|Spoken by:||Evolved into Middle then Modern English| |Spoken
in:||The British Isles,| |Language family:||(West) Germanic;
Indo-European| Late west Saxon reconstructed pronunciation:
|Diphthongs||Short (monomoraic)||Long (bimoraic)| |First element
is close||iy||iːy| |Both elements are mid||eo||eːo| |Both
elements are open||æɑ||æːɑ| Old English grammar is quite complex
and is typically that of a archaic Indo-European language, and
if you know other archaic Germanic languages (or, to a lesser
extent, German, or, to a lesser extent again, other modern
Germanic languages) you will find it much easier to learn. Old
English is a highly phonetic language, and the spelling can
almost always be fully predicted from the pronunciation (with
the rare exception of a double letter in the spelling, which
only makes a difference in the pronunciation if it is a double
plosive/stop), and vice-verse (with the rare exception of a
certain letter being pronounced several ways). Common
difficulties Edit Old English retains four (an