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 subjunctive Old English subjunctive The subjunctive mood is a flexible grammatical instrument for expressing different gradients in thought when referring to events that are not stated as fact. It is still used frequently in such languages as French, German and Spanish, and also in languages outside the Indo-European branch such as Turkish and Hungarian. In modern English only remnants of a once complex system of separate conjugations exist. What once could be expressed succinctly with the mere change of a conjugation is now only expressible, more often than not, by using word-laden modal constructions. The word subjunctive as used to denote