LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Old English Alphabet: Modern English
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Students use the University of Virginia on-line Old English Practice sentences to emulate the audio of Old English speakers and Modern English speakers who use Old English vowel inflections. First, have students become acquainted with the subtle vowel changes which can be foreign to speakers of American English. Perhaps students can work in pairs, listening carefully to one another's mimicry, noting any differences. Students access these Modern English sentences by clicking on Practice Sentences A. Two options for listening are enabled. The WAV files are described as more clear, but they are larger files to download. The WAV files are best for those with a fast connection; WINAMP will read them.
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Old English vowels had a somewhat different quality than their modern English equivalents, although certain aspects of dialects in Britain reflect ancient usage. There were seven vowels and fourteen distinct vowel sounds. The evolution of various words into divergent forms though they only differed in vowel length in the original Old English proves that there must've been a noticeable difference between short and long vowels. In cases where the long and short sounds seem the same, the key to their distinction is intonation length; an 'áé' (long ash) will be held for two counts, while an 'æ' will be held for one, making it short and choppy. Finnish has a similar separation of long and short vowels, although the Uralic language applies it to all vowels, whereas Old English only makes an absolute necessity of intonation length with 'y', 'a', and 'æ'. It is important to remember... that long vowels must not only sound different from their short counterparts, they should be held for slightly longer, as well.
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The student reads the Old English spelling, pronunciation, and grammar information from the suggested Web site. Depending on student ability and teacher preference, the teacher may wish to assist students in the reading process. There is much information presented here, and some students may benefit from partner reading and/or teacher-directed group reading. The information may, of course, be printed and read off-line. The teacher may wish to set the stage by explaining that variations in the spelling of Old English words were common; linguists have made assumptions regarding Old English pronunciation and scholars have a general idea, but we can't be entirely certain as there are no surviving speakers; pronunciation of vowel sounds is complex due to the presence of diphthongs (teacher may wish to adopt a southern accent to demonstrate and define a diphthong - Haayee yuawl!); the complexity of Old English cases means that a "hat" wouldn't always be a "hat." Sentences like, "The hat is green," and "Please give me the hat" would result in different spellings and pronunciations for the word "hat" since it switches from the Nominative to the Dative case in that example; just like in French or Spanish, Old English nouns had a gender; there were many pronoun changes from Old English to Modern English... the words "us" and "we" have not changed; verbs gained endings depending on their tense.
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Old English scribes did not have so strict a set of rules to follow, and usage varies widely even among books produced at the same time and place. Some scribes used punctuation with fair reliability to mark clause- and sentence-boundaries, while others punctuated so lightly that their work is, for practical purposes, unpunctuated. To meet the expectations of readers accustomed to modern rules of punctuation, it has long been the practice of editors to modernize the punctuation of Old English works. Editors have debated how heavy this editorial punctuation should be, how much it should be influenced by the punctuation of the manuscript, and whether modern punctuation is adequate for representing Old English syntax.
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