OLD ENGLISH PRESENTATION

History of english

410

1800-1900

1066

The establishment of Anglo-Saxon

Modern English and Present Day English

Middle English

Early Modern English

American English

Old English

1620

1500-1700

CONTENTS

How does Old English begin?

Old English dialects

Old English characteristics

History of Old English

Old English influences

Comparison between Old and Modern English

How does Old English begin?

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Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, is the term we use to describe the English language from c. 450 – 1100. Old English is the language of the Germanic inhabitants of England, dated from the time of their settlement in the 5th century to the end of the 11th century, and is the language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English.

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The Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes were the three main powerful Germanic tribes who invaded Britain in the 5 th century and formed Anglo-Saxon England. Where did the Anglo-Saxon tribes come from? The Anglo-Saxon race was a mix of Germanic tribes from the Northern coastlines of Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

Netherlands

England

Germany

Denmark

The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language.

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History of Old English

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The history of Old English can be subdivided into:

Late Old English (10th to 11th Century)

Prehistoric or Primitive (5th to 7th Century)

Early Old English (7th to 10th Century)

How was its development? Old English influences

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The three languages that influenced Old English are:

Latin influence

Viking influence

Celtic influence

Old English dialects

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West Saxon

Mercian

Northumbrian

Kentish

West Saxon dialect

West Saxon was the language of the kingdom of Wessex, and was the basis for successive widely used literary forms of Old English: -The Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great’s time -The Late West Saxon of the late 10th and 11th centuries.

Early West Saxon

Early West Saxon was the language employed by King Alfred (849–899), used in the many literary translations produced under Alfred’s patronage (and some by Alfred himself).

Mercian dialect

Mercian was a dialect spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Together with Northumbrian, it was one of the two Anglian dialects.

Features of Mercian dialect

Nouns

Grammar

Verbs

Here we have an example of Mercian dialect

Northumbria dialect

Northumbrian was a dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria.

Northumbria grammar:

Aa’s (I is) and thoo’s (thou is) are the first and second person present forms of the verb “to be” in southern Northumberland and Durham.

The English verb “to be able” is in Northumbrian in the older form ‘te can’, for example “aa used te cud sing” ‘I used to be able to sing’.

Here we have an example of Northumbria dialect

Kantish dialect

It was a southern dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent.

The dialect was spoken in what are now the modern-day Counties of Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by the Germanic settlers, identified by Bede as Jutes.

Old English characteristics

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The Old English alphabet

The alphabet used to write our Old English texts was adopted from Latin, which was introduced by Christian missionaries.

Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first the runic thorn (þ), and later eth (ð).

The earliest appearances of the Old English language are found in inscriptions written using the runic Futhoric alphabet.

Let's see the Futhoric alphabet

Once Old English started to be used more commonly for writing, the Roman alphabet was adopted and adapted.

The Old English pronunciation

The most significant feature of Old English is its pronunciation of words differing from the ones that exist today. In the words of A.C. Baugh," The pronunciation of Old English words commonly differs somewhat from that of their modern equivalents.

As no native-speakers of Old English are currently living, there is no way to be absolutely certain how Old English was pronounced.

Let's see the letters of the Anglo-Saxon Alphabet

The Old English vocabulary

What does inflection mean?

Old English vocabulary

Latin influence

Borrowings from Celtic

Basic elements remained from Old English vocabulary

mann (man) wīf (wife) cild (child)

hēah (high) strang (strong) gōd (good)

drincan (drink) slæpan (sleep) libban (live)

Pure

Old English vocabulary

Unmixed

Capable of expressing new ideas

Sentence structure and Grammar

Synthetic

Languages in the world are:

Analytic

Parts of speech

Nouns, adjectives and pronouns

Nominative

Cases

Accusative

Genitive

Dative

Instrumental

These categories were also declined according to the gender:

Neuter

Feminine

Masculine

• Masculine

• Feminine

• Neuter

More info

Nouns in Old English

Weak nouns

Strong nouns

Their stems end with vowel except of 'u' because it is strong femenine.

Their stems end with consonant.

Verbs in Old English

Strong verbs

Weak verbs

They do not have stem-vowel changes in any tense.

They have stem-vowel changes in one or more tenses.

More about Old English verbs

Orthography of Old English

With the arrival of Romans in 43 AD, the Roman alphabet was introduced to Britain. The previously predominant system of writing was the Runic alphabet or the Runes.

Orthography of Old English

The Runic Alphabet used in the British Islands was called the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. It was called as the first six letters of the alphabet, ‘feoh’ (),ūr(), ‘þorn’(),ōs(), ‘rād’() and ‘cēn’() represented by the sounds /f/, /u/, /θ/, /o/,/r/ and /k/

Let's see more about these letters

Orthography of Old English

Old English was first written in runes, using the futhorc—a rune set derived from the Germanic 24-character elder futhark, extended by five more runes used to represent Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds.

Orthography of Old English

The Latin alphabet of the time still lacked the letters ⟨j⟩ and ⟨w⟩, and there was no ⟨v⟩ as distinct from ⟨u⟩; moreover, native Old English spellings did not use ⟨k⟩, ⟨q⟩ or ⟨z⟩. The remaining 20 Latin letters were supplemented by four more: ⟨æ⟩ (æsc, modern ash) and ⟨ð⟩ (ðæt, now called eth or edh), which were modified Latin letters, and thorn ⟨þ⟩ and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩, which are borrowings from the futhorc.

Comparison between Old and Modern English

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One of the easiest ways to discuss the relationship of Old English to Modern English is to know the symbols that no longer appear in Modern English, such as /p/ and /ð/ which have been replaced by /th/. In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, in the noun and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for case. Noun and adjective paradigms contained four cases: Nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case.

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