Old English is often erroneously used to refer to any form of English other than Modern English. The term Old English does not refer to varieties of Early Modern English such as are found in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, nor does it refer to Middle English, the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries. Language change is gradual; and cannot be as easily demarcated as historical or political events are.
- 450-1100 Old English (Anglo- Saxon) - The language of Beowulf
- 1100-1500 Middle English - The language of Chaucer.
- 1500-1650 Early Modern English (or Renaissance English) - The language of Shakespeare.
- 1650-present Modern English (or Present-Day English) - The language as spoken today
The language we now call English is actually a blend of many languages. Even the original Anglo-Saxon was already a blend of the dialects of west Germanic tribes living along the North Sea coast: The Saxons in Germany and eastern Holland, the Jutes, possibly from northern Denmark (the area now called Jutland), and the Angles, probably living along the coast and on islands between Denmark and Holland. It is also likely that the invaders included Frisians from northern Holland and northern Franks from southern Holland (whose relatives gave their name to France). The dialects were close enough for each to understand the other.
Later, in the 800s, the Northmen (Vikings) came to England, mostly from Denmark, and settled in with the Anglo-Saxons from Yorkshire to Norfolk, an area that became known as the Danelaw. Others from Norway ruled over the people in the northwest, from Strathclyde to the north of Wales. The Norse language they spoke resembled Anglo-Saxon in many ways, but was different enough for two things to happen: One, there were many Old Norse words that entered into English, including even such basic ones as they and them; And two, the complex conjugations and declensions began to wither away as people disagreed about which to use.
If the influence of Celtic upon Old English was slight, it was doubtless so because the relation of the Celt to the Anglo-Saxon was that of a submerged race and, as suggested above, because the Celt was not in a position to make any notable contribution to Anglo-Saxon civilization. It was quite otherwise with the second great influence exerted upon English—that of Latin—and the circumstances under which they met. Latin was not the language of a conquered people. It was the language of a higher civilization, a civilization from which the Anglo-Saxons had much to learn. Contact with that civilization, at first commercial and military, later religious and intellectual, extended over many centuries and was constantly renewed. It began long before the Anglo-Saxons came to England and continued throughout the Old English period. For several hundred years, while the Germanic tribes who later became the English were still occupying their continental homes, they had various relations with the Romans through which they acquired a considerable number of Latin words. Later when they came to England they saw the evidences of the long Roman rule in the island and learned from the Celts a few additional Latin words which had been acquired by them. And a century and a half later still, when Roman missionaries reintroduced Christianity into the island, this new cultural influence resulted in a really extensive adoption of Latin elements into the language. There were thus three distinct occasions on which borrowing from Latin occurred before the end of the Old English period.
While most of the loanwords from Latin are of a technical nature, or express new concepts (like Christianity), the Scandinavian loanwords that survive into Modern English are mostly everyday words. These must have been borrowed as a result of the Scandinavian settlements in the North and East of the country. However, identification of these is quite difficult (they are from NorthGermanic languages which are closely related).
Old English is largely known through the work of tenth and eleventh century scribes, working in the South and West of the country. These scribes would be unlikely to use loanwords that were in use in the Scandinavian settlement area, thus of the 900 attested North Germanic loans into English, only 150 appear in Old English sources. The rest only manifest themselves in the 12th and 13th centuries in Middle English texts even though they must have been around earlier.
The words that do appear -- mostly in late texts -- are mostly concerned with the administrative and social systems of the Danelaw, for example:
There are about 12 secure Celtic loans in OE; most of these are from Brythonic Celtic - the dialect group spoken by the larger number of British inhabitants.
They are: binn "bin", bannoc "bit", dunn "dun, grey", broc "badger", bratt "cloak", carr "rock", luh "lake", torr "rock", cumb "deep valley".
A very small number came from Goidelic Celtic, and are associated with the church (apparently borrowed from Irish missionaries):
The Anglo-Saxons adopted the styles of script employed by the Irish missionaries who had been instrumental in the conversion of the northern kingdoms. These styles included Insular half-uncial, used for fine books in Latin, and the less formal minuscule, used for both Latin and the vernacular. Beginning in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon scribes began to use caroline minuscule (developed in France during the reign of Charlemagne) for Latin while continuing to write Old English in Insular minuscule. Thereafter Old English script was increasingly influenced by caroline minuscule even as it retained certain distinctively Insular letter-forms. Once you have learned these letter-forms you will be able to read Old English manuscripts of all periods without difficulty.
Here are the basic letter-forms of Old English script, illustrated in a late Old English style:
Take particular note of these features:
- the rounded shape of d;
- the f that extends below the baseline instead of sitting on top of it;
- the distinctive Insular g;
- the dotless i;
- the r that extends below the baseline;
- the three shapes of s, of which the first two (the Insular long s and the high s,) are most common;
- the t that does not extend above the cross-stroke;
- the ƿ ("wynn"), usually transliterated as w but sometimes retained in print, derived from the runic letter ᚹ;
- the y, usually dotted, which comes in several different shapes.
Old English has no use for q or z. J and v do not have the status of separate letters but are occasional variant shapes of i and u (more common in roman numbers than elsewhere). Old English scribes used k rarely, and only to represent the [k] sound, never the [ʧ] (ċ).
Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena | in geārdagum, |
þēodcyninga, | þrym gefrūnon, |
hū ðā æþelingas | ellen fremedon. |
Oft Scyld Scēfing | sceaþena þrēatum, |
monegum mǣgþum, | meodosetla oftēah, |
egsode eorlas. | Syððan ǣrest wearð |
fēasceaft funden, | hē þæs frōfre gebād, |
wēox under wolcnum, | weorðmyndum þāh, |
oðþæt him ǣghwylc | þāra ymbsittendra |
ofer hronrāde | hȳran scolde, |
gomban gyldan. | Þæt wæs gōd cyning! |
The first page of Beowulf and Beowulf lines 1 to 11, approximately AD 900 respectively
The most famous Old English manuscript is the Beowulf manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Like the Vercelli and Exeter books, the Beowulf ms. is unique, surviving in one copy now in the British Library. The Junius Manuscript, another unique manuscript of Old English poetry, includes the sacred poems Genesis and Exodus and others. The Junius ms. is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Because of the attraction of unique and rare things, and because of the secularization of modern culture, the surviving poetic texts in Old English are the most heavily studied. We draw a disproportionate amount of our knowledge of the language from these texts, which would not have been as familiar to English people a thousand years ago as they are to students of Old English today.
Old English poetry is based on principles quite unlike that of modern English poetry. Old English poets did not use rhyme; they did not count the number of syllables in a line. But they did not write "free verse" either.
Old English poems are based on alliteration. Each line of poetry is divided into two halves or "hemistichs." Each hemistich has two stressed syllables. The first stress in the second hemistich must alliterate with one or both of the stresses in the first hemistich. (The second stress in the second hemistich does not alliterate.) It doesn't matter how many unstressed syllables there are.
The effect is a bit like hip-hop, except that hip-hop rhymes and carries its rhyme across more than one line.
The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons at the time of their migration to Britain was probably more or less uniform. Over time, however, Old English developed into four major dialects: Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; Mercian, spoken in the midlands; Kentish, spoken in Kent (in the far southeastern part of the island); and West Saxon, spoken in the southwest.
All of these dialects have direct descendants in modern England, and American regional dialects also have their roots in the dialects of Old English. "Standard" Modern English (if there is such a thing), or at least Modern English spelling, owes most to the Mercian dialect, since that was the dialect of London.
Most Old English literature is not in the Mercian dialect, however, but in West-Saxon, for from the time of King Alfred (reigned 871-899) until the Conquest Wessex dominated the rest of Anglo-Saxon England politically and culturally. Nearly all Old English poetry is in West Saxon, though it often contains spellings and vocabulary more typical of Mercian and Northumbrian--a fact that has led some scholars to speculate that much of the poetry was first composed in Mercian or Northumbian and later "translated" into West Saxon. Whatever the truth of the matter, West Saxon was the dominant language during the period in which most of our surviving literature was recorded. It is therefore the dialect that this book will teach you.
