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...literary work or for pronunciation. The dialects that were spread over France at this time were so many separate developments of vulger Latin. Among them was one, that of Paris, that was destined to become the standard of literary French. The differences between Norman French and this ancestor of modern French are so few and unimportant that they can be ignored. Thus, when we consider the language of Normandy at this time, we need only take into account the ancestor of modern French...
Beside the open and closed sound of e, as in modern French, there was still a third sound in old French, about which we can only theorize. It may have been like one of the other two except in length...
...apparent diphthongs in modern French, ai, ei, eu, ou and au, were pronounced separately in old Frence. Exception must be made in this case to au, for it does not appear in old writings, although it may have existed in speech. The sound oi, which seems so eminently English, is in reality of old French origin...
Among consonant sounds we find similar variations. The English sounds of ch and g, as found in church and gentle, although they do not exist in modern French, are found in the French of the eleventh century. There are fewer silent consonants, too, in the older tongure. Final d in modern French is pronounced like t when followed by a word beginning with a vowel. In old French the spelling was made to conform with the pronunciation...
There were certain peculiarities in old French that the modern tongue does not possess, which brought the language nearer the English. The sound, as in thin, is an example. When we say faith we are reproducing almost exactly the old French word...