Old English language

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Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language spoken in England some 1000 years ago. It is a West Germanic language and was very similar to Old Norse. Unlike modern English, Old English was a language rich with morphological diversity, and was still pronounced basically as spelled. It maintained several distinct cases, such as the dative, genitive and instrumental, which are only marginally marked today.

Old English was not a static form. Its usage covered a period of some 700 or so years from approximately 450 AD to some time after the Norman invasion in 1066 when the language underwent a major and dramatic transition, during a period which is (generally) now referred to as Middle English. During the 700 years in which it was in use it assimilated some aspects of the indigenous pre-Celtic languages, some of the Celtic languages which it came into contact with, some of the two variants of the invading Scandinavian languages occupying and controlling the Danelaw, and Norman French in the wake of 1066.

Further, the influence of Latin on Old English should not be ignored. A large percentage of the educated and literate population, monks, clerics, etc, were competent in what was then the prevalent lingua franca. There were at least three noteable periods of Latin influence. The first ocurred before the ancestral Saxons left Europe for England. The second began when they were converted to Christianity; but the largest single transfer of Latin-based words occurred following the French conquest of 1066, after which an enormous number of Old French words entered the language, which were of course themselves derived ultimately from classical Latin. It is sometimes possible to roughly date the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone, though this is not always reliable.

The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as "futhark") to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Words were spelled as they were pronounced. Silent letters therefore did not often exist in Old English: for example, the Old English word for a "knight", cniht, had four distinct consonants, kuh-NIH-t, with the "h" sounding more or less like the German "ich". Another side-effect of spelling words as they sounded was that spelling was extremely variable -- the spelling of a word would reflect differences in time, by region, and from author to author. Thus, for example, the word "and" could be spelled either "and" or "ond". Old English spelling is even more muddled than modern English spelling. Most students these days learn using normalized versions, and are only introduced to variant spellings after they have mastered the basics of the language.

The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. These tend to be everyday words and those which are concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern seaboard of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language which is related to English in that they both derive from the same ancestral Germanic language. One theory holds that the presence of very similar words in both Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English -- that is, if your Nordic neighbor says "horsu" and you say "horsa", you split the difference and just say "horse", reducing the ending to no more than a silent vowel.

The number of Celtic loanwords is of a much lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian. As few as twelve loanwords have been identified as being entirely secure. Out of all the known and suspected Celtic loanwords, most are names of geographical features, and especially rivers.

Dialects

To further complicate matters, Old English was rich in dialect forms. The four principal dialect forms of Old English were: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon. Each of these was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, Northumbria and Kent were wholly overrun by Vikings during the 9th century. Most of Mercia was overrun as well, though a portion of it was successfully defended by and then integrated into Wessex.

After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing: regional dialects continued even after that time, as evidenced both by the existence of Middle English dialects later on, and by common sense (people don't spontaneously develop new accents when there is a change of political power).

However, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's home kingdom. It seems likely that, with consolidation of power it became necessary to standardize the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the remoter areas of the kingdom. As a result, paperwork was written in West Saxon. The Church was likewise affected, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious program to translate religious materials into the vernacular. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the program worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory the Great's treatise on administration, "Pastoral Care."

Due at least partially to the centralization of power, and to the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.

Pronunciation

Vowels

�/� (called ash) is a as in "bat". (In general, Americans are better at pronouncing this short, nasal "a" than the British, especially British from the southern half of the country. The Scottish have retained this short "a" as well.)

Consonants

Consonants equivalent to Modern English

b, d, k, l, m, n, p, r, t, x

h

If the letter h appears at the beginning of a word it is pronounced as it would be in Modern English.

However, if it it appears after a vowel, the letter h is a velar or palatal fricative (a normal h sound is a glottal fricative), the actual sound being contingent upon the preceding vowel: after a front vowel (�, e, i, y) it is palatal, as in German "ich", and after a back vowel (a, o, u) it is velar, like the Scottish word "loch" or German "Bach" (which is not pronounced "Bock").

s

s is pronounced as the Modern English equivalent if it is at the beginning of a word, the end of a word, or if it is adjacent to an unvoiced consonant.

If it comes between vowels or a vowel and a consonant that is voiced then it is pronounced like the letter z in Modern English.

f

f is occasionally pronounced like a "v". For example, our modern "fox" and "vixen" ultimately derive from the same word.

Consonant pairs

� and �

Thorn and eth are used interchangeably to represent both voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds (the sound at the beginning of "the" is voiced; the sound at the end of "with" is unvoiced). While in Icelandic � is used for unvoiced "th", and � is used for voiced "th", the two sounds were merely allophones in Old English and so the symbols are used arbitrarily.

sc

sc is pronounced as the "sh" sound, as in "ship". (The OE word for a ship is scip, the word for fish is fisc...)

c

c can be rendered either a soft consonant pair as in "child" (OE cild) or a hard single as in "king" (OE cyning). The sound is largely determined by the word itself and the vowels adjoining it in that word. In modern editions, a soft "c", with a sound like the modern "ch", will be indicated with a dot above the c.

Old English Grammar

Characters

In addition to most of the characters in the current alphabet, Old English supported three other characters:

�/� - [[�|ash]] (�sc) pronounced as the 'a' in Modern English "cat"

�/� - thorn which represents the Modern English pair "th"

�/� - eth which also represents the Modern English pair "th"

Additionally the letter w has a different manifestation in Old English as the character Ƿ/ƿ wynn.

In modern editions of Old English materials, Ash, Thorn, and Eth are usually retained. Wynn is silently amended to "W" in nearly all editions, barring a few produced in the late nineteenth century.

Old English did not use v and j since these were later additions to the alphabet; q and z are sparingly found. All four of these came into more common use as Latin loanwords became more prevalent.

Syntax

As a West Germanic language, Old English syntax has a great deal of common ground with Dutch and German. Old English is not dependent upon S (subject), V (verb), O (object) or "SVO" word order in the way that Modern English is. The syntax of an Old English sentence can be in any of these shapes: SVO order, VSO order, and OVS order. The only constant rule, as in German, is that the verb must come as the second concept. That is, in the sentence 'in the town, we ate some food', it could appear as 'in the town, ate we some food', or 'in the town, ate some food we'. This variable word order is especially common in poetry. Prose, while still displaying variable word order, is much more likely to use SVO ordering. Similarly, word order became less flexible as time went on: the older a text is, the less likely it is to have a fixed word order.

To further complicate the matter, prepositions may appear after their object, though they are not postpositions, as they may occur in front of the noun too, and usually do, e.g.:

God cw�� him �us to
(lit) God said him thus to
i.e. God said thus to him

Verbs

Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or weak verbs.

Strong Verbs

Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation (known as Ablaut). In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. We still have verbs like this in modern English: for example, "sing, sang, sung" is a strong verb. So is "swim, swam, swum." And "choose, chose." The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old English, there were seven major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes. Learning these is a major challenge for students of the language.

There are many fewer strong verbs in use today.

Weak Verbs

Weak verbs are formed principally by adding endings to past and participles. An example is "walk, walked" or "learn, learned". There are only three different classes of weak verb.

Linguistic trends have greatly favored weak verbs over the last 1200 years. In Old English, especially early on, strong verbs were the dominant form of verb. Today, there are many more weak verbs than strong verbs. Some verbs that were originally strong have become weak; most foreign verbs are adopted as weak verbs; and when verbs are made from nouns (eg "to scroll" or "to water") the resulting verb is weak. Additionally, weak verbs are easier to conjugate, since there are fewer different classes of them. In combination, these factors have drastically reduced the number of strong verbs, so that in modern English weak verbs are the dominant form (although occasionally a weak verb may turn into a strong verb through the process of analogy).

Atypical Verbs

Additionally there is a further group of four verbs which are anomalous, the verbs "will", "do", "go" and "be". These four have their own conjugation schemes which differ significantly from all the other classes of verb. This is not especially unusual: "will", "do", "go", and "be" are the most commonly used verbs in the language, and are very important to the meaning of the sentences they are used in. They have their own conjugation schemes to make them as distinct as possible, to reduce the possibility that a listener will mis-hear the word.

Nouns

Old English nouns were declined -- that is, the ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in the sentence. There were five major cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental. The instrumental case is also known as "ablative", for those who know Latin. The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence (eg "cyning" means "king"). The genitive case indicated posession (eg the "cyninges scip" is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship"). The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence (eg "hringas cyninge" means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king"). The accusative indicates the direct object of the sentence (eg "��elbald lufode cyning" means "��elbald loved the king", where ��elbald is the subject and the king is the object). The instrumental case indicates the agency whereby something was done, eg "lifde sweorde", "he lived by the sword", where "sweorde" is the instrumental form of "sweord"). There were different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (eg "hring", one ring) or plural ("hringas", many rings).

Nouns are also categorized by grammatical gender -- masculine, feminine, or neuter. Masculine and neuter words generally share their endings. Feminine words have their own subset of endings.

Furthermore, Old English nouns are divided as either strong or weak. Weak nouns have their own endings. In general, weak nouns are easier than strong nouns, since they had begun to lose their declensional system. However, there is a great deal of overlap between the various classes of noun: they are not totally distinct from one another. There are only a couple dozen endings in practice, so it's a lot easier than it sounds at first.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Old English are declined like nouns. They fall under the same categories (strong or weak, masculine or feminine or neuter, singular or plural) and have the same number of cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental). There is a great deal of overlap between the endings of adjectives and those of nouns, especially since you usually match the two. That is, you assign the same ending to the adjective and the word it describes.

Pronouns

Most of pronouns are declined by number, case and gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, eg "we two" or "you two" or "they two"). These were uncommon even then, but remained in use throughout the period.

Personal pronouns

1st Person
Case	Singular	Plural	Dual
Nominative	ic, �c	w�	wit
Genitive	m�n	�re	uncer
Dative	m�	�s	unc
Accusative	mec, m�	�sic, �s	uncit, unc

2nd Person
Case	Singular	Plural	Dual
Nominative	��	g�	git
Genitive	�in	�ower	incer
Dative	�e	�ow	inc
Accusative	��c, ��	�owic, �ow	incit, inc

3rd Person
Case	Singular	Plural	Dual
Nominative	h� m., h�o f., hit n.	hi� m., h�o f.	�
Genitive	his m., hire f., his n.	hiera m., heora f.	�
Dative	him m., hire f., him n.	him	�
Accusative	hine m., h�e f., hit n.	hi� m., h�o f.	�

Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case �ower became "your", �re became "our", m�n became "mine".

Prepositions

Prepositions (like our words by, for, with, because) often follow the word which they govern, in which case they are called postpositions. They are not declined.

Front Mutation

Front Mutation (also known as "I/J Mutation") is an important type of linguistic change, in which if a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable which contained a letter "i" or "j", then the previous stressed vowel is fronted or raised. The "i" or "j" is dropped from the word or changes to "e".

A particular class of nouns contain an "i" in the dative singular and plural nominative accusative forms. Consequent upon front mutation, irregular singular/plural oppositions therefore occur such as fot and fet (our foot and feet), and mus and mys (our mouse and mice).

Front mutation is particularly important to the development of English, since it explains many of the changes in pronunciation that have taken place over the last 1200 years.

Old English examples

A sample of Old English can be found in the Beowulf article.

External links

The Electronic Introduction to Old English

[[de:Angels�chsische Sprache]]

References

Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Old_English_language" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_language, used under the GNU Free Documentation License