A Phonemic Change in Early Old English

In the oldest OE texts—the Epinal glossary, the Corpus glossary, and the oldest documents— b is written medially where other Germanic languages have /b/, and f is written where other Germanic languages have /f/; e.g. obær, halbæ, libr, hræbnes, ebor (Ep.), giaban (doc.), uulfes, cefr, hofr. The same distinction is found in final position; e.g. hualb, stæb, reab, uuf (Ep.), gib (doc.). In later OE texts, f is universally used both medially and finally; e.g. lifr, ofer, hræfn, efor, stæf, reaf. Some isolated spellings in Epinal indicated the coming change in spelling practice: unofercumenræ, sifunsterri, nabfogar. Corpus has even more cases, e.g. halfe, forscrifen, as well as reverse spellings like ceber, where b appears for f

Linguistics · Phonemic awareness · Reading (process) · Sound change · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology

• A Bibliography of Diachronic Phonemics

  Open Access•Alphonse Juilland, Alphonse G Juilland•WORD•1953

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