The Old English pronunciator
This website presents the result of an experiment to formalize sound changes in Old and Middle English, as well as the relationship between orthography and pronunciation of Old English. The following sections might be of interest to you:
- Pronounce! automatically converts an Old English text to its pronunciation (the result is represented in IPA*). In most cases the convertor yields reliable results.
- Test search attempts to explain/analyze (however it's still very clumsy and imprecise) the sound changes between and OE and ME form of the same word (but please take its suggestions and results as a guess only).
- Rules: these rules are used in the process of transforming the orthography of OE to its pronunciation (and also in the search system)
- Characters and Phones show the orthographic and phonetic material that is worked with.
- Playground allows you to play with some other things: entering OE words in ASCII and playing with "phonetic wildcards" (a system for describing a set of phones based on their phonetic properties)
* It is necessary that your browser/OS supports special IPA characters (if you see the following 5 characters, you should be ok: ǣæÐðþ).
Some data that I work with (Kirshenbaum's phonetic alphabet, phonetic properties) are taken from the following source: Usenet IPA/ASCII transcription.
The whole experiment was the subject of my BA thesis (written at the Department of English Language at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague). The text of the thesis is available for download here: BA thesis - Daniel Marek, Phonological Changes between Old and Middle English (An Algorithmic Approach). Also, I'm happy to announce that the thesis was awarded the Vilém Mathesius Award.