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Moving forward in time, the two Middle English vowels /a/ and /aː/ correspond directly to the two vowels /a/ and /ɛː/, respectively, in the Early Modern English of c. 1600 AD (the time of Shakespeare). However, each vowel has split into a number of different pronunciations in Modern English, depending on the phonological context.
The phonological system of the Old English language underwent many changes during the period of its existence. These included a number of vowel shifts, and the palatalisation of velar consonants in many positions. For historical developments prior to the Old English period, see Proto-Germanic language.
In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes: /f, v, θ, ð, s, z/. See Middle English phonology – Voiced fricatives. Also in the Middle English period, the voiced affricate /dʒ/ took on phonemic status. (In Old English, it is considered to have been an allophone of /j/).
Early Modern English and Late Modern English, also called Present-Day English (PDE), differ essentially in vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from the Industrial Revolution and technologies that created a need for new words, as well as international development of the language.
The bad–lad split is a phonological split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a long /æː/. This split is found in some varieties of English in England and Australia. In Modern English, a new phoneme, /ɑː/, developed that did not exist in Middle English.
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
The history of Old English can be subdivided into: Prehistoric Old English (c. 450–650); for this period, Old English is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive (with the exception of limited epigraphic evidence). This language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre ...
Old English phonology is the pronunciation system of Old English, the Germanic language spoken on Great Britain from around 450 to 1150 and attested in a body of written texts from the 7th–12th centuries.