In Modern English, as you know, the fricatives [f, v, θ, ð, s, z] are all separate phonemes. But in Old English, although all of these phones occurred, they made up only three phonemes, each with a voiceless and a voiced allophone: [f, v], [s, z], [θ, ð]. The voiceless allophones are the more general (default) forms.
This proves that [f] and [v] are distinct phonemes in English. In fact, since [f] and [v] differ in only one feature—i.e., voicing— this shows that voicing is a distinctive feature in English. Fat and vat constitute a minimal pair for those two phonemes— a pair of words that differ in only one sound.
The 'f' represented the soft 's' which is why you will find it spelt 'houfe' and 'houses' in old English texts.
Old English had a fairly large set of dorsal (postalveolar, palatal, velar) and glottal consonants: [k, tʃ, ɡ, dʒ, ɣ, j, ʃ, x, ç, h]. Typically only /k, tʃ, ɣ, j, ʃ, x/ are analyzed as separate phonemes; [dʒ] is considered an allophone of /j/, [ɡ] an allophone of /ɣ/, and [h] and [ç] allophones of /x/.
Old English did have one set of vowels, at least in the earlier periods, which we no longer have: front rounded vowels, long and short, written as y. This is similar to an umlauted u in German, or the u in French tu. To form it, begin by saying (and holding) a long or short i.
The Old English fricatives /f, θ, s/ had voiceless and voiced allophones, the voiced forms occurring in certain environments, such as between vowels. In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes: /f, v, θ, ð, s, z/. See Middle English phonology – Voiced fricatives.
Monophthongs - Examples of 12 Pure Vowel Sounds - EnglishBix
There are 12 pure vowels or monophthongs in English - /i:/, /?/, /?/, /u:/, /e/, /?/, /?:/, /?:/, /æ/, /?/, /?:/ and /?/.
In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of English by greater use of a larger set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.
Old English has a complex system of noun declensions (i.e. changing the endings of nouns depending on their role in the sentence). There are five main cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental.
You should notice there are four letters which are not present in modern English: wynn (Ƿ), thorn (Þ), eth (Ð), and ash (Æ), and there is no 'j', 'v', 'w', or 'z', but that's not to say these sounds are not represented in Old English.
The word once had two forms—stressed and unstressed. In primitive Old English, it was spelled differently and pronounced differently depending on where it fell in a sentence. The unstressed form (of) had a shorter pronunciation and the “f” was pronounced like “v.”
By the mid-16th century, the "v" form was used to represent the consonant and "u" the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter V. U and V were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later. The rounded variant became the modern-day version of U, and the letter's former pointed form became V.
That phonetic difference leads to a substantial difference in meaning in English, so we say that /f/ and /v/ are contrastive in English. And if two sounds are contrastive in a given language, then those two sounds are considered two different phonemes in that language.
Prevocalic Voicing is when a voiceless consonant (e.g. k, f) in the beginning of a word is substituted with a voiced consonant (e.g. g, v) (e.g. “gup” for “cup”). This pattern can be present until age 6.
fricative, in phonetics, a consonant sound, such as English f or v, produced by bringing the mouth into position to block the passage of the airstream, but not making complete closure, so that air moving through the mouth generates audible friction.
Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West Saxon in southern and southwestern England.
The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon.
There are five cases in Old English: the nominative, the genitive, the dative, the accusative, and the instrumental.
Old English itself has three dialects: West Saxon, Kentish, and Anglian. West Saxon was the language of Alfred the Great (871-901) and therefore achieved the greatest prominence; accordingly, the chief Old English texts have survived in this dialect.
Old English: The word order and the sentence structure were rather free. Middle English: Middle English has the same sentence structure as the Modern English (Subject-verb-object). Modern English: Modern English follows the subject-verb-object sentence structure.
The main difference between Old English and Middle English can be described as the simplification of grammar; in Middle English, many grammatical cases of Old English saw a reduction and inflections in Old English were simplified.