Old English

If you were transported back to England between the mid-fifth and mid-twelfth centuries, odds are that you would have a hard time understanding the English that was spoken around you. Old English, as it is now called, is the result of the fifth century invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into Britain. Some scholars also believe that the Frisians may have been involved in the original invasion.

The invasion of these tribes lasted for more than a century and their effect was to so greatly influence the existing language of England and southeastern Scotland, that they created a new language—the one that we call Old English.

Old English is classified as a West Germanic language and can further be subdivided into three periods. The first of these is Prehistoric Old English which existed from approximately 450-650 AD. At this point, the language had separated enough from its parent languages to be considered an independent language. It is considered “prehistoric” in the sense that no written examples of the language exist. In this phase of Old English, there were seven vowels: a, ae, e, I, o, u, y, and ie.

Each vowel had a long and short form that could affect the meaning of the word. Short and long forms of vowels do not have the same meaning as they do today. Instead, the length of the vowel refers to the duration of its sound. For instance, while the pronunciation of “is” and “ice” were the same, a speaker of Prehistoric Old English would be able to distinguish them because the word for ice was dragged out.

Early Old English existed between 650 and 900 AD. Although there are not many examples of Early Old English writings, “Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, which was written in 731AD is considered a good example. Late Old English existed from 900 AD until the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Old English is characterized by its use of the gerund (which we still have today), gender and declensions, and less dependence upon word order. All Old English nouns have the gender attributes of masculine, feminine and neuter and within each category, a noun can be strong or weak. (The gender of the noun had no relation to the natural gender of the item to which it refers. For example, there are two Old English nouns that mean “woman” in the modern English language. One is neuter and one is masculine.)

It is a subject of debate as to whether word order was important in Old English. Because the declensions of the word help define its use in the sentence, some feel that so long as the declensions were used correctly, it was less important what the word order was. Although Old English is very different from the Modern English and although we would have a very hard time understanding Old English, many of our most-used words have not changed.