Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Language

West Saxon literary dialect

Phonology

Old English consonants (p. 83)

Old English consonant changes from Common Germanic /k/ and /sk/. Examples:

• claene, crypel, corn (before a consonant or back vowel)
• ceap, cild, dic (next to a front vowel) (new sound)
• fisc, wascan, scearp (from Germanic /sk/; in all environments) (new sound)

Old English consonant changes from Common Germanic /g/ and /gg/. Examples

• graes, god, gyltig (before consonants, back vowels, and mutated front vowels)
• sagu, beorg, fylgan (between back vowels or after /l/ or /r/)
• gear, giet, gellan (before or between front vowels and in final position after a front vowel)
• brycg, secg, mycg (from Germanic /gg/; in medial or final position) (new sound)

no phonemic voiced fricatives as in PDE (/v/, /z/, etc)

OE /h/. Examples:

• hraefn, hand (similar to PDE, in initial position before vowels and l, r, n, w)
• sihp (palatal fricative after front vowels)
• eahta, heah, purh (elsewhere, velar fricative)

loss of OE consonant clusters (/hr/, /hl/, /hn/, /hw/, /kn/, /gn/) in PDE (Examples: OE hraefn, PDE raven, OE hlud, PDE loud; sometimes still spelled: what, whale, whistle, knee, gnat)

unstressed final m, n > n

relative stability of English consonant system for past 1200 years

Old English Vowels (p. 88)

Some changes from Common Germanic:

• breaking or fracture (a kind of diphthongization involving the insertion of a glide after front vowels and before velar consonants. Examples: fehtan>feohtan, hærd>heard)
• back mutation (diphthongization of stressed short vowels when followed by back vowel in next syllable, e.g. hefon>heofon)
• palatal diphthongization (e > ie and ae > ea after palatal consonants, e.g. giefan, gieldan, giet, sceaft, gear)
• front mutation (i-umlaut, i/j mutation) (if stressed syllable followed by unstressed syllable containing i or j, the vowel of stressed syllable was fronted or raised, e.g. OE dom/deman, Gothic doms/domjan; OE plural endings with i resulted in foot/feet, other plurals men, teeth, geese, lice; in comparatives/superlatives: old/elder; derived weak verbs, sit/set, lie/lay, fall/fell, whole/heal, doom/deem; 2nd and 3rd person singular present indicatives of strong verbs had i in endings, cuman/cymp, feohtan/fyht, standan/stent

reduction of vowels in unstressed inflectional endings

Prosody

OE verse, alliteration, stress-timed line, root syllable took major stress; compounds stressed on first element

Graphics

beginning of Christian era, Germanic alphabet, Futhorc or runic alphabet (p. 90), derived from Greek/Latin alphabets, 24 symbols; Ruthwell Cross, 8th c. inscribed in runes with portion of "Dream of the Rood"; sixth c. Christianization of England led to adoption of Latin alphabet; influence of Irish practice, Insular alphabet, special characters for f, g, r, s (p. 91).

Punctuation: raised point to indicate pause; semicolon and inverted semicolon (punctus elevatus) also indicated pause; no capitals/lowercase distinction

Morphology

loss of inflections: reduction of vowels in inflectional endings, need for syntactical support, adaptation of imported words, inflections in form of suffixes

Old English noun declensions (p. 97)

Adjective declensions: definite/weak declension (needing demonstrative, numeral, or possessive pronoun), indefinite/strong declension ( p. 99)

Personal pronouns (p. 100)

Demonstrative pronouns (p. 101)

Interrogative pronouns (p. 101)

Other pronouns (indeclinable pe, indefinite pronouns: aelc, hwilc, aenig, eall, nan, swilc, sum, man)

Verbs

• inflected for tense, person, number, and mood; two tenses: present and preterite
• Strong verbs: seven subclasses, ablaut system, four principal parts (infinitive, past sing., past plural, past participle)(p. 103, 104)
• Weak verbs: Germanic innovation (dental preterite), led to regular verbs in PDE (p. 104)
• Other verbs: irregular, beon/wesan, don, willan, gan; preterite-present verbs (sculan, cunnan, magan, agan, ic dearr, durfan), ancestors of Present Day English modal auxiliaries (shall, can, may, ought, dare, must)

Uninflected words

prepositions (to, for, be, in, under, ofer, mid, wip, fram, geond, purh, ymbe, of)

conjunctions (and, ac, gif, peah, forpæm, see also correlative conjunctions, p. 105)

adverbs (ofer, under, on, purh, æfter, ne, eac, næfre, hider, to)

• formed by addition of -an to other words (innan, feorran, sippan)
• formed through inflection in genitive/dative of other words (ealles, geara, hwilum)
• formed by adding -e or -lice to adjective (rihte, rihtlice),

interjections (la, eala, whæt)

Syntax

modifiers close to modified word

prepositions preceded objects

interrogative formed by inverting the subject and the verb

SVO order in main declarative clauses, SOV in dependent clauses, VSO in interrogative and imperative clauses;

parataxis vs hypotaxis: less subordination than in PDE (hypotaxis) , simple links with conjunctions (parataxis) and, pa, some subordination with pa, gif, forpan

use of apposition/variation in poetry

idioms: correlative comparative ("the bigger, the better"), genitive with numerals (twentig geara), some Latinisms

Lexicon

Indo-European or Germanic, IE: basic words, 1-10 numerals, kinship terms; some words found only in Germanic/West Germanic languages: baec, ban, folc, grund, rotian, seoc, swellan, werig, wif, broc, crafian, idel, cniht, sona, weod)

few Celtic borrowings, some place names (Thames, Dover, London, Cornwall, Carlisle)

some Scandinavian influence

major Latin influence (words for religious, intellectual concepts/activities, plants, calques or loan translations)

formation of new words:

• compounding: noun+noun (sunbeam), adjective+noun (yfelweorc), adverb+noun (innefeoh), compound adjectives (isceald, wishydig), some compound adverbs (neafre, eallmaest), compound verbs (goldhordian)
• prefixing, ge-: past participles, perfective sense, association in nouns, derivation from verb
• abstract nouns with -nes, -ung, -dom, -scipe, etc.
• agent nouns with -end, -a, -bora, -ere, -estre
• adjective suffixes: -ig, -lic, -ful, -leas, -ed, -isc, -sum, etc.
• prefixes: un-, in-, ofer-, æfter-, fore-, mis-, under-, etc.

loss in PDE of large part of OE vocabulary due to sound changes, reductions, confusions with other words, cultural and technological change, taboo, chain reactions in semantic changes, dialectal differences, fashion

Semantics

relation to culture and ways of interpreting the world

terms for kinship (OE ego-oriented, nuclear family, little distinction beyond nuclear family, no separate terms for marriage relationship, distinction between paternal and maternal relatives)

color (infrequent use of terms for hue, frenquent reference saturation, lightness, luster, scintillation)

semantic change: generalization and narrowing, amelioration and pejoration, strengthening and weakening, shift in stylistic level, shift in denotation

Dialects

Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, Kentish; phonological differences; north lost inflectional endings earlier than the south; heavier use of diphthongs and extensive palatalization of velar consonants in West Saxon areas

Literature

literacy among the clergy, use of vellum, hand copying, command of Latin, English and Irish/Gaelic by the literate, anonymity of texts, religious literature, translations from Latin; prose: King Alfred's translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy, biblical translations, compilation of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Aelfric (955-1020): sermons, homilies, saints' lives; Wulfstan (d. 1023): Sermon to the English; verse, four-stress alliterative line with caesura (alliteration determined by first stressed word in second half-line, formulaic style, recurring images (eagle, wolf, ice, snow), kennings (e.g. swan-road); earliest verse: Caedmon's hymn late 7th c., epic: Beowulf, elegies: The Wanderer, The Seafarer.