Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 34, sounds like old English.

Last time we looked at the arrival of Christian missionaries in Britain, and we saw that they

not only brought their religion, they also brought their ability to write.

Specifically, they brought the Roman alphabet, and that enabled those early missionaries

to work with the King of Kent to produce the first known document in the English language,

the Lawless of Ethelbert.

But that process of applying the Roman writing system to English, it wasn't as simple as

you might think.

The sounds of English were sometimes different from those of Latin, and the way in which the

Roman alphabet was applied to English ultimately affected the way many words were spelled

in English.

So in this episode, we're going to explore the sounds of old English, and next time we'll

look more closely at how the Roman alphabet was applied to those sounds.

And when we're done with these next couple of episodes, some of the strange spellings

which we still have in modern English will start to make a little more sense.

We'll start by focusing on the sounds of the language, and in this episode I'm going

to be talking a lot about sound shifts again.

So if you like those early episodes about Grimm's Law, I think you'll find this episode

interesting as well.

And since I'm going to be talking about the alphabet over the next couple of episodes,

let me begin by plugging the history of the alphabet audiobook, which I've put together

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