Languages undergo change at all linguistic levels: phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, semantic.
1. Phonetic: Old English had the sound u-umlaut, while that sound is no longer present in modern English (ME).
2. Phonemic: Old English regarded [v] as an allophone of /f/, while in ME /v/ is a phoneme itself.
3. Morphological: Old English had case endings on normal nouns to distinguish indirect objects and direct objects. ME has no such marking.
4. Syntactic: Old English allowed all questions to be formed by inverting the subject and the verb. ME only allows this with auxiliaries, and uses ”do” otherwise.
5. Semantic: In Old English, “girl” referred to young men and women.
Linguistics 