Name : Maida S.

Albanjar

Class : VI - B

NPM : 0621-1711-016

Old English

Called Anglo-Saxon, Englisc by its speakers is an early form of the English language that

was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and southern Scotland between the

mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily

the literary register of Anglo- Saxon. It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old

Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North

Germanic group of languages. And language boundaries do not always reflect political

boundaries, the tendency to correlate language with nationality is a common mistake, and the

use of certain languages can reflect positively or negatively on the speaker depending on the

situation. For example, there is a perception in the US that only English speakers are Americans

and only non-Americans who are not English speakers

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years–

from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the fifth century to some time after the

Norman invasion of 1066, when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early

period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the

Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who were

occupying and controlling large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to

be known as the Danelaw.

In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders (masculine, feminine,

neuter) in the noun and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for case.
Noun and adjective paradigms contained four cases—nominative, genitive, dative, and

accusative—while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case. Old English had a greater

proportion of strong verbs (sometimes called irregular verbs in contemporary grammars) than

does Modern English. Many verbs that were strong in Old English are weak (regular) verbs in

Modern English (e.g., Old English helpan, present infinitive of the verb help; healp, past singular;

hulpon, past plural; holpen, past participle versus Modern English help, helped, helped, helped,

respectively).