Old English Pronunciation: A Comprehensive Reconstruction

In this long video, I try to cover almost all elements of Old English pronunciation, and how the phonetics of the language are reconstructed by historical linguists. Naturally, as it is only preserved in written form, plenty of things are uncertain - here, I try to make clear where we are quite sure about things, and where we are unsure. I use a ground-up approach and try to take fairly few things for granted, but of course I didn’t do this reconstruction work myself, I am only presenting it here (except in a few cases, where I specify that I’m giving my own opinion). Much of this work was done decades ago, but one of the best recent resources on Old English phonology, which helped immensely with this video and with learning about this field myself, is: Hogg, R. (1992). A Grammar of Old English, Vol 1: Phonology. In the video I think I cite it as ’Hogg 2011’ by mistake - I think my copy of it must be an updated version. - Start 01:04 - Introduction 06:39 - Stress, prosody 14:42 - Monophthongal vowels 19:22 - ’i’ 28:23 - ’u’ 30:03 - ’e’ 30:43 - ’o’ 31:29 - ’a’ 31:46 - ’æ’ 35:38 - ’y’ 36:07 - The exact pronunciation of the vowels 40:29 - ’oe’ 41:53 - Vowel quality and length 48:17 - ’an’/’on’ sequences 50:29 - Diphthongal vowels 52:43 - ’eo’ and breaking 1:00:42 - ’ea’ 1:01:52 - ’io’ 1:03:47 - ’ie’ 1:04:59 - Quality of diphthongs 1:12:37 - Short diphthongs? 1:16:10 - Unstressed vowels 1:20:49 - Nasal consonants ’n’ and ’m’ 1:24:32 - Doubled consonants 1:26:40 - Plosive consonants: ’p’, ’b’, ’t’, ’d’ 1:34:42 - ’c’ 1:40:16 - ’g’ 1:46:49 - Fricative consonants: ’f, ’s’, ’þ/ð’, ’h’ 2:00:00 - The semivowel ’w’ 2:06:17 - ’wl’, ’wr’ 2:07:53 - ’ig’, ’eg’, ’aw’ - vowels followed by semivowels 2:11:12 - ’r’ and ’I’ 2:16:30 - Development and dialects 2:24:28 - Spoken example: Very early Old English 2:25:19 - Spoken example: ’Textbook’ Old English 2:25:59 - Spoken example: ’Alternative’ Pronunciation 2:27:32 - West Saxon dialect 2:28:16 - Kentish dialect 2:29:31 - ’Anglian’ dialects 2:31:07 - Mercian dialect 2:31:42 - Northumbrian dialect 2:32:54 - Less palatalisation in more northerly dialects 2:35:38 - Spoken Example: the poem ’Deor’ ____ This channel’s Patreon (thank you to anybody who donates):