# Æ pronunciation in Old English



## theagx

Is it like the "a" in the North American "fast" or the Northern English/Scottish "fast" (a bit shorter than the former)?

Is it like "ea" in "read" (rhyming with "deed") or like the "ea" in "read" (rhyming with "red")?

I realize that we cannot be certain.


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## luitzen

I think as in cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æ#Old_English


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## berndf

It is difficult to reconstruct the _exact _quality of Old English vowels. There is general consensus that Old English had four _a_-type vowels, two back vowels (as in _f*a*ther_), long and short and two front vowels (as in _m*a*n_), again long and short. In modern editions of Old English texts they are normally rendered _ā, a, ǣ_ and _æ_, respectively.


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## Egmont

luitzen said:


> I think as in cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æ#Old_English


That's what I was told when I studied this stuff in university, about half a century closer to when it was spoken than we are now - by an instructor who first studied it at least 25 years before that.

That said, there's a certain amount of guesswork involved in any of these reverse extrapolations. We have a bunch of languages that were related at some point and have evolved in their own directions, we can look at languages that we think have changed less than others over the centuries, we have some hints from the evolution of orthography along different paths, we know something about how pronunciations evolve in general, and we have a few other clues - but we still don't have a time machine that would let us go back and listen.


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## berndf

I think what we can say with some confidence is that there was a _back-font _opposition between _a_ and _æ_ and a _mid-open _oppotions between _e_ and _æ_ and that _æ_ existed in both, long (_ǣ_) and short (_æ_). Anything else is guesswork.


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## ahvalj

Isn't the very fact that the creators of the Old English orthography used the Latin ligature _æ_ indicative of its approximate pronunciation? I doubt that this was a kind of _e_: (1) the short _æ_ originated from the Common Germanic _a_ and (2) it reversed to _a_ in Middle English.


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## entangledbank

From memory, the First Grammarian commented on the OE ligature as being appropriate for an intermediate sound - but that could still apply to anything in the modern [æ ~ a] range, assuming it wasn't the same as his Old Icelandic /a/.

In fact the same problem probably applies to anything before the invention of IPA and recording. Or is the use of [æ] in North American dialects clear enough evidence that it was [æ] in the South by about 1600?


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> Isn't the very fact that the creators of the Old English orthography used the Latin ligature _æ_ indicative of its approximate pronunciation? I doubt that this was a kind of _e_: (1) the short _æ_ originated from the Common Germanic _a_ and (2) it reversed to _a_ in Middle English.


Who said it was a "kind of e"?


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## ahvalj

berndf said:


> Who said it was a "kind of e"?


The topic starter.


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## berndf

entangledbank said:


> From memory, the First Grammarian commented on the OE ligature as being appropriate for an intermediate sound - but that could still apply to anything in the modern [æ ~ a] range, assuming it wasn't the same as his Old Icelandic /a/.
> 
> In fact the same problem probably applies to anything before the invention of IPA and recording. Or is the use of [æ] in North American dialects clear enough evidence that it was [æ] in the South by about 1600?


If you call the modern Southern English vowel of "man" /æ/ or /a/ is more a matter of taste than anything else. What matters is the phonemic opposition to both /ɑ/and /e/.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> The topic starter.


OK, thanks.


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## luitzen

Egmont said:


> That's what I was told when I studied this stuff in university, about half a century closer to when it was spoken than we are now - by an instructor who first studied it at least 25 years before that.
> 
> That said, there's a certain amount of guesswork involved in any of these reverse extrapolations. We have a bunch of languages that were related at some point and have evolved in their own directions, we can look at languages that we think have changed less than others over the centuries, we have some hints from the evolution of orthography along different paths, we know something about how pronunciations evolve in general, and we have a few other clues - but we still don't have a time machine that would let us go back and listen.


I realize that we can never be really sure how it was pronounced and that we may not be aware of some delicate qualities of the sound, but the fact that is a ligature of a and e tells me that it was perceived as a sound that is somewhere between an a and e (in one of the many ways they may have been pronounced) or as a digraph of both. This at least gives us a starting point.


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## berndf

The ae ligature has nothing to do with English. It is a Latin phoneme and the grapheme representing that phoneme was borowed to spell Old English. What matters as a starting point is the pronunciation in Late Latin.


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## luitzen

Ah, I did not know that.


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## ahvalj

The late Latin pronunciation throughout the entire Latin-speaking area was the plain open _e_, merged with _ę _from the old short _e _and opposed to the closed _ė_ from the long _ē_ and _oe_. The late Roman grammarians compiled lists of words to explain their readers where this _ae_ should have been used. The inscriptions contain numerous mistakes with _ae_ and _e_ used interchangeably. So, the creators of the Old English orthography must have deliberately chosen _æ_ for a special kind of sound. I agree that this alone is not enough for a conclusion, but coupled with the other two reasons from my post #6, I think it would be safe to agree with the majority of scholars of the last 200 years in that this sound most probably represented _æ_.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> So, the creators of the Old English orthography must have deliberately chosen _æ_ for a special kind of sound.


Yes, of course. The rational is quite obvious: It is supposed to represent a front vowel that is more open then <e>. This basic meaning of the symbol is still present in German and some Scandinavian languages where over the centuries the shape has changed from _æ_ to _ä _(the <e> moved from a ligature to a superscript, the superscript <e> was simplified to two small slashes under influence of the manuscript shape of the letter <e> (compare the shapes of lower case <e> and lower case <ä> here)and the slashes were finally simplified further to two dots yielding the modern shape <ä>).


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