The Old English alphabet, like the Modern English alphabet, is based on the Roman letters, but the alphabet is slightly different than the one we use, as you will see if you glance at some of the readings for the course.. The Anglo-Saxons did not use the letters v and j (which were invented later), and q and z were used only very occasionally. They used the letter æ, which we do not use. They also introduced three letters not present in the Roman alphabet, called thorn, eth, and wynn. The last of these (wynn) is represented by a w in modern editions and in this course, so need not be learned at this point. Thorn, which is Þ as a capital and þ as a small letter, and eth, which is Ð and ð, were both developed by Anglo-Saxon scribes to represent a sound that was not present in Latin (and for that reason was not in the Roman alphabet), the sound that Modern English represents with the letters th.
To see how the letters of the Old English alphabet appear in a manuscript context, you might like to take a look at one of the most famous manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon England, the Nowell Codex, which contains the poem Beowulf and so is often called the "Beowulf Manuscript."
The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. Very few examples of this writing have survived, these being mostly short inscriptions or fragments. The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc was replaced by the Latin alphabet from about the 7th century onwards, although the two continued in parallel for some time. Futhorc influenced the Latin alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ, þ) and wynn (Ƿ, ƿ). The letter eth (Ð, ð) was later devised as a modification of d, and finally yogh (Ȝ, ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g.
The ligature Æ (æ), for ae, was adopted as a letter its own right, named æsc ("ash") after a Futhorc rune. In very early Old English Œ (œ), for oe, also appeared as a distinct letter named œðel ("ethel"), again after a rune. Additionally, the ligature w (double-u), for vv, was in use.
In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes.[2] He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) first, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian nota ond, ⁊, an insular symbol for and:
The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was eclipsed by French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which for reasons of prestige and familiarity kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English, such as in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled differently, sometimes even in the same sentence.
The pronunciation /u/ (normally spelled u) of written o in son, love, come, etc. is due to Norman spelling conventions prohibiting writing of u before v, m, n due to the graphical confusion that would result. (v, u, n were identically written with two minims in Norman handwriting; w was written as two u letters; m was written with three minims, hence mm looked like vun, nvu, uvu, etc.) Similarly, spelling conventions also prohibited final v. Hence the identical spellings of the three different vowel sounds in love, grove and prove are due to ambiguity in the Middle English spelling system, not sound change.
There was also a series of linguistic sound changes towards the end of this period, including the Great Vowel Shift, which resulted in "igh" in "night" changing from a pure vowel followed by a palatal/velar fricative to a diphthong. These changes for the most part did not detract from the rule-governed nature of the spelling system; but in some cases they introduced confusing inconsistencies, like the well-known example of the many pronunciations of "ough" (rough, through, though, trough, plough, etc.). Most of these changes happened before the arrival of printing in England. However, the arrival of the printing press merely froze the current system, rather than providing the impetus for a realignment of spelling with pronunciation. Furthermore, it introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries.
By the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid 1600s, the spelling system of English started to stabilize, and by the 1800s, most words had set spellings.
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