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 and its imperative and participle forms from "bēon". (Modern German had an analogous, but even more complicated, development for its verb "sein".) In late OE and ME, the form "earon"/"earun", from the Old Norse "erun", replaced bēoþ and sind (See also List of English words of Old Norse origin). Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: