knight337]

Loving old english vowels button | V

[@shanedemeulenaere5792]

This is great! It really helped me clarify a few things. (I thought a short i was more like modern English's short i, like in "pit".) One question though: Are there rules that one can follow to infer where the dots and macrons would be placed in a text without them written? I've sort of started to be able to expect where g would be dotted intuitively, but rules would be helpful too.

[@nicholassinnett2958]

The dotted/palatal consonants usually evolved out of their non-dotted forms through specific sound changes, which were triggered by nearby sounds (usually a following front vowel or /j/, but the rules for word-final ones are more complex). Read out-loud enough, you get a feel for where they do and don't usually show up. Sometimes though, you'll see exceptions to the rules, which can muddy things a bit. For example, sc -> sċ only required a following front vowel inside words, but it was indiscriminate at the start of words (except in a few Latin loans like scōl, "school"), and seems to have been inconsistent at the ends of words (tusc gives "tusk" today, but also has a variant "tush" in some modern dialects). There's also a few /j/ sounds that were preserved from Proto-Germanic instead of evolving from another "g" sound, like in ġear ("year"), ġeong ("young"), and the related word ġeoguþ ("youth"). It also wasn't uncommon for a front vowel that allowed one of the changes to get deleted later on (happened frequently in verbs). Scribes often marked those exceptions with a silent e after the consonant, or with the sequence /ju/, writing it as "geo" (like in ġeong and ġeoguþ). Non-palatalised sc (/sk/) also often inconsistently flipped around to /ks/, so words like "fiscas" ("fish", nominative/accusative plural, the singular forms did palatalise though) and "ascian" ("to ask") often have variant spellings like fixas/ficsas or axian/acsian.

[@rambleswolf]

How do we know that dotted g wasn't a palatal fricative /ʝ/ like gamma in Modern Greek? Wouldn't the scribes have just written it with an if it were /j/, like the convention in Latin? I'm sure there must be some evidence for /j/ somewhere, it's just /ʝ/ makes more orthographic sense to me. It obviously became /j/ eventually, but I'm just curious when that shift would have happened. And also, when did aspiration of the plosives developed (you seem to use both aspirated and unaspirated varieties in this video). No criticism intended, I'm just curious. :)

[@Ψυχήμίασμα]

I do not know. But judging from related languages, palatal fricativizing the g doesn't seem to be a thing in Germanic languages in this way. The same thing with g exists in Swedish and Icelandic, for example. Götaland is just plain old /j/. Daginn is just a plain old /j/ too. But as with all things, probably both /ʝ/ and /j/ existed and were used by different speakers. Language is fluid and organic. And we know that some even pronounced it /g/ and didn't have the palatalization.

[@rambleswolf]

@@Ψυχήμίασμα Ah, okay. Thank you! 😊

[@johannkroeber392]

What about the similarities to Frisian and Lower-German(anglo saxon) do they hint at old english pronounciation?

[@ColinGorrie]

Definitely! That's an even more direct case of the "consistency with related languages" criterion

[@johannkroeber392]

@@ColinGorrie I grew up in angeln (like in anglo-saxon) region in northern germany and my grandma always spoke lower german to us so i learned some. When i went to school i met lots of folks from the islands who can speak frisian and my mothers parents are danish so i learned that. I think i will buy your book.

[@AGuy-r2c]

I made a langauge that’s based off of old English and old Icelandic, I think you might’ve liked it

[@ConciseCabbage]

Could we apply standard rules for a “modern pronunciation”? For example, pronounce ū as the MOUTH phoneme, pronounce ī as the PRICE phoneme, etc

[@vampyricon7026]

24:16 I believe the sounds written ⟨m n b d g⟩ also count in this class?

[@vampyricon7026]

One trick I use for the diphthongs (especially ⟨eo⟩) is to treat it as having a lax W at the end. So I aim for /ew/ but close my mouth as little as possible. And for ⟨ea⟩ I just pretend I'm Australian.