At or before the time of the Conquest a seriesq by a voiced sound of a similar nature, lengthened the

preceding vowel or diphthong. The change did not take place if there were three co nsonants of which
the first two constituted a lengthening group.

At the time of the Conquest one may assume that the Old English vowel and diphthong system, at least
as found in the standard variety, was something like that shown in Table blow

This difference depends on the varying origins of OE reo If it arose through fronting of WGmc ii, it is
known today as eel and appears in the West Saxon and Anglian dialects as <<E>, but in Kentish as <e>. If
it came from front mutation of ii, it is known as ee2 and appears in West Saxon as <<E>, but in all non-
West Saxon dialects as <e>.

The first change in the vowel/diphthong system is the monophthongisation of the Old English
diphthongs so that eEoC:) became ee(:) and fell together with existing ee(:). The diphthong eo(:) was
monophthongised to a rounded e sound, which may sometimes be represented as <e/ee> or as <0/00>.

The spellings <ea> and <eo> continued to be used in this period because of the influence of the
standard, even though words such as OE cleene and beam now had the same vowel sound. These
diphthongal spellings were to be dropped in the thirteenth century, only to be reintroduced later in
English. But even in a text like the Peterborough Chronicle a variety of different spellings can be found
particularly in the later annals because of the confusion between the standard writing system and the
pronunciation. Thus <ea> can be used in words like Henri to give Heanri (1131) and <<E> can be used in
the French place name Angeeu in the passage quoted above.

The development was further complicated by the merger of short ee and a in a sound that was written
as <a> and this led to the eventual disappearance of <<E> from English writing This meant that the two
short low vowels and the diphthong had fallen together.

In the meantime some changes also affected the long low vowels. The front long vowel lre:1 was raised
to le:1 and the back vowel /0:/ was raised to /:J:/ in the southern half of England. Although the Chronicle
does have an occasional example of mor for DE mara, the passage quoted above has mare and halden,
though in the latter case the /01 might not yet have been lengthened under changes discussed above.
An important split between the north and south of the country was brought about through this raising
of 10:1, since the north did not have this raising. The boundary for this raising is generally thought to be
a line running roughly from the Wash to Chester in the Middle English period.
The effects of this change are various throughout the different dialects, for it seems to have been more
influential in the south than the north, and the results are far from uniform. It is obvious that in many
noun and verb paradigms there would be variation between forms with a vowel in an open syllable and
those without. The nominative of many nouns had no inflection, so a word like OE strefhad a genitive
strefes. The former is not in an open syllable, but the latter is and was subject to open syllable
lengthening. The result was a difference in the paradigm between short and long vowels in the
nominative and genitive respectively. In many cases analogy affected the result, but this example has
produced two separate words in Modern English, staff and stave. If the results had been regular we
would expect the following changes to have occurred: Ii! ~ /e:/, /e/ ~ /e:/, /0/ ~ lre:/, /ul ~ /0:/ and /0/
~ /:J:/.

The development of /0/ to along front vowel meant that there was no replacement for the long vowel
which had been lost by the raising of OE /0:/ to I:J:/. The result was that English now had four heights for
long and short vowels, though with gaps where there was no short low-mid or long low-back vowel.
There were also some centred vowels, which were usually the rounded forms of front vowels.

The discussion of vowels and consonants so far has not taken into account the development of the new
diphthongs referred to in the last chapter formed when Ij I followed a front vowel and I¥. I a back one.
This process appears to have been an ongoing one. With the front vowels the new diphthongs ai and ei
were created, though during the course of this period they fell together under I ail. With the back
vowels and diphthongs, which all had a back vowel as the final element, a variety of different diphthongs
were created.

The diphthong eo and the vowel li:1 formed the diphthongs eu and iu respectively, which then merged
under iu. These were written ew or iw, as in sniwen 'to snow'.

Words with either long a or long or short 0 formed the diphthong I:m/, though the resulting spelling
takes a variety of forms in Middle and Modern English, though most show ou or ow.

The major developments in the consonants took place with the fricatives, liquids and nasals. In Old
English there was no distinction, as we have seen, between the voiced and voiceless fricatives, and the
symbols <v> and <z> were rarely found in Old English texts. Although in voiced environments these
consonants in Old English may well have been voiced, the voiced forms were in complementary
distribution with the voiceless, and so there was no need to distinguish voice with a separate symbol in
writing. Although there were the two symbols <p> and <0>, they were not used to distinguish voice.
Generally voiceless consonants occurred initially and voiced ones medially in voiced environments.

The introduction of many loan-words which had voiced forms initially and voiceless ones medially meant
that the voiced and voiceless fricatives ceased to be in complementary distribution and became
phonemicised.

In Modern English we now distinguish between fan and van and between mace and maze. This
distinction arose in this post-Conquest period and the symbols to make this explicit were introduced at
the same time. Generally, the symbols <u, v> did not have the distribution characteristic of today, since
<v> was used at the beginning of words and <u> medially, giving such spellings as vp 'up' and haue
'have'.
With the nasals we notice their blurring and then their loss when final, particularly in unstressed
syllables. Many inflections had ended in -n or -m and these were lost, leaving either a schwa written as
<e> or nothing at all. This helped to destroy the weak class of nouns and made the dative plural of many
nouns endingless so that gradually they adopted the nominative ending -es.

Nouns that ended in -n in Old English usually lost the ending and the nouns often turned from a
bisyllable to a monosyllable; hence ModE maid as well as maiden from OE m;r3den (d. ModG miidchen).
Some nouns did retain their ending as ModE heaven.

Two works in this early post-Conquest period are notable for their attempts to create a regular writing
system: the Ormulum and the Ancrene Wisse. I shall deal with the former first because it comes from
the east of the country, whereas the latter may be treated as part of the general western dependence
on Standard Old English.

The opening of the preface of the Ormulum reads:

piss boc is nemmnedd Orrmulum Forrpi patt Orrm itt wrohhte.

The name of the author, which he spells Orrm, from ON armr, is cognate with OE wyrm. This name
illustrates the penetration of Old Norse into English in that a man who was writing a homiletic sermon
and who was probably a member of a religious house had a name of Old Norse form. More important is
the spelling <rr>, for Orm chose to double all consonants after short vowels. This tells us that the system
of long consonants, which were written as double consonants, found in Old English had disappeared,
and hence there was no longer a distinction between short and long consonants. All consonants were
short except where two consonants came together through the formation of a compound with two
separate words as in ModE penknife. This must be so if Orm can use double consonants for purely
orthographic purposes to indicate the length of vowels. In the line quoted above we can see that words
like piss and itt must have short i, whereas boc (ModE book) has long o. The important feature of Orm's
poem is that he tried to devise a new, regular system of writing, and in this activity he may well have
been influenced by his knowledge of the earlier standard. He also uses three different forms of g to
indicate the different sounds that might otherwise be represented by this symbol. He invented a new
symbol with a flat top to represent I g I, and used the Caroline <g> for I d 3/ which in Old English writing
systems had been written as <c3> as in a word like eC3 (ModE edge). Old English <3> he used for the
palatal sound Ij/. Throughout his poem he shows his concern for accuracy. For example, he starts
representing OE eo as a diphthong, but gradually turns to representing it as a monophthong e. He then
turned back to earlier parts of his poem and erased the 0 in as many of the previous examples of the
diphthong as he could find. However, as his language is probably from the north-east Midlands and as
his system seems to have had no followers, there is no need to examine it in detail here. Some aspects
of his phonology and lexis are significant. He uses 3ho as the feminine nominative singular of the third
person of the personal pronoun which had been heo in Old English. It is often thought that this might
represent a stage on the transformation of OE heo to ModE she. The plural of the personal pronoun
shows the penetration of the Old Norse forms which were later to be adopted in the language as a
whole.