Old English
excerpts from the
works of
Dr. Micheal Crafton
Department of English
State University of West Georgia
Carrollton, Georgia
(Spring 2000)
Some form of homo sapiens has been living on the British isle for a long time, deep into prehistory. In fact, a very popular form of tourism in the British isles focuses exclusively on these prehistoric settlements.
The Stonehenge site is of course the most popular of these, but there are literally dozens of other stone circle sites, barrows, and burial grounds all across the country, particularly Northern England and Scotland as well as the counties near Stonehenge.
The following sites are of interest:
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/stonehenge/stonehenge.html
http://www.cumbria1st.com/History/prom.htm
The first historical peoples in England are the Celts. They were in England settled by 300 BC for certain, probably much earlier, and remain to this day.
We distinguish two waves of Celts whose dialects form two
distinct groups, the Goidelic and the Brythonic.
The first wave was the Goidelic and they ended up in Ireland
and Scotland, after being pushed there by the second wave the Brythonic, who
settled in Wales and Cornwall. Upon
invasion by the Anglo-Saxons, the Brythonic tribes migrated to what is now
Brittany in France and settled that are as the Breton Celts. The dialect of these people is still very
close to Welsh.
The following site is of interest: http://www.clannada.org/docs/theline.htm
You will find hundreds of sites related to things Celtic, especially Arthuriana. Caveat Cursor, however, some of them are quite kooky.
The next historical peoples to settle in England were of course the Romans. Julius Caesar landed in the south of England in 55 BC as part of his Gallic wars, conquering Celts all across southern Europe. He did not do much with England and so the Romans did not have much of a presence until about a century later when Claudius invaded in 43AD, and utterly dominated the Southern half of England.
The resistance by the Celts was fierce in places, the most famous of which is Boudicca’s rebellion, but by and large the Celts and Romans learned to coexist. Roman excavations reveal now how extensive the Romans were settled in England with elaborate houses, bath houses, theaters, temples, and most importantly roads, bridges, and walls. The most famous of the walls marks the northernmost point of the Roman occupation near the border of Scotland. This is Hadrian’s Wall and much of it still stands.
The following sites are of interest:
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Roman_Britain_index.htm
http://www.bedoyere.freeserve.co.uk/hadrians%20wall.htm
The Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century AD as a result, in part, of attacks from Northern Europe by nomadic Germanic tribes, such as the Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, Lombards, and Franks. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were likewise nomadic Germanic tribes that invaded England.
That the Romans had to contend with Saxon invasions where stationed in England is indicated by the fortifications required on the East Cost of England and by appointing an Office of the Saxon Shore. However, by 410 conditions had deteriorated such back in Rome that the Roman troops and citizens were pulled back home.
Thus, as the story goes, the remaining Romanized Celts were left unprotected from the invasions of barbarians from the North, the Scots and the Picts. These were Goidelic Celts who did not take to Roman life. As Bede tells it in his 730 AD history of England, in the year 450 King Vortigern asked help from the Jutes in Friesland or thereabouts to come fend off these Picts and Scots. Two Justish princes came over to assist. Their names were Hengest and Horsa, both names mean horse, and did indeed repel the offending Picts and Scots, but instead of taking payment and returning home, they decided the stay and thus begins the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
Whereas the Romans and Celts learned to live together and each respected the other’s culture, such as not the case between the Celts and theAnglo-Saxons. The Germanic invaders ruthlessly obliterated any competition for language or culture. The result is clear in how very few Celtic words ended up in Anglo-Saxon. The analogy often drawn to explain the relation between Celt and English is that between Native American and English Colonists in this country. You know the bloody history, and you know how few Indian words we have in American English.
The hostility between Celtic and English peoples helped to evolve the Arthurian mythology. King Arthur, you will recall, was a Romanized Celtic general or warrior who fought bravely against the Saxons. This hostility may be experienced today, some argue, in the attitude toward the British by the Scottish and the Irish, particularly the Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland.
The Jutes came to settle the southeastern part of the Island, generally Kent, while the Saxons settled the next northern tier all the way to the western coast, and the Angles settled the next northern tier up to Wales in the west and Scotland in the north.
As these Germanic tribes settled, there emerged more and more common dialects associate with the seven dominant kingdoms, or Heptarchy. The seven kingdoms are as follows: Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, thus one Jutish kingdom and three Saxon and Anglian kingdoms.
The culture of the Anglo-Saxon period was much like that popularly known of as Viking culture, their values centering on warfare, valor, ship faring, loyalty to king and clan, and with a non-Christian religion that you may know of as Tuetonic or Norse mythology, the figures of Thor, Woden, Freya, Loki, and Frigg were some of the dominant gods. Our days of the week reflect four of theses gods: Tiwes-day, wodens-day, Thors-day, and Freya-day.
The Anglo-Saxon culture was converted to Christianity, however, by two different evangelical movements, one from Rome and one from Ireland.
From Rome, Pope Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine (not the one who wrote the Confessions) to England in 597. He settled in Kent and was taken in by the King there, King Aethelbert, and the Queen, a Christian Frankish woman. St. Augustine was allowed to set up a church and he converted from there to the north.
From Ireland, St. Patrick had been converted the locals to Christianity since the fifth century. One of his most famous followers, St. Columba, established a monastery on the isle of Iona between Ireland and Scotland and sent missionaries from there to Scotland and Northern England. These missionaries converted the north and moved south to meet the work of St. Augustine.
The two groups had slightly different customs and so by 664 a meeting was held in the north English fishing village of Whitby wherein it was decided which tradition of Christianity the isle would follow, the Irish or the Roman. The meeting decided upon the Roman tradition.
Some of the finest examples of medieval learning, book making, and spiritual cultivation resulted from this time associated with monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow in England and Dublin in Ireland. The famous Book of Kells comes from this time as do the Lindisfarne Gospels, both magnificent examples of medieval art.
The following sites are of interest:
http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/old_english.html
http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/early/pre1000/ASindex.html
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/british_isles/anglo-saxon/anglo-saxon.html
Our text organizes the Viking conquests into two major ones. It is probably more accurate to talk about a series of battles and invasions, but two waves of Viking attacks will do for us now.
The first wave of Viking attacks began toward the end of the eighth century and it was during this time that the Vikings sacked the famous monasteries. The attacks continued and increased in ferocity and daring to the point that it might seem as if they were about the completely dominate the island. Perhaps they would have done so had it not been for the Wessex king Alfred, now known by historians as Alfred the Great, who found the Vikings to a standstill in 878.
At this time, he forced the Danes to agree to a treaty known as the Danelaw. According to the Danelaw, the Vikings would not settle or invade any territory in the southern half of England and the English would leave the northern half alone.
The second wave started toward the end of the 10th century and resulted in the son of Danish king Svein Forkbeard becoming the King of England. Cnut (pronounced “ka noot”) became the king in 1014 and ruled able until 1041 and his sons ruled for a couple more years until the Wessex line was returned with King Edward the Confessor in the year 1042.
That Viking culture became a part of life in Northern England is evident from the language, the names of towns ending in Viking suffixes like –thwaite or –by, as in Whitby, but also in the history and lore of the people. This is well documented and presented in the Yorvik Viking museum in the northern city of York in England. I have linked below the Jorvik web site.
http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk
Vikings and English Live Together
Unlike the situation between the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings did manage to learn to live together. The dialectal differences between the North Germanic languages of the Vikings and the West Germanic languages of the English were not so great as to prevent communication. As the years went by in the North of England the Vikings and English intermarried and their languages may be said to have intermarried as well.
You may want to check the web sites
associated with learning Anglo-Saxon or Old English. One of the very best is Cathy Ball’s site at Georgetown
University.
http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/old_english.html
You might especially enjoy going to this site and checking out the sound files associated with counting. http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/hwaet/hwaet06.html
There was no such thing as standardized Old English. Standards in language are always political constructs that require something of a unified nation.
We have good evidence to talk about four distinct Old English dialects.
1: Kentish – most Jutish influence
2: Wessex – most Saxon influence
3: Mercian – most Anglian influence
4: Northumbrian – Anglian with Viking influence
Three other points:
1. The dominant dialect of Old English is Wessex.
2. Modern English probably derives from Mercian
3. The Northumbrian and Mercian dialects are so similar they are something referred to as one dialect and called Anglian.
Rule # 1: Pronounce all letters; assume no silent letters. Stress all vowels.
Vowels
Rule # 2: The basic long vowels are all pronounced with European value, i.e.
Long vowels are pronounced exactly as if they were written in IPA.
a à ah (as in la la)
e à ay (as in day, may, say)
i à ee (as in bee, see, free)
o à o (as in low, tow, fro)
u à oo (as in boo, you, to)
y à oooo (a high front, rounded vowel, as in French duc, lune)
Short vowels are pronounced the same as modern English
except no schwa.
ae à ash (as in last, fast, past)
open e à eh (as in bed, dead, red)
I à
ih (as in bid, rid, tidbit)
U à ooh (as in would, put, should, wood)
Diphthongs are a little more complicated.
ea long à ash tensed, plus schwa (sounds like “ay yuh”)
ea short à ash not tensed, plus schwa
eo long à e plus o
eo short à open e plus o
io long à i plus o
io short à I plus o
These are a little more complicated. Basically you could just follow IPA except for the following:
c à could be a hard k sounds or a ch sound. If near front vowels, then ch sound; if near back vowels, then hard k sound. Thus, ic à ich, but boc à bok.
g à could be a hard g or a “y” sound. Again, if near front vowels, then y sound; if near back vowels, then hard g sound. Thus, gear à year; gomban à gomban.
cg à “juh” sound; thus, ecg – sounds like “edge.”
sc à sh so fisc à fish, scirt -à shirt
h à initially a regular h sound; but medially and finally a velar fricative, like German ch. Thus, horsa à “horsa,” but feoh à “feox”
s,z; f,v, theta, eth. Since the voiced versions of these fricatives were not phonemes there was no need for different spelling, so the pronunciation is as follows:
Voiced if between voiced sounds; voicelss otherwise.
sunu – voicless, “sunu”; risan – voiced “rizan”
n / long n à the long n sound occurs before [g] or [k].
r à the [r] sound is trilled
Doubled consonants are both pronounced just as the two t’s are in “hot time.”
The stress is nearly always on the first syllable with three exceptions.
1. The exceptions are verbs with prefixes such as with-, for-, on-.
2. The prefixes ge-, be-, for- were not stressed ever.
3. Compounds were stressed on the first syllable of the first word, with a secondary stress on the first syllable of the second word.
The general point about the remainder of this chapter on Old-English, from my perspective at any rate, is two-fold: one, to get you to understand the nature of Old English; and two, to get you to see what in Modern English derives from Old English.
Germanic Word Stock
When you look at a passage of Old English (for example, the passages from Genesis and Luke printed at the end of this chapter) even after you are familiar with the spelling, sound, and grammar, you run into a problem of not recognizing many of the words. This is simply because many of the Germanic words that made up the bulk of the Old English lexicon or vocabulary are gone. So we learn right away in dealing with Old English that a dictionary will be necessary for translating. Now, having said that, though, you will also find a good many words that we still use or use with different meanings.
The Old English word hlaf through sound and spelling changes becomes loaf. That is a word that we recognize; however, we must learn that in Old English loaf meant bread, not the shape of the bread.
We should also learn that we use some really obsolete Anglo-Saxon words buried in other words. The words for man “guma” and “wer” are good examples. We have the words today in bridegroom – bride + guma and werwolf – man + wolf. Another one is “gar” which means spear. We have in garlic – spear + leek, a spear shaped leek, garlic.
A final but important, and poetic, is the use of compounds. All languages must create new words to deal with new situations and languages do that differently. Anglo-Saxon tended to create new words by compounding; modern German does the same thing. So many of the words in Old English are compounds, and they are often metaphoric compounds called kennings. One famous example is used in Beowulf to refer to the ocean; it is hranrade or whaleroad, the road a whale travels.
Grammatical Gender
Those of you who have worked with inflected languages, Latin for example, are familiar with the concept of grammatical as opposed to natural gender in languages, but for those who have not done so, it appears a strange concept. Old English as an inflected language relied upon grammatical gender, so you have odd creations like the word for woman, wifmann, being masculine and the word for wife, wif, being neuter. Odd though it may seem, we have to just accept that the language system drove these gender associations and nothing more. For our purposes, we have to know that in order to properly inflect a word, to do correct grammar in Old English, one simply has to know, that is look up in a dictionary, the grammatical gender of the word.
One of the clear signs that a language is changing from a synthetic or an analytic language, as English does, is its increasing reliance on natural gender.
Inflections
In Modern English we have few inflections, we have basically three for nouns (singular, plural, and possessive), about the same for pronouns, and a few conjugations for verbs. Old English had many more.
Nouns
Old English nouns are declined or inflected for gender, number, and case, and these declensions are grouped in families according to their endings of their stems, not inflections, in Proto-Germanic.
When you look at the paradigms of inflections of Old English on the bottom of page 110, you will see the groupings of the most important nouns according to stems, but the stems themselves don’t show up or make any sense; you just have to accept that the group a-stem contains nouns that are declined in the same way.
Nature of OE Nouns
The group of nouns that has bequeathed the majority of nouns to Modern English, including the majority inflection, is the masculine a-stem. Look at the pattern of declension as a paradigm of what the nouns system was like.
In the case of a-stem masculine, you will notice that in the singular nominative and accusative (subject and direct objects) were declined the same (hund, hund). Genitive (or possessive) ended in –es and dative (indirect objects and objects of prepositions) ended in –e. For the plural, nominative and accusative ended in -–s (which becomes –s in Modern English); genitive ends in –a and dative ends in –um. So take another a-stem noun, stan (stone) and decline.
stan
stan
stanes
stane
stanas
stanas
stana
stanum
So in OE you might still kill two birds with one stone (or stan), but that stone could be pronounced, spelled many different ways.
Modern Survivals of OE Nouns
The main survivals are, of course, the –s ending for genitives and the –s ending for plurals. But we can also see the unmarked plural, deer/deer from the neuter a-stem, the –en plural, oxen, from n-stem, the vowel mutation plural, foot, feet; and the r plural as in children, brethren from the r-stem nouns.
Note there are other more arcane survivals, in particular, the singular genitive of measure.
Demonstratives
There were two dominant paradigms in OE. You can see what Modern English has taken from this set, quite a few actually.
What will stand out in the demonstratives is that (a) that it is so decline (the works well for us in nearly every case) and the two demonstratives that begin in “s”, se and seo. All the other demonstratives begin in th just like our modern ones. The se, seo demonstratives completely died out because they did not fit the paradigm and the more popular th versions won out.
Adjectives
About adjectives we need to take away two points. One, OE had a dual adjective system, strong and weak, which differed in definiteness. Those adjectives that following demonstratives, the most definite, were more simply declined and thus called the weak set; those not following demonstratives, more indefinite, has a more complex declension and thus strong.
The other thing to note is that OE had a comparative and superlative declension as we have in Modern English, good-better-best, old-older-oldest.
Adverbs
This was not complicated, mostly an –e ending marked the adverb formed from an adjective.
Adverbs likewise had a comparative and superlative declension.
Personal Pronouns
The personal pronouns look most like Modern English of anything we have seen. Familiar forms; ic for I, me for me, min for mine and so forth. What you should notice, therefore, are the differences.
One, there is a dual pronoun which we no longer have. That is, a pronoun set for two people versus just one or several. We get on today with a singular and plural, but no dual. So if you look at the paradigm of dual pronouns, you don’t see anything familiar. “Wit, unc, uncer, git, inc, uncer” are all gone.
Two, there is a distinct set of second person singular pronouns that sound familiar, thu (thou), the (thee) and thin (thine). These forms were later used as either polite forms of the second person or religious forms, but in OE they are simply the singular form of the second person. We have adopted the plural forms of the second person for Modern English, you your, and we don’t have a singular, thus a loss of distinction. (Except of course in Southern American English, which as a you for singular and y’all for plural.)
Three, in the third person set, you of course will notice that the feminine is strange: no she! It is believed that the Modern pronoun she was derived from the demonstrative seo plus the personal form heo, thus sheo and thus she.
Four, the plural forms of the third person that we are familiar with, they, them, are not in OE at all. They were actually borrowed from the Viking languages later in the period and adopted in the Middle English period, so in OE you see the hi, hi, him, hira for the third person plurals.
Interrogatives and Relatives
The interrogative pronoun hwa, from which we get who was declined in the singular and in masculine and neuter, so fewer forms than you might have guessed. From this paradigm we get who, whom, whose, and what.
These pronouns were not used as relative pronouns in OE as they are so used in Modern English; OE got by with a Þe, an undeclinable pronoun that was an all purpose relative, much like Modern that, which can be used for nearly anything.
(For a new web site on Old English go to the following: http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl401/
Here you will find everything you never needed to know about Old English, but seriously, there are ample sound files to help you practice your pronunciation.
Anglo-Saxon Verbs
Verb conjugation is not something many of us feel very warm and fuzzy about. We could say the same about nearly all aspects of grammar, I suppose, but I believe it applies especially to verbs. Verbs are complicated, the notions of tense, aspect, and subjunctive typifying the complexity.
A few basic things about OE verbs:
Familiarize yourself with the conjugation or declension paradigm.
First, OE verbs obviously had a more complete set of declensions, far more so than Modern English.
Two, there were two basic groups of verbs, strong and weak. The strong class indicated declensions by vowel ablauting and the weak class by adding dental suffixes. The same can be said of Modern English. For example, the Modern English verb to walk for its past or preterit by adding –ed, a dental suffix to the end of the word, walk – walked. That is, then, a weak verb paradigm. A Modern English strong verb is to run, which forms its preterit by ablauting the vowel, hence ran, run – ran.
Three, in OE there were seven distinct classes of strong verbs, each with its own distinctive ablaut series.
Four, in OE there were three distinct classes of weak verbs, with distinct series of endings.
Five, the principal parts are different in OE verbs. For weak verbs there were three, the infinitive, the preterit indicative, and the past participle. For strong verbs there were four, the infinitive, the preterit indicative, the past participle, and the plural preterit.