UNIVERSIDAD AUTONOMA DE CHIAPAS

Centro de Educación Continua y a Distancia

Licenciatura en inglés modalidad a Distancia

UNIDAD ACADEMICA
DESARROLLO DE LA LENGUA INGLESA
OLD ENGLISH ON LANGUAGE
U1. T3. Act. 2
Semestre: Tercero
Aurora Liliana Salas Villafuerte
[email protected]

Marzo 17, 2023

 OLD ENGLISH ON LANGUAGE

Language develops and changes over time due to various factors such as
invasions, unions with other groups of people, and common life, but many
languages have their roots in one main language.
Britains were people who crossed the English Channel before the Christian Era.
The language spoken by native inhabitants of the British Isles belonged to the
Celtic Family and the language develops through the years because of different
invasions, first Romans, who arrived in 43 B. C. and stayed there for around 400
years but their culture and Latin language were never effectively imposed on the
British celts (McCrum, Cran and MacNeil, 1992), then Germanic tribes in the late
400s which were the Jutes, the Angles (from them the name “Angleland” or
“England” was gotten) and the Saxons, who exterminated Celtic people and Celtic
language in England, however, this has not been proved, there are still about one-
third of those Anglo-Saxon words that remain in constant use today; and Viking
invasions between 787 and 1000s .A.C. who took control of a major part of
Scotland, the Northern Isles such as Shetland and the Orkneys and the Hebrides.
They were pushed back by King Alfred the Great toward the North East section of
Britain, where they continued to be dominant in the area called Danelaw. The
English language became the language of choice of King Alfred to develop a
feeling of national identity. these descents of the Nordic tribes brought about 2,000
new words.
The basic features of Old English were characterized by strong and weak verbs, a
dual number of pronouns two different declensions of adjectives; four declensions
of nouns; and grammatical distinctions of gender.
Grammar had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) two forms of nouns,
(strong and weak); three numbers singular, dual, and plural; For Example stän
(stone) is masculine, möna (moon) is masculine, but sunne (sun) is feminine. The
verbs in Germanic languages were divided into two classes, the weak and the
strong, and in Modern English are known as regular and irregular verbs. Nouns
and adjectives paradigms have four cases Nominative, accusative, dative, and
genitive.
Vocabulary in Old English was almost completely Germanic. It had some words of
Celtic origin too. Almost 85 percent of that vocabulary has been extinct now, but
the ones that survive are basic elements of our vocabulary. Some examples are:
 Mann (man), Wif (woman), mete (meat), waell (wall) cild (child), hüs (house), weall
(wall), lëaf (leaf), fugol (fowl, bird), göd (good) hëah (high), stang (strong), etan
(eat) drincan (drink), but a considerable part of the words are unfamiliar to the
modern English. 
Written forms in Old English were first made with runes, then it was made most of
the times as alliterative poetry the oldest one Beowulf, then during King Alfred’s
reign works were made in prose, especially for legal writings, medial tracts,
religious texts, and translations from Latin to other languages.
Even though a modern speaker is not able to understand a sentence in old English
researchers call these two different languages by the same name because they
belong to the same family and had been changing through time to make it easier to
understand and manage because during all this time, there has been different
language and culture influences that introduced a lot of new words and now are
merged as one language. 
The most important link between Old and Modern English is that about half of the
words we use today are derived from Old English.
Borrowing means that words that originated in one language are now used in
another and English has had many words from other languages. For example
Celtic words: crag, cumb (deep valley), binn (bin), carr (rock), brock (badger), torr
(peak). Latin words pise (pea), plante (plant), catte (cat), belt (belt), weall (wall).  
Old Norse (Scandinavian). Berserkr (berserk), klubba (club), gunn (gun), rannsaka
(ransack), slatra (slaughter). (Crystal, David, 1995)
Old English Word order is more flexible than in modern English due to its extensive
system of inflections. Subject-Verb-Object is still the most common order, but Verb-
Subject order occurs regularly in clauses introduced by adverbs such as þa - then
or nu - now. In relative clauses introduced by the relative pronoun 'þe -
which/that/who', the verb usually goes to the end of the clause.
Different endings mark words as subjects (the thing acting), direct objects (things
directly receiving the action), indirect objects (things indirectly receiving the action),
objects of prepositions, and genitives (things possessed by other things).
Endings for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in Old English are divided into five
categories of the grammatical function called cases.
Nominative: In the naming case, the nominative is used for subjects and for
predicate nominatives (words that rename the subject of a sentence).
Genitive: The possession case, the genitive case is used to indicate ownership.
Accusative: The direct object case, the accusative is used to indicate direct
receivers of an action.
Dative / Instrumental: The indirect object and prepositional case, the
dative/instrumental is used to indicate indirect receivers of action and objects of
prepositions.
Modern English word order is relatively fixed. We use cases in Modern English
when we use "he" or "she" as the subject of a sentence but "him" or "her" as the
direct object (similarly, "who" for subjects and "whom" for objects). The standard
order of words in an English sentence is subject + verb + object. While this sounds
simple, it may be difficult to identify the subject(s), verb(s), and object(s),
depending on the structure and complexity of the sentence.
According to the material I read old English is the base of the actual language
which continued evolving the word order in Modern English has been simplified
looking for a better way of communication. One example of word order in old
English 1) the woman saw the man 2) the man saw the woman here nouns,
adjectives, and articles tell how the parts of the clause relate to each other. In the
same sentences in Modern English, the difference is made by word order.
In conclusion, reading about the history of language has been very interesting and
especially because I liked history a lot, but I have to tell you that all the inflections
and changes are very difficult to understand, but knowing the origin of words leads
you to have a wider view about the language we are studying. Even people who
have English as their mother tongue can’t understand a text in old English easily.  

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