Old English

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Old English - also called Englisc, Ænglisc, or Anglo-Saxon - was carried to Britain in the mid-5th century by Germanic settlers from the continent, and it would survive as a living tongue for roughly 700 years. Picture a language so remote that perhaps 85 percent of its words have now vanished, yet whose surviving core forms the bedrock of everything a Modern English speaker says each day. How did a set of tribal dialects harden into a literary standard? Why did a Viking occupation actually simplify grammar? And what happened to this language when, in 1066, the Norman Conquest introduced a new ruling class that spoke a type of French? Those are the questions Old English invites us to answer.

• 2. Origins and Names

  ›

  The word Englisc, from which English derives, means simply "pertaining to the Angles." The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes who settled across much of Britain in the 5th century. By the 9th century, all speakers of Old English - including those who claimed Saxon or Jutish descent - were being called Englisc regardless of tribal origin.

  The name Angles itself has a more mysterious ancestry. It probably traces back to Proto-Germanic roots suggesting narrowness, constriction, or the anxiety of shallow coastal waters. A competing theory links it to a word for curve or hook shapes, including fishing hooks. Under that reading, the Angles may have taken their name because they lived on a curved, fishhook-shaped promontory of land, or because they were fishermen - anglers.

  The language they brought to Britain developed from Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects, and its closest living relatives at the time were Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Once established in Britain, Old English gradually displaced the two languages it found there: Common Brittonic, a Celtic tongue, and Latin, the legacy of Roman occupation. The process was sweeping enough that Celtic loanwords entering Old English numbered very few.

• 3. Dialects and the West Saxon Standard

  ›

  Old English was never a single uniform tongue. Four main dialects divided the language along political lines: Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon. In geographic terms, Northumbrian lay north of the Humber River, Mercian stretched between the Humber and the Thames, West Saxon covered the south and southwest of the Thames, and Kentish occupied the small southeastern corner beyond the Thames. The Kentish region, settled by the Jutes from Jutland, left the scantiest literary remains of the four.

  Alfred the Great's unification of several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the later 9th century fixed West Saxon as the language of government. Alfred advocated teaching in English alongside Latin and had many Latin works translated; Pope Gregory I's treatise Pastoral Care appears to have been translated by Alfred himself. A later literary standard emerged in the late 10th century under Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester. Known as the Winchester standard, or Late West Saxon, it is considered the classical form of Old English, and it shaped prolific writers such as Ælfric of Eynsham, called "the Grammarian."

  Scholars Richard Hogg has suggested these two West Saxon phases be renamed Alfredian Saxon and Æthelwoldian Saxon, so readers do not wrongly assume a simple chronological relationship between them. What neither dialect anticipated was the future: the standard forms of Middle English and Modern English would descend not from West Saxon but from Mercian, while Scots developed from Northumbrian.

• 4. The Viking Effect on Grammar

  ›

  Old Norse entered Old English through the Scandinavian rulers and settlers of the Danelaw from the late 9th century and again during the reign of Cnut and other Danish kings in the early 11th century. The two languages resembled each other closely, and speakers could roughly understand one another. That near-similarity, however, had a structural consequence. As Simeon Potter observed, the influence of Scandinavian "hastened that wearing away and leveling of grammatical forms which gradually spread from north to south." The body of a word was nearly identical in both tongues; only the inflectional endings created obstacles. In the mixed population of the Danelaw, those endings produced persistent confusion, tending gradually to become obscured and finally to disappear.

  The outcome was a shift from a synthetic language - one that expresses relationships through word endings - toward a more analytic one, relying on word order instead. Old Norse borrowings in the formal literary record appear sparse and are mostly confined to terms of government and administration. But that understates the real impact. Scholar Otto Jespersen noted that the most compelling evidence of Scandinavian influence lies in the extensive word borrowings, since no texts survive in either Scandinavia or northern England from this period that could demonstrate syntactic influence directly. Modern English contains many everyday words borrowed from Old Norse, and the grammatical simplification that followed the Old English period is widely credited to Norse pressure. Place names across eastern and northern England remain of Scandinavian origin to this day.

• 5. Writing Systems and Spelling

  ›

  The oldest Old English inscriptions were carved in runes, using a set called the futhorc - derived from the Germanic elder futhark of 24 characters, then extended by five more runes designed for Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds. From around the 8th century, the runic system was supplanted by a half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet, introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. That half-uncial gave way to Insular script, a cursive and pointed version, which in turn was replaced around the end of the 12th century by continental Carolingian minuscule.

  The Latin alphabet of the period lacked certain letters, so scribes supplemented the remaining 20 with four additional characters: the ash (æ), eth (ð), thorn (þ), and wynn (ƿ). Thorn was derived from a rune of the same name and first appears in dated materials in the 8th century; eth, modified from an earlier Latin letter, is attested somewhat earlier. A common scribal abbreviation used a thorn with a stroke to stand for the pronoun þæt, meaning "that."

  Old English spelling had a largely predictable correspondence between letters and sounds. There were almost no silent letters. In the word cniht, for example, both the c and the n were pronounced - /knixt/ or /kniçt/ - in sharp contrast to the modern knight, where only the vowel and final consonant are sounded. This regularity distinguishes Old English sharply from the famously unpredictable spelling of modern English.

• 6. Literature and Surviving Texts

  ›

  Cædmon's Hymn, composed between 658 and 680 but not written down until the early 8th century, is the oldest surviving work of Old English literature. Scholar James Hulbert, writing in the 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, estimated that an incalculable amount of Anglo-Saxon writing perished, and that with few exceptions all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in just four manuscripts. About 400 surviving manuscripts represent the entire corpus.

  Among the most important surviving works is Beowulf, an epic poem of around 3,000 lines. Its opening passage describes how Hrothgar's legendary ancestor Scyld was found as a baby, washed ashore, and adopted by a noble family. The poem's formal features include a stress-and-alliteration system in which the first consonant of one word alliterates with the same consonant beginning another - as in the pairing of Gar-Dena and gear-dagum in line one. Vowels alliterate with any other vowel.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records early English history, while the Franks Casket is an inscribed whalebone artefact from the early 8th century. The corpus also contains sermons, saints' lives, biblical translations, legal documents such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous; Bede and Cædmon are among the few known by name. Cædmon served as a lay brother in the monastery at Whitby, making him the earliest English poet whose name survives.

• 7. Grammar and Structure

  ›

  Old English nouns declined for five cases - nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental - and carried three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The instrumental case was already vestigial and was often replaced by the dative; only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate instrumental forms. Early Northumbrian runic texts provide sparse evidence of a sixth case, the locative, as in the inscription on rodi, meaning "on the Cross."

  Verbs in Old English fell into two broad classes, exactly as in Modern English. Strong verbs changed their root vowel to form the past tense; weak verbs added a dental suffix such as -de. This two-class system is a feature peculiar to the Germanic languages. The noun system carried grammatical gender that could conflict with natural gender: the word wif, meaning "woman," and the ancestor of modern wife, was grammatically neuter.

  Remnants of the Old English case system still survive in modern English as the pronoun forms I/me/mine and who/whom/whose, and in the possessive -'s ending, which derives from the masculine and neuter genitive ending -es. Word order was freer than in Modern English because inflectional endings carried much of the relational information. The default pattern placed the verb second in main clauses and verb-final in subordinate clauses - a structure still visible in modern German. Questions were formed by inverting subject and finite verb; negatives were formed by placing ne before the finite verb. Multiple negatives could stack to intensify meaning, a feature called negative concord.

• 8. Legacy and Modern Reach

  ›

  The Norman Conquest of 1066 ended Old English's role as a literary and governmental language, but the vocabulary that survived its decline forms the essential skeleton of Modern English. About 85 percent of Old English words are gone; those that remain are the basic elements of everyday speech.

  Scholar Albert Baugh places Old English between 450 and 1150 - a period he characterizes as one of full inflections and a synthetic structure. The subsequent Middle English period, running from 1150 to 1500, reflected the heavy influence of Anglo-Norman French on what Old English left behind. Scots meanwhile developed along its own track from the Northumbrian dialect.

  Old English has attracted readers and writers well beyond academia. J. R. R. Tolkien and Alistair Campbell are among those who drew on it in literary work. Author Ransom Riggs borrowed several Old English words - including syndrigast, meaning singular or peculiar, and ymbryne, meaning period or cycle - for a fictional language he called "Old Peculiar" in his novels. Advocates of linguistic purism in English still look to Old English as a source for reviving old words or coining new ones without relying on Latin or French roots. The Dictionary of Old English, begun in Toronto in 1983 and now available online, had reached the letters A-I as of September 2018 - a reminder of how much careful scholarly work the language still requires.