ET122: History and Spread of English

Unit 4: Indo-European Origins and Old English

Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation:

 The alphabet was adopted from Latin, introduced by Christian missionaries
 Spelling was never fully standardised, instead the alphabet, with continental values (sounds)
was used by scribal monks to spell words ‘phonetically’
 Each dialect, with its different sounds were rendered different and inconsistently over time.
 King Alfred attempted to standardise spelling in 9 th century but by 11th century changes in
pronunciation continued.
 Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds:
first the runic thorn (þ), and later eth (ð). 
 Another added letter was the ligature ash (æ), used to represent the broad vowel sound
now rendered by ‘a’ e.g. in ‘fast’.
 A letter wynn was also added, to represent the English w sound, but it looks so much like
thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with w to prevent confusion.
 No letters were silent (all were pronounced)
 Phonetic spelling helps to identify and track dialectal differences through time

Vocabulary:
 The inflectional structure was far more rich than is true of Old English’s modern descendant.
 Small spelling differences and some minor meaning changes, many of the most common
words in Old and modern English are the same.
 Over 50% of the 1000 most common words in OE survive today and more than 75% of top
100
 E.g. Nouns: hand, god, man, word
 Pronouns: He, I, me, self, we
 Verbs: bear, come, did, sit, was
 Adjectives: fast, good, holy, rich wide
 Adverbs: ere, all, now, too , there

Sentence Structure:
 OE was a ‘synthetic’ language, meaning inflectional endings signalled grammatical structure
and word order was rather free as for example in Latin.
 Modern. English is an ‘analytic’ language, meaning word order is much more constrained.
(With clauses typically in SVO order)
 In OE verse, word order becomes much more free, and word inflections and meaning
become even more important for deducing syntax

Word Forms:
 OE words were much inflected.
 Overtime, most of this apparatus was lost and English became the analytic language we
recognise today

Nouns, Adjectives and Pronouns:

 These categories of OE words are declined according to case (nominative, genitive, dative,
accusative, or sometimes instrumental), number (singular, plural, or [for pronouns] dual)
and gender (masculine, feminine or neuter)
 Some adjectives are inflected to distinguish comparative and superlative uses
 Adjectives and regular nouns are either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ in declension
  Irregular nouns belong to classes that reflect their earlier Germanic or even Indo-European
roots
 Pronouns are typically suppletive in their declension, meaning inflectional rules do not
account for many forms so each form must be memorised

Verbs:
 OE verbs are conjugated according to person (1 st , 2nd, 3rd), number (singular or plural), tense
(present or past/preterite), mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive or optative)
 Most verbs are either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ in conjugation
 There are seven classes of strong verbs and three classes of weak verbs
 A few other verbs, including modals belong to a special category called ‘preterit-present’
where different rules apply
 Others (e.g. be, do, go) are ‘anomalous’ meaning each form must be memorised

Other parts of Speech:

 The numerals may be declined, albeit with fewer distinct forms than is normal for adjectives

What was OE and what makes it different from ME?