On the Syllabic Phonemes of Old English

Abstract

1. The phonemic system of Old English has become a matter of increasing interest to linguists in recent years. Twenty years ago, structural linguists seldom concerned themselves with the phonemes of a 'dead' language, while traditional linguists and philologists generally regarded phonemes as something exotic, something outside the purview of normal language activities and studies. Since 1939, however, we have seen a fair number of publications dealing with the Old English phonemic system or portions of it, written either from a structural viewpoint or in a manner which indicates an awareness of the structural problems of the language.l Very few of these studies deal with more than a small segment of the Old English phonemic system; most of them attack some portion of something which is described as the 'traditional interpretation' or the 'traditional view'. To my knowledge, no one has yet given us an account of all the Old English phonemes from the viewpoint of the traditional linguists. There are several reasons for this