The article is devoted to the analysis of the English language phonetic system by the example of early grammars of M. Permskii and I. Gruzinov. The paper seeks to consider the features of the English “pronunciation” by the authors of grammars. It is shown that the problem of the specific English “pronunciation” has been interesting to linguists since the middle of the XVIII century and it is still topical nowadays. The author aims to analyze and unify the first attempts of presenting the phonetic system of the English language in terms of diachrony.