An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

language. There is not the degree of standardisation to which we are
accustomed in the present day, but there can be no doubt that this was an
important factor in the widespread use of West Saxon in many parts of
the country.
Present-day textbooks always use West Saxon as their basis for the
introduction of Old English, and indeed, given the relative paucity of
ORIGINS AND SOURCES
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text from elsewhere, there is no alternative. One important warning,
however, must be offered. In the overall history of the language, West
Saxon is of only small relevance. The areas which come to dominate, in
particular, the standard language of England today arise principally
from the areas of the dialects of the East Midlands and East Anglia, areas
for which, unfortunately, there is precious little Old English evidence.
Another complication arises from the fact that the dialects of Early
West Saxon and the dialects of Late West Saxon differ in some signifi-
cant features. Textbook writers, therefore, have made a decision about
which form of the language to use when, for example, they present the
different forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs. In this book I
shall use Late West Saxon as the basis for discussion. I do this for several
reasons. Firstly on the grounds of quantity: there is so much more, both
of prose and of poetry, which is written in Late West Saxon. Secondly,
because that material is more homogenous than any other body of
material. This second point is particularly important for the beginning
student, who may not before have encountered historical texts such as
those in Old English. For one of the immediate issues that arises is that
in such texts there can be a wide variation in the shape of individual
forms, even from sentence to sentence, which can cause considerable
confusion. At least for Late West Saxon such variation is minimised.
1.7 The sound system of Old English
We have already explored some of the similarities and the differences
between Old English and PDE in terms of their spelling systems. How-
ever, there is no disguising the fact that, nevertheless, there have been
many major changes in pronunciation since the Old English period (and
indeed considerable variation between dialects during the period itself ).
Of necessity, the study of the sound system, or phonology, is technical,
and an understanding of key concepts such as the phoneme is import-
ant, but outside the scope of this work (you should consult, for example,
the companion volume on phonology in this series, which you will find
in the section on recommended reading).
The consonants of Old English are often recognisably parallel to
those of PDE. Thus there were three voiceless stops: /p, t, k/ but only
two voiced ones: /b, d/. The missing voiced stop, /g/, is discussed im-
mediately below. The fricative system was radically different, for there
were only voiceless phonemes, and three of these: /f, 
θ
, x/. This does
not mean that there were no voiced fricative sounds, for there were. The
critical feature is that voiced sounds were in what is called complemen-