Old English
Old English
Old English Language, also called Anglo-Saxon language spoken and written in England before 110; it is the antecessor of Middle English and Modern English. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term Anglo-Saxon, adapted in the early seventeenth century from Lat. Anglo-Saxonicus, was the commonest name for the language, but although still sometimes used by scholars, it has gradually been replaced in the last hundred years by the more scientific term “Old English”.
Old English is a member of the western branch of the Germanic family of languages and therefore belongs ultimately to the Indo-European stock. It shares the fundamental characteristics of Indo-European with most other European languages, though these remoter basic qualities have been much obscured by distance in the time and space. More clearly, it shares special Germanic features which distinguish it, together with the language of Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, from other branches of Indo-European. The history of OE is usually divided into the two main periods, Early OE (from about A.D. 700 to goo) and Late OE (from about A.D. goo to 1100). But in fact the only considerable work of “Early Old English” upon which any thorough grammatical study can be based is that of King Alfred, which came at the very end of this “Early Old English” period, and only in the case of his Cura Pastoralis translation (since the manuscripts of all his other works are later) does his work survive in the forms of a scribe who wrote in one of his scriptoria. Moreover the extant manuscripts of the Alfredian West Saxon already shew marks of a transition to Late Old English, just as, similarly, the Old English of the eleventh century begins to shew marks of the transition to Middle English.
The beginning of Old English
It is very difficult to say when Old English began, because this pushes us back beyond the date of our earliest records for either Old English or any of its closest relatives (with the exception of very occasional inscriptions and the evidence of words and names occurring in Latin or in other languages). Everyone agrees in calling the language of our earliest extensive sources found in contemporary copies ‘Old English’: these are Latin-English glossaries from around the year 700. (Some other material was certainly composed before 700, but survives only in later copies.) By this time Old English was already very distinct from its Germanic sister languages as a result of many sound changes and other linguistic developments.
Dialects
It is possible that Old English was already to some extent divided into three main dialects when the first settlements were made from the continent. The only Old English dialect of which we can gain an extensive and continuous knowledge is West Saxon. Moreover, West Saxon was the only dialect to become literary in prose, and in the later Old English period it was Wessex that provided the dialect which became the cultural language of the whole England, though somewhat influenced and modified by neighboring dialects.
The surviving Old English documents are traditionally attributed to four different major dialects: Kentish (in the south-east), West Saxon (in the south-west), Mercian (in the midland territories of Mercia), and Northumbrian (in the north); because of various similarities they show, Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as Anglian.
The Alphabet
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The Germanic invaders brought to Britain a rough method of writing magical formulae and epigraphs called runes. This runic writing consisted at first of some 24 symbols to be scratched upon or colored into stone or hard wood or metal- signs which generally by means of straight lines could very roughly represent common sounds. These runes, at first the secret of a priestly class (the OE word ran means 'secret'), were employed in England to some extent after the conversion to Christianity for religious inscriptions but they were unsuitable for any sort of continuous writing and remained only as tokens of antiquarian interest in the late Old English period.
Pronunciation and spelling
Although the spelling system of Old English was not fixed or regular, it seems best to introduce beginning students to the language in a regularized spelling system, a modified form of the Early West Saxon dialect in use at the time of King Alfred, in the late ninth century.
Vowels and diphthongs in Old English are either long or short. This feature, vowel length, is difficult for students to grasp, because Modern English no longer has it. Although it was formerly the practice in grammars and discussions of metrics to describe the vowels of modern English as logo or short, linguists tend now mostly to characterize them as simple vowels or diphthongs.
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The end of Old English
The conventional dividing date of approximately 1150 between Old English and Middle English reflects (very roughly) the period when these changes in grammar and vocabulary begin to become noticeable in most of the surviving texts (which are not very numerous from this transitional period). In what is often called ‘transitional English’ the number of distinct inflections becomes fewer, and word order takes on an increasing functional load. At the same time borrowings from French and (especially in northern and eastern texts) from early Scandinavian become more frequent. All of these processes were extremely gradual, and did not happen at the same rate in all places. Therefore any dividing date is very arbitrary, and can only reflect these developments very approximately.