Old English (OE) or Anglo-Saxon

The Old English is a descendant of Proto-Germanic or Germanic language, which in itself belongs to Indo-European family of languages. This Germanic language group, according to the ecclesiastical history of the English people by Venerable Bede cited in Algeo (2010: 214), began as a common language; ‘it was a relatively unified and distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, accentual system, and word stock’. This group of language, as it is common with all languages, is believed to have split later into different distinct subgroups: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic.

The East Germanic branch, according to the account, was spoken by people who migrated back to southeastern Europe, a form which is no longer spoken today except Gothic which exists only in written form. The North Germanic division, according to the account, however, evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, while the West Germanic branch, is the ancestor of both Old German and High German (Plattdeutsch), Dutch, Frisian, and of course the

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Old English, the ancestor of the present day English (see Baugh & Cable, 2002; Hoad, 2006). Although the speakers of these languages can hardly understand one another, there are several features that prove that they have a common origin. The word ‘father’

in Modern English, for example, is vader and vater in modern Dutch and German respectively, but it is fæder, in Old English, fatar in Old High German, feder in Old Frisian, faðir in Old Norse, and atta in Gothic. Also, in Greek it is patēr, in Sanskrit pitar and athir in Old Irish. It is therefore evident that English was brought to Britain at the time there was no distinct English language. The English language only began as a distinct language when the Anglo-Saxons split off from their Germanic brothers around the fifth century.

The Old English period can best be described as the period between 449 and 1100 AD according to Algeo (2010), 450 to 1150 AD according to Irvine (2006), a period during which the Jutes, Saxons, Angles and the Frisians began to occupy the British Isles and when Old English was said to have actually begun. This period was pre-occupied by a lot of activities (see Algeo, 2010 for more discussion). By Bede’s account cited in Algeo (2010: 82), ‘in 865 the Vikings army, great and expertly organized led by the unforgettably named Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdan, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok (Loð brók ‘Shaggy-pants’), landed in East Anglia.’ They subsequently attacked Wessex, which was ruled by the first Ethelred (Æðelræd), assisted by his brother Alfred, who was to succeed him in 870. Thus, the Vikings occupied the whole of the eastern part of England after driving and looting the English wealthy monastery.

Alfred however, later defeated Guthrum, the Danish king of East Anglia (i.e. the King of the Vikings), in 878 AD. A treaty, as reported, was signed later with the original Britons, therefore establishing the ‘Danelaw’, which split the country into two, having the Norsemen in the east, and the Anglo-Saxons in the south and west.

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language similar to the Anglo-Saxon. The similarity between OE and Old Norse is said to be so subtle that it is difficult to tell whether a word in Modern English is a native or a borrowed word. An example of this is the sk sound, which was palatalized to sh (written sc) in OE, except in scr combination, but the sk was retained in the Old Norse. That is, while native words such as ship, shall, fish have sh in Modern English, words borrowed from Old Norse still have their sk, e.g. sky, skin, skill, scrape, scrub, bask, whisk. Other identical

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vocabularies of both languages are: over, under, man, wife, hear, see, folk, house, thing, winter, summer, will, can, come, mother, think, ride, mine, skull, skin, leg, neck, sister, fellow, husband, wind, bull, score, seat, root, bloom, gap, knife, dirt, kid, sky, egg, cake, skirt, link, gate, bag, etc. were said to be some of the remnants of Old Norse (Baugh &

Cable, 2002: 78).

There have been several developments however in the Anglo-Saxon English that brought a huge change in its entire structure, making it completely different from the present day English. A modern English speaker cannot read and understand an Old English text without difficulty. The Old English or the Anglo-Saxon was said to have been a heavily inflected language; like German and French, it had three genders: male, female and neuter, and could be inflected for up to five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental). There were seven classes of ‘strong’ verbs and three of ‘weak’ verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person.

Adjectives were believed to have had up to eleven forms, while the definite article ‘the’

had three genders and four case forms as singular and plural respectively (for detailed discussion see Baugh & Cable, 2002). Some other key features that make the Old English unique are its spelling and pronunciation.

2.4.2.1. Old English monophthongs

One very important thing that distinguishes Anglo-Saxon English vowels from the present day English vowels is length. The Old English is said to have had both monophthongs and diphthongs just as it is in Modern English, and both type of vowels had short and long versions. The monophthongs were normally represented with the letters: a, æ, e, i, o, u, and y, both representing either the short or the long vowel sounds.

Though the OE long vowels were said to have had the diacritic [´ ] written above them to avoid confusion; that is, gód [go:d] ‘good’, this was said to be inconsistent. But modern writers normally distinguish the long vowels from the short ones with a macron placed on top of them in spelling, while the short ones are left unmarked. Some examples are fēdan ‘feed’ and fōda ‘food’, where a macron is placed on e and on o to show their length. But in phonetic transcriptions a colon is used for the same purpose:

thus the words fēdan and fōda will be transcribed [feːdan] and [foːda] respectively (see also Algeo, 2010: 86). The Old English short vowels would be written a, æ, e, i, o, u,

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and y, while the long ones are written as ā,ǣ,ē,ī,ō,ū,ӯ. There was also an additional vowel, ǝ, said to be reduced from the second elements of the diphthongs ēa and ēo in unstressed syllables (Algeo, 2010). This vowel was said to have disappeared later somewhere in the eleventh century, and the two diphthongs, ēa and ēo, consequently became monophthongs. Examples of the vowels as they were used in Old English cited in Algeo (2010: 87) are given below:

Short vowels Long vowels

a as in wascan (to wash) ā as in hām (home) æ as in fæþm (embrace) ǣ as in dǣl (deal) e as in settan (set) ē as in fēdan (feed) i as in sittan (sit) ī as in rīdan (ride) o as in moððe (moth) ō as in fōda (food) u as in sundor (sunder) ū as in mūs (mouse) y as in fyllan (fill) ӯ as in mӯs (mice)

2.4.2.2. The diphthongs

Diphthongs in Old English were made up of the OE short and long vowels and were short and long in quality. Just like the monophthongs, the long diphthongs have a macron on their first elements to indicate their length, while the second elements, the short vowels, remained unmarked. Most of the diphthongs consist of a front vowel followed by a central offglide. Examples of the diphthongs used in Old English are: eǝ, æǝ, _ēǝ,_ǣǝ (Millward & Hayes, 2012: 155).