OLD ENGLISH

I GUSTI MADE ARI RAHARJA PUTRA

1941121113
 English Characteristics
Between Era’s

• Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are the

classification of English language, and they exhibit some
differences between them. There’s interesting fact that modern
English, which gets to be spoken in this modern era, tends to be
completely different from that which was spoken in the olden
times.
• The modern speakers of this language cannot recognize the older
version of this language. This is due to the fact that this language
has a history of around 1700 years where it can be classified into
three categories, the Old English, the Middle English, and the
Modern English.
Old English
• Old English language, also called Anglo-
Saxon, language spoken and written in England before
1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern
English.

• Four dialects of the Old English language are

known: Northumbrian in northern England and
southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central
England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West
Saxon in southern and southwestern England. Mercian
and Northumbrian are often classed together as the
Anglian dialects.
 Old English - Characteristics
• 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).
 Characteristics - Pronounciation

• The pronounciation of English words commonly differs from somewhat from their
modern equivalents. The long words in particular have undergone considerable
modification. So the words like heafod (head), fager (fair), or savol (soul) show forms
that have been contracted in later English

•  Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh,
spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs; ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short
and long versions.

• There was a difference of spellings in Old English as compared to Modern English. Old
English made use of two characters to represent the sound of th: Þ and ð, as in the
words wiÞ (with) or ðā (then). Old English represented the sounds of sh by sc, as in
scēap (sheep) or scēotan (shoot), and the sound of k by c, as in cynn (kin) or nacod
(naked)
 Characteristics - Vocabulary
• The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Germanic. A large part of this
vocabulary, moreover has disappeared from the language. When the Norman Conquest
brought French into England as the language of the higher classes, much of the Old
English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was displaced
later by words borrowed from French and Latin.

•  Many of these words were inherited by English together with some other Indo-
European languages from the same common source.

Old English   New English      Latin          Russian

modor            mother              mater          мать

niht                night                 nox            ночь

neowe            new                   novus         НОВЫЙ

beran              bear                  ferre           брать

 Characteristics - Grammar
• One of the important feature of the Old English that distinguishes it from Modern English is of
its grammar. Inflectional languages falls into two classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic
language is one which indicates the relation of words is a sentence largely my means of
inflections while the languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs
and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages.

• The Noun
The inflection of the Old English noun indicates distinctions of number (singular and plural) and
case. There are four main grammatical cases in Old English, known by the Latin terms;
Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. The Nominative is used for the Subject, the
Accusative is used for the Direct Object, the Genitive is used to express possession and the
Dative is used for the Indirect Object. Old English nouns had grammatical gender, singular and
plural number, and were also classified as "strong" or "weak" according to the distinctness of
their inflectional endings.
 Characteristics - Verb
• Old English verbs have only two tenses: present and past. The present tense was also used for
the future, while the past perfect was signalled by the past tense with the
adverb ǣr ‘formerly’: Ic lufode ‘I loved’, Ic lufode ǣr ‘I had loved’. However, Old English
verbs also have three moods: the Indicative, used for statements of fact (I love him), the
Imperative, used for commands (Love me!), and the Subjunctive, used for hypothetical
statements (If I loved you) and reported speech (He said he loved me).

•  A peculiar feature of the Germanic Languages was the division of the verb into two great
classes, the weak and the strong, often known in Modern English as regular and irregular
verbs, the weak verbs are those that require 'ed' at the end but the vowel remain same, and
strong verbs are those in which vowel is changed or modified. Example of weak verb is walk,
walked, walked and the example of strong verb is sing, sang, sung.
 Characteristics – Prefixes/Suffixes
• A part of the flexibility of the Old English vocabulary comes from
the generous use made of prefixes and suffixes to form new words
from old words or to modify or extend the root idea. In this
respect it also resembles modern German. Some examples of
Suffixes are –ig, –full, –lēas, –lice, –nes and –ung. Some adjective
suffixes are: –sum (wynsum) and –wis (rihtwis).

•             Some prefixes that are frequently used in Old English

are; ā_, be_, for_, fore_, ge_, mis_, of_, ofer_, etc. Thus with the
help of prefix, the verb 'settan'(to set) can become 'āsettan'(place),
besettan(appoint) etc.
THANK YOU