Oe Alphabet and pronunciation.

The system of writing in OE was changed with the introduction of Christianity. Before that, the English used the runes – symbols that were very vague, that might at the same time denote a sound, a syllable or a whole word.

Runes are the 24 letters (later 16 in Scandinavia and 30 or more in Anglo-Saxon England) of an ancient Germanic alphabet used from the 2-d or 3-d to the 16^th century. Perhaps derived ultimately from the Etruscan alphabet, the runic alphabet was used mainly for charms and inscriptions, on stone, wood, metal, or bone. Each letter had a name, which was itself a meaningful word. The rune , for instance, could stand for either the sound “f” or the fehu, “cattle”, which was the name given to the rune.

They were of specific shape, designed to be cut on the wooden sticks, and only few people knew how to make them and how to interpret them. Runic inscriptions that came down from the oldest settlers on the isles are few, and the language is not what might be called OE – it was rather an ancient language which might be very close to the languages of other Germanic tribes. The story of runes might be very interesting in itself, yet what we are going to study was written in an alphabet dating back to the 7^th century; it was Latin alphabet with few specifically English additions. Some English sounds had no counterpart in Latin, so three signs developed from runes were added, plus ligature ae, now well known as a transcription symbol.

The Latin alphabet was carried throughout medieval Europe by the Roman Catholic church – to the Irish and Merovingians in the 6^th century and the AngloSaxons and Germans in the 7^th. The oldest surviving texts in the English language written with Latin letters date back to c.700.

So the letters of the OE alphabet were as follows, and they denoted the following sounds:

a [a] an (go) and (and

ae [ae] aet (that)

b [b] ban (bone)

c [k] caru (care) and [ ] before front vowel cild (child)

d [d] deor (deer; in old times animal)

e [e] mete (meat; in old times food)

f [f] findan (find) and [v] in intervocal positian lufu (love) was one of the remnants of the runic alphabet called joh (yoke) and it had several readings

[g] an (go)

[j] ear (year)

[ ] at the beginning of the word before back vowels and after n and between two back vowels: sor ian (sorrow), fol ian (follow), uma (man, human), da as (days)

h [h] ham (home), him (him), hunto (hunting)