OLD ENGLISH Navarro Martinez Berenice Guadalupe

Castillo Rodríguez Ingrid Gissele

Sánchez Araiza María Fernanda

ORIGINS OF ENGLISH
Before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the language (or languages)
spoken by the inhabitants of the British Islands belonged to the

Celtic family, introduced by people who had come to the islands

in the middle of the first century BC.

Many of these colonizers were later subjugated by the

Romans, who arrived in 43 BC. But around 410, the

Romans left, retreating to defend their empire in

Europe. So, after a millennium of speaking Celtic and

halfanother millennium of speaking Latin.

LATIN LOANS
Latin has been a major influence on English through out its history, and
there is evidence of its role from the earliest moments of contact. The
Roman army and merchants gave new names too many local objects
and experiences, and introduced several fresh concepts. About half of the
new words were to do with plants, animals, food and drink, and
household items.

ANGLOSAXON
The name Anglo-Saxon king to refer in the
16thcentury to allaspects of the early period-
people, culture and language. It is still the usual way
of talking about the people of the cultural history;
but since the19th century whenthe historyof
languages came to be studied in detail old English
has been the preferred name for the language.

SCRIPT
There is a "gap" between the arrivalof the
Anglo-Saxons and thefirst manuscripts in Old
English. Some deteriorated inscriptions date
from the 5th and 6th centuries, written in runes
that the invaders brought with them, but they
givevery little information about what the
language reallywas like. The literary age began
with the arrival of Roman missionaries, led by
Augustine, who came to Kent in 597. The rapid
growthof monasteries led to the production of
large numbers of manuscripts, especially of the
Bible and other religious texts.Due to this
growing literary environment, Old English
manuscripts appeared slightly earlier
compared to other European languages. The
first texts, dating from around 700, are some
inscriptions and poems.

ALPHABET
The Anglo-Saxon alphabet was mainly influenced by
writing in runes, which eventually evolvedinto
characters that closely resemblethe letters and
pronunciation we know from modern English.

VERBS
Verbs were conjugated according to the person (first,
second, third), number (plural or singular), tense (past,
present) and mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive,
etc.).Most verbs are regular or irregular depending
on the conjugation; but there are seven typesof
irregular verbsand three of regular verbs. In addition,
there are other verbs, such as modals, whose
conjugation rules are different, that is, all the forms
must be memorized as in modern English.
 THE EARLIEST ENGLISH LITERATURE
As with foreign languages, there is never a complete

agreement about best way of translating old English texts

about the need for attending there’s no doubt. To print a

facsimile of old English

texts would be to make them unreadable to all but the

specialist.

GRAMMAR
In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages
in the history of English by greater use of a larger set of inflections
in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with
this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical
gender in nouns and adjectives.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Old English was a "synthetic" language in the sense
that the meaningof the inflectional endingsand the
orderof the words was quitefree, as in Latin. In
contrast, modern English is more "analytical", which
means that the order of the words is stricter.

OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY

The vocabulary of Old English presents a mixed picture, to those who
encountering it for the first time. The majority of the words in the Caedmon
extract are very close to Modern English, once we allow for the unfamiliar
spelling and the unexpected inflections. On the other hand , some of the words
look very strange, because they have since disappeared from the language.

OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS

The Old Englishtexts which havesurvived come
fromseveral parts of the country, and fromthe way
they are written they provideevidence of dialects. As
there was no standardized systemof spelling, scribes
tended to spellwords as theysounded; but because
everyone used the sameLatin-based alphabetic
system, there was an underlying consistency, and it is
possibleto use the spellings to work out dialect
differences.

REFFERENCES
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2019, July 25). Old
English language. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Old-English-language