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

language.

This is episode 35, English sounds and Roman letters.

Last time, we looked at how the sounds of early English began to change shortly after

the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain.

Two sounds were beginning to emerge, and these changes coincided with the first attempts

to write down the language with the Roman alphabet.

So in this episode, we'll look at how those first scribes adapted the alphabet to the

English language, and in the process we'll see the ultimate origin of some of the strange

spellings we have in modern English.

Let me begin by noting that I had originally intended to discuss the first English alphabet

in one episode, but there's a lot of material here, and it can be a little confusing to keep

track of everything.

So I've decided to cover the first English alphabet in two parts.

It's important to keep in mind that Latin and English had many sounds in common.

So in those cases, the application of the Roman alphabet to English was pretty straightforward.

But there were also many unique sounds in English, sounds that didn't exist in Latin.

And that's where things started to get a little more complicated.

So in this episode, I'm going to explore how the alphabet was applied to the sounds which

I discussed in the last episode.

These were mainly the sounds in the back of the throat, and the newer sounds which evolved

out of those original sounds.

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