Old English
The first page of the Beowulf manuscriptOld English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc) or
Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now
England and southern and
eastern Scotland between at least the
mid-5th century and the
mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.
It is a West Germanic language closely related to
Old Frisian and
Old Saxon.
Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to
Classical Latin. In most respects, including its grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern English. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two.
Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number.
Nouns came in numerous declensions (with deep parallels in
Latin,
Ancient Greek and
Sanskrit). Verbs came in nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as
Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses (vs. the six "
tenses" – really tense/aspect combinations – of
Latin), and have no synthetic passive voice (although it did still exist in
Gothic).
Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to the natural gender that prevails in modern English. That is, the grammatical gender of a given noun did not necessarily correspond to its natural gender, even for nouns referring to people. For example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, se mōna (the Moon) was masculine, and þat wīf "
the woman/wife" was neuter. (Compare German cognates die Sonne, der Mond, das Weib.) Pronominal usage could reflect either natural or grammatical gender, when it conflicted.
From the
9th century,
Old English experienced heavy influence from
Old Norse, a member of the related
North Germanic group of languages.
The Anglo-Saxon runes (also Anglo-Frisian), also known as futhorc (or fuþorc), is a runic alphabet, extended from the Elder Futhark from 24 to between 26 and 33 characters. They were used probably from the 5th century onward, recording Old English and Old Frisian. They remained in use in Anglo-Saxon England throughout the 6th to 10th centuries, although runic script became increasingly confined to manuscript tradition as a topic of antiquarian interest after the 9th century, and it disappeared even as a learned curiosity soon after the Norman conquest.HistoryOld English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion.
Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic (also known as North Sea Germanic) dialects from the 5th century. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmon's Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts (notably Franks Casket) date to the 8th century.
The Anglo-Saxon futhorc (abecedarium anguliscum) as presented in Codex Sangallensis 878 (9th century).The history of
Old English can be subdivided into:
Prehistoric
Old English (c. 450 to 650); for this period, Old English is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive (with the exception of limited epigraphic evidence). This language, or bloc of languages, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre-dating documented
Old English or Anglo-Saxon, has also been called Primitive Old English.
Early Old English (c. 650 to 900), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon, Bede, Cynewulf and Aldhelm.
Late Old English (c. 900 to 1066), the final stage of the language leading up to the Norman conquest of England and the subsequent transition to Early Middle English.
The Old English period is followed by
Middle English (12th to 15th century),
Early Modern English (c. 1480 to 1650) and finally
Modern English (after 1650).
The Thames zoomorphic silver-gilt (knife?) mount (late 8th century).Influence of other languagesIn the course of
the Early Middle Ages,
Old English assimilated some aspects of a few languages with which it came in contact, such as the two dialects of
Old Norse from the contact with the Norsemen or "
Danes" who by the late 9th century controlled large tracts of land in
northern and
eastern England, which came to be known as
the Danelaw.
Latin influenceA large percentage of the educated and literate population of the time were competent in
Latin, which was
the scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of Europe. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into
Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone.
There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before
the ancestral Angles and
Saxons left
continental Europe for
Britain. The second began when
the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and
Latin-speaking priests became widespread.
The third and largest single transfer of Latin-based words happened after
the Norman Conquest of 1066, when an enormous number of
Norman (
Old French) words began to influence the language. Most of
these Oïl language words were themselves derived from
Old French and ultimately from
classical Latin, although
a notable stock of Norse words were introduced or re-introduced in Norman form.
The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English.
One of the ways the influence of
Latin can be seen is that many
Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from
Anglo-Saxon but using
Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service.
In 1066, the Battle of Hastings began the Norman Conquest. It had a huge impact on the history of the English languageThe language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc or fuþorc) to
the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language.
Old English words were spelled, more or less, as they were pronounced. Often, the Latin alphabet fell short of being able to adequately represent Anglo-Saxon phonetics. Spellings, therefore, can be thought of as best-attempt approximations of how the language actually sounded.
The "
silent" letters in many
Modern English words were pronounced in
Old English: for example, the
c and
h in
cniht, the
Old English ancestor of the modern
knight, were pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling Old English words phonetically using the Latin alphabet was that spelling was extremely variable. A word's spelling could also reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect. Words also endured idiosyncratic spelling choices of individual authors, some of whom varied spellings between works. Thus, for example, the word and could be spelt either and or ond.
Norse influence
The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century:
[
Red] Old West Norse dialect
[
Orange] Old East Norse dialect
[
Pink] Old Gutnish
[
Yellow] Old English
[
Blue] Crimean Gothic
[
Green] Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility
The second major source of loanwords to
Old English were
the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words 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 coast of England and Scotland).
The Vikings spoke
Old Norse, a language related to
Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral
Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of
Old Norse and
Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in
Old English.
Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the north and latest in the south-west, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory,
the influence of Old Norse on the lexicon of the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, the pronoun they, the verb form are, and hundreds of other words.
Celtic influenceTraditionally, and following the Anglo-Saxon preference prevalent in the 19th century, many maintain that the influence of
Brythonic Celtic on
English has been small, citing the small number of
Celtic loanwords taken into the language.
The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian. However, a more recent and still minority view is that
distinctive Celtic traits can be discerned in syntax from the post-Old English period, such as the regular progressive construction and analytic word order in opposition to the Germanic languages.
DialectsOld English should
not be regarded as
a single monolithic entity just as
Modern English is also
not monolithic. It emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes, and it was not until the later Anglo-Saxon period that they fused together into
Old English. Even then, it continued to exhibit local language variation, remnants of which remain in
Modern English dialects.
Thus it is misleading, for example, to consider
Old English as having a single sound system. Rather, there were multiple
Old English sound systems.
Old English has variation along regional lines as well as variation across different times.
For example, the language attested in
Wessex during the time of
Æthelwold of
Winchester, which is named
Late West Saxon (or
Æthelwoldian Saxon), is considerably different from the language attested in
Wessex during the time of
Alfred the Great's court, which is named E
arly West Saxon (or
Classical West Saxon or
Alfredian Saxon). Furthermore, the difference between
Early West Saxon and
Late West Saxon is of such a nature that
Late West Saxon is not directly descended from
Early West Saxon (despite what the similarity in name implies).
The four main dialectal forms of
Old English were
Mercian,
Northumbrian,
Kentish, and
West Saxon. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of
Northumbria and most of
Mercia were overrun by
the Vikings during
the 9th century. The portion of
Mercia that was successfully defended and all of
Kent were 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, as evidenced both by the existence of
Middle and later
Modern English dialects.
However, the bulk of the surviving documents from
the Anglo-Saxon period are written in
the dialect of Wessex,
Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the more remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, documents were written in
the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but
Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular, and brought many scribes to his region from
Mercia to record previously unwritten texts.
The Church was affected likewise, especially since
Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into
English. To retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect.
Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of
Latin and into
English, notably
Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration,
Pastoral Care.
Because of
the centralisation of power and
the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.
Thomas Spencer Baynes claimed in
1856 that, owing to its position at the heart of
the Kingdom of Wessex,
the relics of Anglo-Saxon accent, idiom and vocabulary were best preserved in
the Somerset dialect.
Even after the maximum
Anglo-Saxon expansion,
Old English was never spoken all over
the Kingdom of England; not only was
Medieval Cornish spoken all over
Cornwall, it was also spoken in adjacent parts of
Devon into the age of the
Plantagenets, long after
the Norman Conquest.
Cumbric may have survived into
the 12th century in parts of
Cumbria and
Welsh may have been spoken on
the English side of the Anglo-Welsh border. In addition to
the Celtic languages,
Norse was spoken in some areas under
Danish law.
