Phonological history of Old English Proto-Germanic phonology and Old English phonology. Proto-Germanic had two allophones each: stops and fricatives . The stops occurred: By West Germanic times, was pronounced as a stop in all positions. The fricative allophones are sometimes indicated in reconstructed forms to make it easier to understand the development of Old English consonants. Old English retained the allophony , which in case of palatalization (see below) became . Later, non-palatalized became word-initially. The allophony was broken when merged with , the voiced allophone of . A number of phonological processes affected Old English in the period before the earliest documentation. The processes
Old English grammar Old English had free word order, this is not quite true, as there were conventions for the positioning of subject, object and verb in clause. Old English did not use forms equivalent to "who, when, where" in relative clauses (as in "The man whom I saw") or subordinate clauses ("When I got home, I went to sleep"). Instead, relative clauses used one of the following: Preposition-fronting ("The man with whom I spoke") did not normally occur. Subordinate clauses tended to use correlative conjunctions, e.g. The word order usually distinguished the subordinate clause (with verb-final order) from the main clause (with