Characteristics Old English ( Notes of History of Language)

History of Language:   Old English Notes 

BS English & MA English Notes 

Characteristics of Old English

 Introduction:

 Old English is an old form of the English language that was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. An Examination of the words in an Old English dictionary shows that about 85 percent of them are no longer in use.

The English Language has undergone so many changes that one cannot read Old English without special study. Following are some important characteristics of Old English.

Spelling and Pronunciation:

            Spellings and Pronunciation of Old English words commonly differ somewhat from that of their modern equivalents. In Old English, the vowels were different from that of Modern English. Old English had six simple vowels, spelt a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelt ie. It also had two diphthongs; ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions.

Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts. Long vowels in particular have undergone considerable modification. The Old English word stān is the same word as Modern English stone. Some other examples are: rāp—rope, bāt— boat.

Other vowels have also undergone some changes for example; changes in fōt (foot), cēne (keen), metan (mete), but the identity of these words with their modern descendants is still readily apparent.

 There was a difference of spellings in Old English as compared to Modern English. Old English made use of two characters to represent the sound of th: Þ and ð, as in the words wiÞ (with) or ðā (then). Old English represented the sounds of sh by sc, as in scēap (sheep) or scēotan (shoot), and the sound of k by c, as in cynn (kin) or nacod(naked).

Vocabulary:

The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Germanic. A large part of this vocabulary moreover has disappeared from the language. When the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the higher classes, much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was displaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin. Many of these words were inherited by English together with some other Indo-European languages from the same common source.

Old English   New English      Latin          Russian

modor            mother              mater          мать

niht                night                 nox            ночь

neowe            new                   novus        НОВЫЙ

beran              bear                  ferre           брать

Some words were inherited by English and other Germanic languages from the same common Germanic source.

 

Old English    New English German

eorQe             earth              Erde

land               land               Land

Grammar:

            One of the important features of Old English that distinguish it from Modern English is its grammar. Inflectional languages fall into two classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of inflections while the languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic language and Old English is a synthetic language. Old English resembles Modern German in its grammar. 

NOUN:

Old English nouns show their different cases by inflection: they add additional letters to the end of the basic form of a word.

•       This basic form that does not change throughout a word’s inflection is called a stem.

There are consequently two parts of an Old English word that you must note: the stem and the case ending. The stem contains the meaning of the word and its gender(masculine, feminine or neuter). The case ending will tell you how the noun is being used in the sentence and whether the noun is singular or plural.

DECLENSION:

The Personal pronoun

Definition:

“A pronoun having a definite person or thing as an antecedent and functioning grammatically In the grammar of Latin, Greek, and certain other languages, the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number, and gender are identified.

Nouns are divided into two main categories of declension in Old English: the so-called "Strong" and "Weak" nouns. There are other minor declension groups, as well; but most nouns fall into these two classifications. If a noun belongs to a particular declension group, it can usually only be declined that way. Occasionally, you can decline an Old English noun in one of several ways. Whether or not a noun is weak or strong does not affect whether or not the modifiers (adjectives) used with it are declined weak or strong. Which declension a noun takes must be memorized along with the noun itself. Often, the noun itself may give clues as to which declension it takes, but not always.

CASES IN NOUN:

The old English noun has only four cases. The ending of these cases varies with different nouns, but they fall into certain broad categories or declensions. There is a vowel declension and a consonant declension, also called strong and weak declension, according to whether the stem ended in Germanic in a vowel or consonant, and within each of these types are certain subdivisions. The stem of nouns belonging to the vowel declension ended in one of four vowels in Germanic (although these has disappeared in Old English): a, i or u, and the inflection varies accordingly. It is impossible here to present the inflections of Old English nouns in detail. Their nature may be gathered from two examples of the strong declensions and one of the weak: stan (stone),a masculine a-stem; giefu (gift), a feminine and hunta(hunter),a masculine consonant stem. Forms are given for the four cases, nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

GRAMMATICAL GENDER (OLD ENGLISH 450-1150)

The gender of Old English nouns is quite illogical. The gender of Old English nouns is not dependent on consideration of sex. Nouns designating males are often masculine and those indicating females feminine, those indicating neuter objects are not necessarily neuter.

 

EX:  Stan (stone) is masculine and mona (moon) is masculine, but sunne (sun) is feminine, as in German. In French, the corresponding words have just the opposite genders: pierre (stone) and lune (moon) is feminine, while soleil (sun) is masculine.

 

The gender of Old English nouns is quite illogical. Words like wif (wife) bearn (child, son) and cild (child), which we should expect to be feminine or masculine, are fact neuter, while wifmann (woman) is masculine because the second element of the compound is masculine. 

The simplicity of Modern English gender has already been pointed out as one of the chief assets of language.

Adjective

 They are words used to describe either nouns or pronouns.

An important feature of the Germanic language is the development of a twofold(twice number) declension of the adjective.

One is the strong declension, used with nouns when not accompanied by a definite article or similar words.

E.g :- god mann(good man)

Another is the weak declension, used when the noun is preceded by such a word.

E.               g:- se goda mann(the good man)

 Adjectives were fully inflected with five grammatical cases nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental while the instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular. It was often replaced by dative. Two grammatical numbers singular and plural and three grammatical genders masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Strong Declension 

SINGULAR CASE

Notice that the genitive, dative, and instrumental feminine are all -re, the masculine and neuter genitive are both "-es", and masculine and neuter dative are both "-um", and masculine and neuter instrumental are both "-e". Also, the neuter adjective adds no ending in the nominative and accusative case.

 

e.g

PLURAL CASE:-

Notice that genitive and dative are the same in all genders for plural. Note also the instrumental is exactly the same as the dative. The "-e" ending for nominative and accusative feminine was used in later Old English.

E.g

WEAK DECLENSION

SINGULAR CASE:-

Weak declension is much more uniform and simple than strong declension.

  E.g

Plural Case:-

It is simpler than the strong declension and it is exactly the same for all genders.

E.g

The Personal pronoun

Definition:

“A pronoun having a definite person or thing as an antecedent and functioning grammatically in the same way as the noun that is replaced.

In old English , the personal pronoun includeHe[he], eow [you] etc.

The personal pronoun in all languages is likely to preserve a complete system of inflection. Most pronouns declined by no, case and gender. In the plural form, most pronouns have only one form for all genders.

Number:

Old English pronouns have singular, plural and additionally, it also perceives the dual no [A set of forms for two people or two things].

Cases:

Ø Nominative

Ø Dative

Ø Genetive

Ø Accsative

Old English pronoun has overall 12 cases,4 for singular, 4 for plural,

4 for dual.

Gender:

Old English gender has masculine, feminine, neuter

 

In old English, the distinction between the dual and the plural was disappearing from pronoun in old English. Many of the old English pronouns are exactly the same as their modern equivalent others, though their spellings are different but pronounce in a similar way to the modern English equivalent.

For example:

Eow is pronounced like in modern English you.

THE VERB:

          Old English distinguished only two simple tenses by inflection, a present and a past, and, except for one word, it had no inflectional forms for its passive as in Latin and Greek, it recognized the indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods and had the usual two numbers and three persons.

The Germanic language was the division of the verb into two great classes

·       The weak verb.

·       The strong verb.

The weak and strong verbs, often known in modern language as regular and irregular verbs.

THE WEAK VERBS:

          In weak verbs, such as walk, walked, walked, this change is affected by the addition of a “dental” sometimes an extra syllable. The weak verbs form the past tense and past participle in a quite different way using a suffix with a vowel followed by –d- with is the ancestor of the modern inflection in –ed-.

EXAMPLE:

WORDS	PAST TENSE	PAST PARTICIPLE
Fermman (to perform)	Gefremed	Gefermed
Lufian (to love)	Lufode	Gelufod
Libban (to live)	Lifde	Gelifd

 THE STRONG VERB:

The strong verbs like sing, sang, sung which represents the basic Indo-European type are so-called because they have the power of indicating the change of tense by a modification of their vowel. The strong verb realizes differences of tense by variation in the stem vowel they are assigned to seven main classes according to the vowel variation. Old English strong verbs therefore we have four forms:

·       The infinitive.

·       The past singular.

·       The past plural.

·       The past participle.

EXAMPLE:

INFINITIVE	PAST SINGULAR	PAST PLURAL	PAST PARTICIPLE
Ridan (ride)	Rad	Ridon	Riden
Drifan (drive)	Draf	Drifon	Drifen
Helpan (help)	Healp	Hulpon	Holpen

 

          In old English, the vowel of the past tense often differs in the singular and the plural; or, to be more accurate, the first and the third person singular have one vowel while the second person singular and all persons of the plural have another.

          The weak conjugation has come to be the dominant one in our language. Many strong verbs have passed over to this conjugation, and practically all new verbs added to our language are inflected in accordance with it.