AUFSTZE PROBLEMS IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY: INTRODUCTION This special issue of Anglia contains selected papers from the workshop th ‘Problems in Historical English Phonology’, which took place at the 15 International Conference of English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) in Munich, 29 August 2008. Together the papers in this issue present a wide range of phonological conundrums and, in many cases, they also offer a number of compelling solutions to them. The papers are presented in ap- proximate chronological order, which also roughly corresponds with the fact that the first two papers, by Goblirsch and Vennemann, consider the development of speech segments, whereas the following three papers, by Noel, Mailhammer and Lutz, are mainly concerned with suprasegmental issues. The first paper, by Kurt Goblirsch, investigates the (pre)historic devel- opment of the Germanic obstruents. Goblirsch is able to present to a larger audience some of the results of his recent monograph treatment on Ger- manic sound shifts, but from the vantage point of English. Like much of Goblirsch’s work, the paper is characterized by its vast coverage and detailed scrutiny of the dialectal data, not only from English but also from other West Germanic dialects. Goblirsch covers the main changes which led to the English system of obstruents, but he also seeks to clarify the phonetic history of the individual obstruent phonation types, from the earliest times right up into present-day varieties of English. Such an endeavor represents a serious challenge to the historical linguist, not least because many traditional dia- lects of British English evidence a range of different phonation types, espe- cially in the case of the plosive consonants. It is curious to note in this regard that the phonetic intricacies of the many regional varieties of English have gone virtually unstudied until comparatively recently, not only among his- torical linguists, but also among phoneticians. This trend is now changing somewhat as a result of the work of historical linguists like Goblirsch and a rising interest in sociophonetic research. Theo Vennemann investigates an early assimilatory change which he terms ‘glide accretion’. In brief, the change involves the creation of a palatal or labial glide before especially palatal and velar fricatives respectively, e. g. eight (< OE ), eahta bought (< OE bohte). The change has received com- paratively little attention so far. Remarkably, the change resurfaces in a number of different languages at different points in time and over a limited geographical area, encompassing not only English but also Insular Celtic languages and even the Germanic dialect of the Ubians, which is fragmen- tally attested in early inscriptions of the Rhineland. Vennemann concludes DOI 10.1515/angl.2009.025