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=David Crystal's Concept of Evidence of Old English Sounds=

David Crystal’s book ‘The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language’ (third edition), published in 2019, includes the concept of four forms of evidence used to understand the different sounds within Old English. These are: Alphabetical Logic, Comparative Reconstruction, Sound Changes and Poetic Evidence. Using these, we are able to reconstruct and decipher technical linguistic aspects of Old English using more modern forms of English as a comparison.

Alphabetical Logic
Crystal describes one form of evidence as Alphabetical Logic, the idea that missionaries maintained the pronunciation of most written letters within the alphabet, and new letters were in turn created to define new sounds. The writing form of Old English matched with the oral form, as it was a phonetic language in which almost all letters are spoken when pronouncing a word. Regional dialects provided the easiest form of evidence as they were not well adapted or using the standardised rules of written language seen in dialects used in cities or heavily populated areas during that time period.

Comparative Reconstruction
Comparative Reconstruction, also known as Linguistic Reconstruction refers to the idea of using certain words or phrases from different languages and dialects that are derived from Old English and comparing them to Old English in an effort to understand and interpret relationships between them. An example of this would be Grimm's Law.

Sound Changes
Sound Change involves the notion that over time, pronunciation of certain letters or sounds will shift due to exposure to a number of internal or external factors like trading or written work such as books, etc. An example of this would be 'H dropping' in which a speaker will drop the 'h' sound used in a word such as 'horse' or 'here' and say "'orse" "'ere" instead. 'H dropping' occurred after Old English, with the language pronouncing the 'h' in certain words earlier on.

Poetic Evidence
Poems allow an insight into how certain words have similar sounding vowels or how stress will land on a vowel within a poetic structure using a plethora of poetic devices like alliteration and rhyme. This would also allow us to understand the written form of Old English too, using the word structure to understand how sounds are created and where stress is placed within the words.

Criticisms
One of the main problems with using these forms of evidence is based on how inconsistent Old English manuscripts and other forms of written work were. Therefore, one would need a significant amount of evidence in order to properly compare and define universal rules of the language. It is difficult to understand and state where an error has occurred, or whether it was an early attempt at changing the written language, for example.