and 12th centuries, with a great shift from Latin to Low German writing happening around 1150, so that the development of the language can be traced from that period. The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction, which took place in most other West Germanic languages and some Scandinavian dialects such as Danish, reducing all unstressed vowels to schwa. Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan (spoken) or dagō (days' – gen. pl.) became gesprēken and dāge. Phonology Early developments Old Saxon did not participate in the High German consonant shift, and thus preserves stop consonants p, t, k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates. The Germanic diphthongs ai, au consistently develop into long vowels ē, ō, whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei, ou or ē, ō depending on the following consonant. Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic /j/ after a consonant, e.g. "savior" (, , but ). Germanic umlaut, when it occurs with short a, is inconsistent, e.g. or "to have" (). This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjective krank (sick, ill) had the comparative forms krenker and kranker. Apart from the e, however, the umlaut is not marked in writing. Consonants The table below lists the consonants of Old Saxon. Phonemes written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. Notes: The voiceless spirants , , and gain voiced allophones (, , and ) when between vowels. This change is only faithfully reflected in writing for (represented with letters such as and ). The other two allophones continued to be written as before. Fricatives were devoiced again word-finally. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period, stops became devoiced word-finally as well. Most consonants could be geminated. Notably, geminated gave , and geminated probably gave ; Geminated resulted in . Germanic *h is retained as in these positions and thus merges with devoiced . Vowels Notes: Long vowels were rare in unstressed syllables and mostly occurred due to suffixation or compounding. Diphthongs Notes: The closing diphthongs and sometimes occur in texts (especially in Genesis), probably under the influence of Franconian or High German dialects, where they replace Old Saxon developments and (which evolved from Proto-Germanic