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What is the difference between Old English and Old English?
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Old English, spoken from the 5th to the 11th century, differs greatly from the Modern English we use today. In this article, we will explore the attributes of both Old English and Modern English, highlighting their differences and showcasing the evolution of the language.
Oct 2, 2018 · Old English was a language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons (or English speaking peoples) who inhabited Britain from around 449-1066. Modern-day languages spoken all over the world can trace their roots back to this dialect. It looks and sounds completely different then any of these languages however.
Aug 26, 2023 · This may be a little hard to believe, considering the conspicuous lack of “thee” and “thou” in modern writing, but the forms of English that came before are even more foreign. The most noticeable difference between older forms of English and today’s English is the alphabet.
- Introduction
- Scope
- Origins
- Grammar
- Places of interest
- Influences
- Writing
- Language
- Example
- Morphology
- Phonology
- Usage
- Quotes
In this brief introduction to the subject, I will show how we can look at the history of a language in two main ways: externally where, why and by whom the language was used; the political and social factors causing change and internally the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and written appearance of the language; the motivations for change ari...
I will structure my discussion around the conventional division of the history of English into three main periods: Old, Middle and Modern English.
The Old English (OE) period can be regarded as starting around AD 450, with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern Britain. They brought with them dialects closely related to the continental language varieties which would produce modern German, Dutch and Frisian.
Many grammatical features also date back to this time: irregular verbs such as drink ~ drank ~ drunk (OE drincan ~ dranc ~ (ge)druncen) parallel German trinken ~ trank ~ getrunken. Similarly, many OE pronunciations are preserved in modern spellings e.g. knight (OE cniht, German Knecht), in which k would have been pronounced and gh sounded like ch i...
Anglo-Saxon Church carving St. Mary and St. Hardulph Church. Breedon on the Hill [Image: Walwyn under CC-BY-NC licence]
OE, also called Anglo-Saxon, was not heavily influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by the native inhabitants of the British Isles, borrowing only a few words (e.g. brock, tor) associated with local wildlife and geography (but many place and river names e.g. Dover, Avon). However, Latin, introduced to Britain by the Romans, and reinforced in its...
OE was mostly written using the Latin alphabet, supplemented by a few Germanic runic letters to represent sounds not found in Latin e.g. þ, which represented the th sounds in thin or this. (A relic of þ survives as y in modern signs like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.)
British Isles also resulted in substantial borrowing of basic vocabulary: sky, get and they derive from Old Norse.
Thus, in the OE clause wolde guman findan he wanted to find the man, the e on wolde indicates a 3rd person singular subject: he wanted; the n on guman indicates that the man is the object, not the subject of the verb; and the an on findan indicates an infinitive: to find. For instance, the vowel in caas case was simply a longer version of the vowel...
In ME, changes in the pronunciation of unstressed syllables, mainly occurring at the ends of words, caused most inflections to merge indistinguishably, or be dropped altogether. This inflectional breakdown could have created ambiguity (e.g. wanted man find), but speakers compensated by using more rigid word order (subject verb object, usually), a...
An internal feature which characterised the movement towards ModE was the Great Vowel Shift an important series of linked pronunciation changes which mainly took place between the 15th and 17th centuries. In ME, the sound system had contained broadly corresponding series of long and short vowels, represented in writing by the same letters.
In the present day, English is used in many parts of the world, as a first, second or foreign language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity, the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige.
We need not fear or resist such change, though many people do, since the processes operating now are comparable to those which have operated throughout the observable and reconstructable history of English, and indeed of all other languages.
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.
Negation was often repeated for emphasis. English language - Old English, Middle English, Modern English: Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent ...
Nov 1, 2019 · Differences Between Old English and Modern English "There is no point...in playing down the differences between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for spelling Old English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English, and that accounts for some of the difference.
