ABSTRACT
The kinds and variety of evidence available to us make any attempt to provide a detailed account of the phonology of the earliest period of the English language an extremely difficult and tentative exercise. In the first place, rely for almost our entire knowledge of the language's phonology during this episode upon the testimony of orthographic representations. Indeed, during most of the period covered by the eighth to the thirteenth century that are confronted by an orthographic standardization not unlike that people find in Modern English printing practice, where the same set of spelling conventions is regarded as equally suitable for the representation of Englishes as phonologically disparate as those of California and West Africa. However, the Old English picture is not quite one of unrelieved spelling uniformity and texts showing some orthographic variation do survive especially from the very beginning and later parts of the period.
