HISTORY OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

TEACHER: Silvina, Carmaran

STUDENTS: Alanis, Flavia; Luque, Jesica;

Machain, Santiago

TOPIC: Some features of Old English Grammar

COURSE: 4th year of English Profesorado

YEAR: 2016

1
Some features of the Old English language.

The most fundamental feature that distinguishes Old English from the language
of today is its grammar. The word order is much varied than it would be in
Modern English. Sometimes, whole sentences are identical in the order of
words, or nearly so, as can be seen from the word-for-word translation in the
Caedmon text.

The main syntactic differences affect the placing of the verb, which quite often
appears before the subject, and also at the very end of the clause – a
noticeable feature of this particular story.
The reason Old English order could vary so much is that the relationships
between the parts of the sentence were signaled by other means.

The Caedmon text: the extract is from an Old English translation of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History. It tells the story Of Caedmon, the unlettered cowherd
who became England’s first Christian poet, sometime in the late 7th century.

Word order
The varying forms of nouns, adjectives, and articles tell us how the parts of the
clause relate to each other. In Modern English, the difference between (I) and
(II) is a matter of word order:

(I) The woman saw the man

(II) The man saw the woman

In Old English, the two sentences would be:

(I) Seo cwen geseah pone guman

(II) Se guma geseah pa cwen

The nominative feminine form of seo in (I) has changed to an accusative form,
pa in (II). Similarly, the accusative masculine form of pone in (I) has become a
nominative se in (II).

Verb ‘be’
The past tense of the verb ‘be’ has changed little since Old English times:
 Waes ‘Was’ 1st/3rd sg.
 Waere ‘Were’ 2nd sg.
 Waeron ‘Were’ 1st/2nd/3rd pl.

Personal pronouns
The personal pronoun system had more members than we find in Modern
English:
 Ic ‘I’
 We ‘We’
 Pu ‘Thou’
 Ge ‘Ye’

2
  He ‘He’
 Heo ‘She’
 Hit ‘It
 Hi ‘they’

Nouns

Old English nouns may be masculine, feminine or neuter, regardless of the

biological sex of their referents. Often the gender of Old English noun is quite
illogical, for example, words like magden (girl), wif (wife), which we should
expect to be feminine or masculine, are in fact neuter. Nouns also appear in
nominative, accusative, genitive and dative forms, depending on their function
in the clause.

The definite article:

The nominative masculine definite article  se

The nominative feminine definite article  seo

The nominative neuter definite article  paet

Verb inflections:

There were several other distinctive inflectional features of the Old English verb:

 The infinitive: -an or –ian was added to the root. Examples in the
Caedmon text include singan ‘to sing’ and nealecan ‘(to) approach’. The
use of a suffix to mark the infinitive was lost after the Old English period,
and the particle ‘to’ come to be used instead;

 The –ing form: the equivalent form was –end (e). Examples in the
Caedmon text are gongende ‘going’ and sprecende ‘speaking’;

 The –ed form: this shows the some kind of vowel changes and endings
we see today, but it also had a special prefix ge – (proper of Germanic
languages), the form is well represented in the Caedmon text, being a
past narrative – see geseted ‘settled’, geleornode ‘learned’;

 The subjunctive: unlike in Modern English, this mood was systematically

used, but it had far fewer endings than the indicative. It can be seen
especially in subordinate clauses expressing a subjunctive attitude. An
example in the Caedmon text is scedden ‘should’.

3
Bibliography:

 Crystal, D. (2005). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Second Edition).

USA: CUP
 Baugh, A & Cable, T. (2002) A history of the English Language. Routledge