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
Longest word in English likely to be encountered in general text are "deinstitutionalization" and "counterrevolutionaries", with 22 letters each. A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is "uncharacteristically", at 20 letters. The word "internationalization" is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last. In his play "Assemblywomen" ("Ecclesiazousae"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients: Henry Carey's farce