Old English vowels

Old English texts contain seven letters which denote vowels. There is evidence that each of these represents two distinct phonemes, one 'short' and one 'long':

majuscule	minuscule	short	long
a	A	a or ɑ	ɑ:
e	E	ɛ or e	e:
i	I	ɪ or i	i:
o	O	ɔ or o	o:
u	U	ʊ or u	u:
y	Y	y	y:
æ	Æ	æ	æ:

Note that there are two different proposed pronunciations for some of the short vowels.

The evidence for phonemic status of vowel length involves the existence of minimal pairs involving homographs like:

written	short reflex	long reflex
ham	ham	home
is	is	ice
rod	rod	rood (i.e. cross)

Because one reading of each homograph underwent a vowel change during the Great Vowel Shift, it is believed that these words were not homophones in Old English. In addition, we can use evidence of vowel shift in Modern English to identify long vowels in Old English.

In modern versions of Old English texts, long vowels are often marked with a macron: ā, ē, ī etc. The original Old English texts often use different glyphs: (a) 'i' without a dot; (b) 'y' with a dot; (c) a version of 'E' that looks a bit like 'C'; (d) sometimes a version of 'a' without the curly bit on top.

There are three digraphs/diphthongs, each of which can be either short or long:

digraph	sound
eo	eo or eʊ
ea	æɑ
ie	ɪ

Note that the digraph 'ie' was probably not pronounced as a diphthong. Long diphthongs/digraphs are conventionally designated by placing a macron above the first letter in the digraph.

Note also that the short vowels 'a', 'æ' and 'ea' are closely related - they evolved out of a single Proto-Germanic vowel 'a' (by phonological conditioning), and evolved back into a single Middle English vowel 'a'. This is important to know to understand certain inflectional paradigms, e.g. 'dæg' vs 'dagas'; 'geat' vs 'gatu'.