964: Pronunciation of G in Old English Jul 30, 2017

Old English would look alien to anyone who speaks Modern English; partly this is because of the inflection—all the verbs were conjugated and all the nouns decline—and also the vocabulary was quite different. As Old English is a dead language however, pronunciation would not always be one of the reasons people may have difficulty learning it, but there were some significant differences. One way in which this differs is that G was pronounced /g/ such as in 'gum' today, but before certain vowels would become closer to /j/ as in 'yum' or 'yellow'. In Beowulf, one of the most famous Old English texts, the hero is Geatish, but while people now usually pronounce that /git/ (approximately 'geet') in Old English it would have been /jaət/ (approximately 'ya-ut').