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
The Old English Boethius and digressions throughout explaining allusions. Many of these additions come from glosses to contemporary Latin manuscripts of the "Consolation", which were obviously used in the translation process. There is also a significant number of references to Christianity within the translation which are entirely absent in Boethius's work. Sometime after the composition of the prose translation, someone adapted the prose translations of Boethius's metres into Old English alliterative verse. They are an important example of relatively securely dateable Old English poetry. The Old English Boethius The Old English Boethius is an Old English translation/adaptation of the sixth-century "Consolation of Philosophy" by