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The Development of English: Old English (450-1150)



The English language began as Englisc, the speech of a scattered population of Anglo-Saxon peoples on an island off the European coast. Today, English is a global language spoken by perhaps a billion people around the world. This is largely due to the political power and cultural influence of the British Empire and the United States. However, it is also the result of the simplicity that English grammar has acquired during its long history. Before reaching its modern form, English passed through two major stages, Old English and Middle English.

The Anglo-Saxons spoke various Germanic dialects, a mixture of which are the basis of Old English, the form of the English language used from the mid-400s to the early 1100s. To present-day readers of English, Old English looks like a foreign language, as these lines from the Old English epic poem Beowulf show:

Рa com of more under mist-hleoϸum

Grendel ʒonʒan, Godes yrre bær

(Then out of the marsh, under mist-covered cliffs,

Grendel stalked, bearing God’s wrath)

Old English has had a significant effect on Modern English. Although less than one percent of the words—4,500 out of 500,000—in the Oxford English Dictionary are from Old English, these words form our most basic (man, wife, work, Friday, house) and functional (to, for, but, and) vocabulary. One computer analysis revealed that all of the hundred most commonly used English words are of Anglo-Saxon origin. Grammatically, the language was more complex than modern English, with words changing form to indicate different functions, so that word order was more flexible than it is now.

By the 600s, Christian scribes had further developed English by replacing the ancient Germanic characters known as runes with the Old English alphabet of twenty-four letters. The scribes who transcribed Beowulf around the year 1000 used this alphabet.

The most valuable characteristic of Old English, however, was its ability to change and grow, to adopt new words as the need arose. While Christianity brought Latin words such as cloister, priest, and candle into the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, encounters with the Vikings brought skull, die, crawl, and rotten. The arrival of the Normans in 1066 would stretch the language even farther, with thousands of words from the French.

 







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