Morphology and the lexicon

English has its beginnings around 450 CE, when speakers of Germanic languages settle in Britain. The
account that Bede tells is of the brothers Hengist and Horsa who were invited by the Celtic-speaking King
Vortigern to defend his British kingdom against invaders. The invitees turned against Vortigern and the
Germanic they spoke gradually replaced the Celtic and Latin spoken there at that time. The year 450 is a
relatively arbitrary date because Germanic speakers had had trade routes to Britain and had probably settled
there long before 450. Moreover, the language we refer to as Old English does not change into a separate
branch of Germanic right away but continues to be similar to the Germanic languages spoken outside of
Britain.

Being much closer in nature to Proto-Germanic than modern English is, Old English has a morphological
system that is quite similar to its predecessor.Old English is a language that relies on marking its nouns,
adjectives, and verbs but that has relatively free word order. Such a language is called synthetic. Over time,
however, English becomes a language that relies more on prepositions, auxiliaries, and articles, also known
as grammatical words, and on word order than on case markings on nouns and agreement on verbs. This kind
of language is called analytic. The table reproduced below summarizes differences between synthetic and
analytic languages. The change from synthetic to analytic might have been caused by the contact with
speakers of Celtic, Scandinavian, and other languages or be due to language-internal factors or both.

The grammatical structure of OE can be summarized in the table below.

noun verb
cases Nom form strong (irregular)
Acc I
Gen II
Dat* III
Instr* IV
gender masc V
fem VI
neuter VII
number sing weak (regular)
dual in pronouns* I
plural II
III
 class root signature example change pattern
I i + cons writan ī-ā-i
II eo/u + cons beodan, brucan ēo/ū - ēa - u
III vowel + l/r/h/n + cons helpan, weorpan, feohtan, findan i - a - u, eo/e - ea - u
IV e + l/r/m beran, stelan e-æ-ǣ
V e + cons (not l/r/m/n) sprecan e-æ-ǣ
VI a + cons or e/ie + double cons wæscan , hlehhan a-ō-ō
VII a/o/ea/æ/e + cons hatan, rædan a - e - ē, ea - eo - ēo

Hafa arna þanc ðara, ðe ðu unc bude.

Thena lefna lamon bārun mid is beddiu.

By 1100, the date usually adopted as the start of Middle

English, many case endings have disappeared and the
use of grammatical words is on the increase. This
development continues between 1100 and 1500, and the
English at the end of the Middle English period
resembles present-day English in many respects. During
the Middle English period, French and Latin words come
into the language and cause changes in the sound system
(expanded use of [v] and [dƷ]) and the lexicon (many
derivational affixes such as -ity and -ify are introduced).
The figure on the right provides a visualization of the
changes, based on written texts: it can easily be seen that
twelfth-century texts are most synthetic but that there is a
major change in the thirteenth century to less synthetic
and then to more analytic in the fourteenth.

The period after 1500 is another transition period with

some changes in grammar and sounds. The major change
is perhaps the adoption of tens of thousands of Latin,
Greek, and newly invented words. Because of their complex morphology, these loans increase the overall
syntheticity, as shown in the figure above. This phenomenon also causes the appearance of dictionaries of
hard words and gives rise to concerns about the purity of the language. The result is a set of prescriptive rules
for spelling, pronunciation, and grammar that are still adhered to today.

The period after 1700 is best characterized by the spread of English around the world: the increased use of
English in different parts of the world leads to variation while globalization encourages stabilization.
Politically, we could argue that Australian, Nigerian, and Indian English are separate languages though most
people would argue that these varieties are all English despite differences in the phonology, grammar, and
lexicon. All Englishes display the analytic character that English has been moving towards: an abundance of
grammatical words (auxiliaries and prepositions) and reliance on word order.