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Old English, spoken from the 5th to the 11th century, differs greatly from the Modern English we use today. In this article, we will explore the attributes of both Old English and Modern English, highlighting their differences and showcasing the evolution of the language.
- Overview
- Historical background
- Old English
Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; ...
Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; ...
The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, before settling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449; and the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the future Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common Germanic the Angles’ name was Angli, later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative) and Engla (genitive). Engla land designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and both King Alfred (known as Alfred the Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian, subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.
The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed two speech groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian, usually referred to as Mercian. There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. In the 8th century, the Northumbrian speech group led in literature and culture, but that leadership was destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrian mainland, in 793. They landed in strength in 865. The first raiders were Danes, but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western Isles who settled in modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and the Isle of Man. In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed from Northumbria to Wessex. During King Alfred’s reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century, Winchester became the chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian Paulus Orosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated; and there the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon dialect. This resulted in West Saxon’s becoming “standard Old English.” About a century later, when Aelfric wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, the hegemony of Wessex was strengthened.
In standard Old English, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs were fully inflected. Nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and plural. Five nouns of first kinship—faeder, mōdor, brōthor, sweostor, and dohtor (“father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,” and “daughter,” respectively)—had their own set of inflections. There were 25 nouns such as mon, men (“man,” “men”) with mutated, or umlauted, stems. Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture of noun and pronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full inflections. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:
There were two demonstratives: sē, sēo, thaet, meaning “that,” and thes, thēos, this, meaning “this,” but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for “that” or not expressed at all. Thus, “the good man” was sē gōda mon or plain gōd mon. The function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral ān “one” in ān mon “a man,” by the adjective-pronoun sum in sum mon “a (certain) man,” or not expressed, as in thū eart gōd mon “you are a good man.”
Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). There were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectional changes—changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.—are added.) One type of verb stem, called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for “sing”: singan, singth, sang, sungon, gesungen. The word for “deem” is an example of the other, called consonantal: dēman, dēmth, dēmde, dēmdon, gedēmed. Such verbs are called strong and weak, respectively.
All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the consonantal type. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words be, shall, will, do, go, can, may, and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.
The Old English period (5th-11th centuries), Middle English period (11th-15th centuries), and Modern English period (16th century to present) are the three main divisions in the history of the English language.
28 de mar. de 2024 · Old English language, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages. Learn more about the Old English language in this article.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
I will structure my discussion around the conventional division of the history of English into three main periods: Old, Middle and Modern English. The Old English (OE) period can be regarded as starting around AD 450, with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern Britain.
The Differences between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. By Danièle Cybulskie. When people study Shakespeare in high school, I often hear them refer to his language as “Old English.” As far as the language goes, Shakespeare’s English actually falls under the category of “Modern English.”
Some Old English words of Latin origin that have survived into modern English include belt, butter, chalk, chest, cup, fan, fork, mile, minster, mint, monk, pepper, school, sock, strop, wine. Some borrowing from early Scandinavian is attested in later Old English, but again the major impact of contact with Scandinavian settlers becomes evident only in Middle English.
