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
Grammatical number ("He goes" versus "They go"). English treats zero with the plural number. Old English did contain dual grammatical numbers. The Finnish language has a plural form of almost every noun case (except the comitative, which is formally only plural). However, when a number is used, or a word signifying a number (monta- many), the singular version of the partitive case is used. and where no specific number is mentioned, the plural version of the partitive case is used and in the possessive (genitive) In modern Romance languages, nouns, adjectives and articles are declined according to number (singular or plural only).