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Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and place, and in contrast with Old English and Modern English, spelling was usually phonetic rather than ...
Middle English (abbreviated to ME [1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
(Middle English, and hence Modern English, largely derives from the Anglian dialect of Old English, but some words are derived from the West Saxon dialect of Old English, because the border between the two dialects ran through the London area.
Early Middle English had two separate diphthongs /ɛj/ and /aj/. The vowel /ɛj/ was typically represented orthographically with "ei" or "ey", and the vowel /aj/ was typically represented orthographically with "ai" or "ay". These came to be merged, perhaps by the fourteenth century. [1] The merger is reflected in all dialects of present-day ...
Y-cluster reductions. Y-cluster reductions are reductions of clusters ending with the palatal approximant /j/, which is the sound of y in yes, and is sometimes referred to as "yod", from the Hebrew letter yod (h), which has the sound [j]. Many such clusters arose in dialects in which the falling diphthong /ɪu/ (the product of the merger of ...
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/).
Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language.Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.