GERMANIC: OLD

ENGLISH AND ITS

CLOSEST
RELATIVES
 AN OVERVIEW
• Old English is the name given to the earliest recorded stage of the
English language, up to approximately 1150AD (when the Middle
English period is generally taken to have begun). It refers to the
language as it was used in the long period of time from the coming
of Germanic invaders and settlers to Britain—in the period
following the collapse of Roman Britain in the early fifth century—
up to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and beyond into the first
century of Norman rule in England. It is thus first and foremost the
language of the people normally referred to by historians as the
Anglo-Saxons.
 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• Before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, the majority of the population
of Britain spoke Celtic languages. In Roman Britain, Latin had been in
extensive use as the language of government and the military and
probably also in other functions, especially in urban areas and among
the upper echelons of society. However, it is uncertain how much Latin
remained in use in the post-Roman period.
• During the course of the next several hundred years, gradually more
and more of the territory in the area, later to be known as England,
came under Anglo-Saxon control. (On the history of the name, see
England n.)
• Precisely what fate befell the majority of the (Romano-)British population in
these areas is a matter of much debate. Certainly very few words were
borrowed into English from Celtic (it is uncertain whether there may have
been more influence in some areas of grammar and pronunciation), and
practically all of the Latin borrowings found in Old English could be explained
as having been borrowed either on the continent (i.e. beforehand) or during
or after the conversion to Christianity (i.e. later).
• The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which began in the late
sixth century and was largely complete by the late seventh century, was an
event of huge cultural importance. One of its many areas of impact was the
introduction of writing extensive texts in the Roman alphabet on parchment
(as opposed to inscribing very short inscriptions on wood, bone, or stone in
runic characters). Nearly all of our surviving documentary evidence for Old
English is mediated through the Church, and the impress of the literary
culture of Latin Christianity is deep on nearly everything that survives written
in Old English.
CONFLICT AND INTERACTION WITH
RAIDERS AND SETTLERS OF
SCANDINAVIAN ORIGIN IS A CENTRAL
THEME IN ANGLO-SAXON HISTORY
ESSENTIALLY FROM THE TIME OF THE
FIRST RECORDED RAIDS IN THE LATE
EIGHTH CENTURY ONWARDS.
HOWEVER, THE LINGUISTIC IMPACT OF
THIS CONTACT IS MAINLY EVIDENT
ONLY IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD.
LIKEWISE, THE CATACLYSMIC POLITICAL
EVENTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST
TOOK SOME TIME TO SHOW THEIR
FULL IMPACT ON THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE.
 SOME DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF
OLD ENGLISH
• In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of English by greater
use of a larger set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with
this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.

• An example: The following couple of lines from Ælfric’s De temporibus anni:

• ‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’

• may be translated word-for-word as:

• Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air draws the moisture to it from below and the
heat from above.
• To pick out a very few grammatical features:
• The nouns hæte, ‘heat’, and wæta, ‘moisture’, both have the inflection –an in the first
sentence, because both are in the dative case, governed by the preposition of ‘from’.

• In the second sentence they both again have the inflection –an, but this time they are in the
accusative case, as the direct objects of tyhð ‘draws’.

• The forms of the definite article agree with these nouns, but you will note that they are
different in each instance, þone wætan ‘the moisture’ (direct object), but ða hætan ‘the
heat’ (also direct object). The difference arises because wæta ‘moisture’ is masculine but
hæte ‘heat’ is feminine, and the article (like other adjectives) agrees in gender as well as
case.
• For another example of gender agreement, look at the pronoun hire (i.e. the
antecedent of modern English her) referring to seo lyft (feminine) ‘the air’.
• In vocabulary, Old English is much more homogeneous than later stages in the
history of English. Some borrowings from Latin date back to before the
coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain (i.e. they were borrowed on the
continent), while many others date from the period of the conversion to
Christianity and later. However, words borrowed from Latin or from other
languages make up only a tiny percentage of the vocabulary of Old English,
and the major influx of words from French and from Latin belongs to the
Middle English period and later. (There are also numerous loan translations
and semantic loans from Latin in Old English, reflecting the influence of Latin
on the language of religion and learning.)
• 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.
• There is also a great deal of continuity between Old
English and later stages in the history of the language. A
great deal of the core vocabulary of modern English goes
back to Old English, including most of the words most
frequently used today.
• Some letters from the Old English alphabet which modern
English has lost:
• þ, ð both represent the same sounds as modern th, as e.g.
in thin or then;
• æ and a represent distinct sounds in Old English, formed
with the tongue respectively at the front and back of the
mouth.
• The pronunciation of e.g. trap or man in many
modern varieties of English comes close to Old
English æ, whereas Old English a was more like the
sound in modern German Mann ‘man’ or
Spanish mano ‘hand’ (like the sound in modern
English father, but shorter).
 THE BEGINNING OF OLD ENGLISH
…
It is very difficult to say when Old English began, because this pushes us back
beyond the date of our earliest records for either Old English or any of its closest
relatives (with the exception of very occasional inscriptions and the evidence of
words and names occurring in Latin or in other languages). Everyone agrees in
calling the language of our earliest extensive sources found in contemporary
copies ‘Old English’: these are Latin-English glossaries from around the year 700.
(Some other material was certainly composed before 700, but survives only in
later copies.) By this time Old English was already very distinct from its
Germanic sister languages (see below) as a result of many sound changes (i.e.
changes in how certain sounds were pronounced, chiefly when they occurred
near to certain other sounds) and other linguistic developments. In fact, most of
the most important changes which we can trace through our surviving Old
English documents had already happened before this time. Some of them were
very probably well in progress or even complete before the time of the
settlement in England.
• Some Latin-English glosses from one of our earliest
sources (the Épinal Glossary):
• anser goos (i.e. ‘goose’)
• lepus, leporis hara (i.e. ‘hare’)
• nimbus storm (i.e. ‘storm’)
• olor suan (i.e. ‘swan’)
• If we trace its history back further, Old English belongs to the West Germanic
branch of the Germanic languages, along with Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High
German, and the various dialects which later gave rise to Old Dutch. The major
early representatives of the North Germanic branch are Old Icelandic, Old
Norwegian, Old Swedish, and Old Danish (although the earliest extensive remains
for all of these are much later than the earliest Old English documents), while the
only representative of the East Germanic branch for which extensive remains
survive is Gothic. Ultimately, all of these branches diverged from a single
hypothetical ancestor, (proto-)Germanic, which itself constitutes a branch of the
larger Indo-European language family. Other branches of Indo-European include
Celtic, Italic (including Latin and hence the Romance languages), Greek, Indo-
Iranian (including Sanskrit and Persian), Baltic, and Slavonic (these last two being
regarded by many as a single branch, Balto-Slavonic).
 THE END OF OLD ENGLISH
• The conventional dividing date of approximately 1150 between Old English
and Middle English reflects (very roughly) the period when these changes in
grammar and vocabulary begin to become noticeable in most of the surviving
texts (which are not very numerous from this transitional period). In what is
often called ‘transitional English’ the number of distinct inflections becomes
fewer, and word order takes on an increasing functional load. At the same
time borrowings from French and (especially in northern and eastern texts)
from early Scandinavian become more frequent. All of these processes were
extremely gradual, and did not happen at the same rate in all places.
Therefore any dividing date is very arbitrary, and can only reflect these
developments very approximately.
 OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS
• The surviving Old English documents are traditionally attributed to four different
major dialects: Kentish (in the south-east), West Saxon (in the south-west), Mercian
(in the midland territories of Mercia), and Northumbrian (in the north); because of
various similarities they show, Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped
together as Anglian. This division is largely based on linguistic differences shown by
various of the major early sources, although many of the details are highly
controversial, and some scholars are very critical of the traditional association of
these linguistic differences (however approximately) with the boundaries of various
politically defined areas (which are themselves only poorly understood), and today
many of the details of where each variety was centred geographically are subject to
debate. For political and cultural reasons, manuscripts written in the West Saxon
dialect hugely predominate among our later records (although much of the verse is
something of a special case), reflecting the widespread adoption of a form of West
Saxon as a written language in the later Old English period.
 OLD ENGLISH VERBS
• Verbs in Old English show an extensive range of inflections,
reflecting distinctions of person and number (e.g. first person
singular, first person plural, etc.), tense (present or past), and
mood (indicative, subjunctive, or imperative); many other
distinctions are realized by periphrastic constructions
with be v., worth v., will v., or shall v. as auxiliary in combination
with non-finite forms of the verb.
• With the exception of some (mostly high frequency) irregular or
anomalous verbs, Old English verbs belong to one of two main
groupings: strong verbs and weak verbs.
• The strong verbs realize differences of tense by variation in the stem vowel.
They are assigned to seven main classes, according to the vowel variation
shown. Thus RIDE v., a Class I strong verb, shows the following vowel
gradation in its “principal parts”, from which all of its other inflections can be
inferred:
• infinitive: rīdan
• past tense singular: rād
• past tense plural: ridon
• past participle: (ge)riden
• Similarly, the Class III strong verb BIND v. shows the following
principal parts:

• infinitive: bindan
• past tense singular: band (or bond)
• past tense plural: bundon
• past participle: (ge)bunden
• Similarly, the Class III strong verb BIND v. shows the following principal parts:
• infinitive: bindan
• past tense singular: band (or bond)
• past tense plural: bundon
• past participle: (ge)bunden
• The principal parts of the various classes can simply be memorized as fairly arbitrary
sets (with various subclasses and exceptions). To understand the causes of this
variation we need to go back to a much earlier system of vowel gradation called ablaut,
which Germanic inherited from Indo-European, and which Germanic made extensive
use of in the strong verb system.
• A very short introduction to ablaut The stem vowels ī, ā, i, i shown by rīdan ultimately
reflect Indo-European *ei, *oi, *i, *i (giving by regular development Germanic *ī, *ai, *i,
*i, giving ultimately Old English ī, ā, i, i). Thus the principal parts in Old English can be
explained as reflecting Indo-European *i in combination with either *e (hence *ei),
*o (hence *oi), or nothing (hence *i). For these reasons, the infinitive rīdan is said to
show the Indo-European e-grade, the past tense singular rād is said to show the Indo-
European o-grade, and the past tense plural ridon and past participle (ge)riden are said
to show the Indo-European zero-grade, even though, confusingly, the Old English forms
themselves do not show e, o, or zero. Similarly bindan ultimately reflects a sequence
*en, *on, *n, *n, in which *e, *o, or nothing appear in combination with *n. Similar
variation figures largely in a great many etymologies: for some examples see e.g.
LOVE n.¹, OWE v., RAW adj. and n.¹, COOL adj., adv., and int., RED adj., n., (and adv.),
RIFT n.,
• The weak verbs form the past tense and past participle in a quite
different way, using a suffix with a vowel followed by -d-, which is
the ancestor of the modern inflection in -ed (see ‘-ED’ suffix¹).
Thus lufian LOVE v.¹ (a weak Class II verb) shows 1st and 3rd person
past singular lufode.
• Weak verbs often originated as derivative formations, and often
preserve some aspect of this in their meaning, as for example
showing causative or inchoative meaning: see below on cēlan ‘to
(cause to) cool’ and cōlian ‘to become cool’.
 DERIVATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND
SOUND CHANGES
• Many Old English words belong to large groups of words all derived
ultimately from the same base, and are related to one another in ways
that would have been fairly transparent to speakers of the language.
However, in the period of our literary documents the relationships
between words were often much less clear than they are likely to have
been earlier, because sound changes and other developments had
obscured the derivational relationships.
• For example, cōl ‘cool’ (see COOL adj., adv., and int.) has a small family of
related words in Old English, including cōlnes COOLNESS n., which clearly
shows the same base plus ‘-NESS’ suffix. The relationship is similarly clear
in the case of the derivative Class II weak verb cōlian ‘to become cool’
(see COOL v.¹).