Trivia On Old English

Trivia on Old English
ORIGINS
 The Old English language, often called Anglo-
Saxon, was spoken in England from 450 AD to
1100 AD.
 The most important shaping force on Old English
was its Germanic heritage in vocabulary, sentence
structure and grammar, that it shared with its sister
languages in continental Europe.
 The second major source of loanwords to Old
English were the Scandinavian words introduced
during the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth
centuries.
 There are three notable periods of Latin Influence
for Old English; first occurring before the ancestral
Saxons left continental Europe for England, second
beginning when the Anglo-Saxons were converted
to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became
widespread, and the third following the Norman
invasion of 1066, after which an enormous number
of Norman French words entered the language.
 The number of Celtic loanwords is of a much lower
order than either Latin or Scandinavian. As few as
twelve loanwords have been identified as being
entirely secure. Out of all the known and suspected
Celtic loanwords, most are names of geographical
features, and especially rivers.
 Old English was rich in dialect forms. The four
main dialect forms of Old English were Kentish,
Mercian, Northumbrian and West Saxon.
 It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so
Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the
cultural onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans
who came after them.
PHONOLOGY AND STANDARDIZED

ORTHOGRAPHY
 The Scandinavian runes are called "Fuþark"
because the first six letters in the runic alphabet are
ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ (F U Þ A R K). The Anglo-Saxon runes
are called "Fuþorc" because they are a little
different.
 Runes are found carved into stones (called
runestones) in many places in Scandinavia
(Denmark, Norway and Sweden), and in the British
Isles, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and
Frisia.
 Anglo-Saxon runes were used probably from the
5th century AD until about the 10th century.
 Old English shifted to the Latin alphabet with some
additions: the letter yogh, adopted from Irish; the
letter eth and the runic letters thorn and wynn.
 Also used was a symbol for the conjunction 'and', a
character similar to the number seven ('7'), and a
symbol for the relative pronoun 'þæt', a thorn with a
crossbar through the ascender (' ').
 Also used occasionally were macrons over vowels,
abbreviations for following 'm's or 'n's. All of the
sound descriptions below are given using IPA
symbols.
 Doubled consonants have doubly long durations;
'ðð'/'þþ', 'ff' and 'ss', they cannot be voiced as their
single constituents can be.
SYNTAX
 Old English syntax has a great deal of common
ground with Dutch and German. Old English is not
dependent upon S (subject), V (verb), O (object) or
"SVO" word order in the way that Modern English
is.
 The only constant rule, as in German and Dutch, is
that the verb must come as the second concept.
 Word order became less flexible as time went on:
the older a text is, the less likely it is to have a fixed
word order.
 Prepositions may appear after their object, though
they are not postpositions, as they may occur in
front of the noun too, and usually do.
PARTS OF SPEECH
 Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or
weak verbs.
 Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation
(known as Ablaut). In this form of conjugation, the
stem of the word changes to indicate the tense.
 Weak verbs are formed principally by adding
endings to past and participles.
 There is a further group of four verbs which are
anomalous, the verbs "will", "do", "go" and "be".
These four have their own conjugation schemes
which differ significantly from all the other classes
of verb.
 Old English nouns were declined – that is, the
ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in
the sentence. There were five major cases:
nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and
instrumental.
 Adjectives in Old English are declined using the
same categories as nouns: five cases (nominative,
accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three
genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and two
numbers (singular, plural).
 Most pronouns are declined by number, case and
gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only
one form for all genders.
 Prepositions (like our words by, for, with, because)
often follow the word which they govern, in which
case they are called postpositions. They are not
declined.
THE ENGLISHES TO FOLLOW

 The transition from Old English to Middle English
is primarily defined by the linguistic changes that
were taking place in grammar, with Old English
losing most of its inflectional endings, and word
order becoming the primary means of expression.
 Old English slowly turned into Middle English after
the Norman Conquest of 1066.
 Unlike modern English, Old English is a language
rich with morphological diversity and is pronounced
essentially as it is spelt. It maintains several distinct
cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative
and instrumental, remnants of which survive only in
a few pronouns in modern English.
 Old English is very different from Modern English;
it has many more Germanic words.
 In Old English, especially early on, strong verbs
were the dominant form of verb. Today, there are
many more weak verbs than strong verbs.
OTHER FACTS
 Beowulf is written in Old English in an alphabetic
script.
 According to Toronto University's Dictionary of
Old English Corpus, the entire surviving body of
Old English material from 600 to 1150 consists of
only 3,037 texts (excluding manuscripts with minor
variants), amounting to a mere three million words.
 Researchers have determined that town is the oldest
word in the English language, originates from Old
English, and has kept the same definition through
the millennia.

Trivia On Old English

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Trivia on Old English

PHONOLOGY AND STANDARDIZED

THE ENGLISHES TO FOLLOW

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