The History of English: Old English and the Anglo-Saxons

Before I delve into the details of the changes that have affected the English language, I am going to write a little bit about the origins of English; who spoke the first forms of English, where it originated from and how it came to Great Britain in the first place.

Present-day English is descended from Middle English, which itself comes from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. Old English belongs to the West Germanic group of languages, along with Dutch, German, Frisian and various Low German dialects.

There is also a North Germanic group of languages, which includes modern Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faeroese and Icelandic. All of these languages are descended from the now-extinct Old Norse, which as we shall see, has exerted considerable influence on English.

There also existed an East Germanic group of languages, which Gothic belonged to. However, Gothic did not have any influence on English, so you won't hear from it again in this blog series. Sorry, goths!

It is crucial to remember that the three branches of Germanic are all related to each other. They originally stemmed from one parent language, Proto-Germanic, which itself is part of the Indo-European family of languages. 


The Anglo-Saxons


The term Anglo-Saxon reflects the origins of the people who spoke Old English; they were the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Frisians, a collection of closely related peoples who originated from what is now the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark.

They were often collectively known as the Saxons by contemporary writers, which shows that they were considered to be akin. Indeed, they would have all been able to communicate with each other, as they all spoke more or less the same West Germanic language which we could reasonably call Pre-Old English.

A map showing the the journey that the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians took.

The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians originally came over to Britain in the middle of the fifth century to help the British Celts contain the Picts and the Scots, by request of the Celtic leader Vortigern. A vacuum had been left in Britain following the departure of the Romans. The Celts no longer had the protection of a powerful empire to keep away invaders, so Vortigern was forced to turn to the Saxon nation (a generic term for the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians) for help (Algeo & Pyles, 2004).

After helping the Celts dispatch of the Picts and Scots, the Anglo-Saxons turned on the Celts and drove them into the far west of Great Britain; namely, Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria. These Germanic invaders soon sent more of their continental relatives to Britain. They knew that the land was theirs for the taking.

During the course of the next century, more and more Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived from the mainland. From the middle of the fifth century to the latter years of the eighth century, the descendants of the original Germanic invaders succeeded in conquering all of England and some of Scotland as far north as the highlands (Algeo & Pyles, 2004).

These Germanic settlements eventually developed into seven kingdoms: Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Although they differed slightly in terms of their dialect and culture, these settlers all spoke what was essentially a common language. They are known today as the Anglo-Saxons, and they spoke a language that they called Ænglisc, i.e. English.

The Mercians were a bit greedy.

From the first invasions up until about the 12th century, this period in the development of the English language is now called Old English. In many ways, Old English had more in common with German than it does with Modern English. As I will explain later, English has since lost many of its typical Germanic characteristics.

Writing

Old English was first written in the 'futhorc' variety of the runic alphabet (see picture below), but it shifted to a Latin-based alphabet introduced by Irish missionaries (Crystal, 1987; p.203) from around the 9th century.

The variety of runes known as 'futhorc', named after the first 6 letters.

The letter <þ>, which was adopted into the Latin-based alphabet is a borrowing from the runic symbol þorn (thorn). The thorn survives in 'Ye Olde Worlde...' - the symbol was confused with a <y>, which is why old pubs and shops often use Ye to emulate an archaic style of writing, even though it was always pronounced as 'the'.

<ð> was an alteration of Latin <d>, and was used interchangeably with thorn; they both represented the 'th' sounds in 'think' and 'the'. Another borrowing from futhorc runes is the <ƿ> symbol, known as 'wynn'. It represented the /w/ sound in 'walk', but it was gradually replaced with <uu>, which evolved into <w> (hence, 'double u'). This was almost certainly to avoid confusion with the very similar looking <p>. 

Influences from other languages

Although the Anglo-Saxons displaced the Celts throughout England (except Cornwall and the North-West), there are very few Celtic influences in the English language. Only a handful of Celtic words were adopted in Old English. Some examples are crag, cumb (deep valley; compare Welsh cwm, meaning 'valley'), broc (badger), and clucge (bell, pronounced [kludʒe], or 'clue-jay').

Brock the badger. Soon to be culled in a town near you!

Latin, on the other hand, has exerted a considerable influence on English throughout its history. There is some Latin influence from the very earliest moments of contact between Latin and English (Crystal, 2003). In England, Latin remained the language of the Church for some time after the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Words such as munuc (monk), mynster (minister) and alter (altar) were adopted from Church Latin.

Travelling missionaries also introduced a few Latin words into English, such as plante (plant) and pise (pea), while some words had probably already been adopted by the Anglo-Saxon tribes while they were still on the continent. Examples include wīn (wine), cēse (cheese) and tigele (tile).

The earliest written forms of Old English, however, showed very little influence from other languages except from a small number of borrowed words from Latin.

However, this was all about to change in 787 AD when the Vikings began to arrive in Britain.

Stay tuned for the next instalment!

References:

Algeo, J. & T. Pyles (2004) The Origins and Development of the English Language, Wadsworth: Boston

Crystal, D. (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Crystal, D. (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

The History of English: An introduction

Hi, and thank you for reading my blog. You will be pleased to know that I am back in the Blogosphere after a long summer break. My next few articles are going to follow a series, documenting the origins of the English language, and the many changes it has undergone since its humble beginnings.

As we shall see, English has risen from relative obscurity to the most widely spoken language in the world in the space of about 1,500 years. In that time, English has changed to such an extent that the varieties of English that were spoken in 500 AD would be completely incomprehensible to our ears. Understanding the written works of Shakespeare can be a little challenging, so you can imagine how much harder it would be to understand somebody who lived over a thousand years prior to that!

The English language has undergone numerous changes over the years, some of which are trivial and others of which are striking. In terms of vocabulary, English has gained a great deal of loanwords from other languages, while conversely, many native words have been lost or replaced. The meaning of some words has changed over time, too.

Also, English has undergone many sound changes. To give one example of many, English once had the 'ch' sound in German acht, or the Spanish 'j' in ojo (Crystal, 2003); this is a sound that linguists call the voiceless velar fricative. This sound no longer occurs in English, except in dialectal Scottish pronunciations of loch. Wherever you find a <gh> combination, as in though, enough and right, there was once a velar fricative.  

The language has also undergone many other sound changes; probably one of the most famous examples is Great Vowel Shift, which altered the pronunciation of the English long vowels.

English has also undergone changes in its morphology (roughly, word endings) and its syntax (the way in which sentences are constructed; roughly: word order).

In terms of morphology, Old English, which was spoken from roughly 450  - 1200 AD, had many more inflections (word endings) than does Modern English. 

An inflection is the modification of a word to express a change in tense, number, gender, case, etc. We still have the -s plural and the -'s possessive ending on nouns, and the past tense -ed inflection on verbs, but by and large, English has lost the rich set of inflections it once had.

The written language has also changed, although it hasn't always kept up with changes in pronunciation.

Due to the various changes it has undergone, English now looks very different to its Germanic cousins; even its closest relatives Dutch, German and Frisian do not appear to resemble English very much. But modern English doesn't even look much like the varieties of English that were spoken over a thousand years ago.

To give you a taste of what English looked like over a millennium ago, here is an extract from an Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, which describes a battle that the Anglo-Saxons fought against the Danes in 991:

"hige sceal þe heardra heorte þe cenre
mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað
her lið ure ealdor eall forheawen
god on greote a mæg gnornian
se ðe nu fram þis wigplegan wendan þenceð"

A relatively direct translation of the passage would be:

The mind must be the firmer, the heart must be braver, 

the courage must be the greater, as our strength grows less. 

Here lies our lord all cut to pieces, 

the good man on the ground. 

If anyone thinks now to turn away from this war-play, may he be unhappy forever"

(Translation from anglik.net - see footnote for full reference)

What is this crazy language?

As you can see, very little of the extract is comprehensible to us, though you might be able to make out the odd word. Heorte looks a bit like heart, for example, and if you bear in mind that the <þ> and <ð> characters are now represented as <th> in Modern English, then you can see that þis is indentical to this. Also, þenceð, or thenceth, doesn't look that different to think.

The second word in the first and second line, sceal, looks a bit like shall, although it is translated as must in this passage. When you consider that <sc> represents the 'sh' sound in ship, the link between sceal and shall comes even clearer.

But on the whole, Old English is completely incomprehensible to us. It needs to be studied like a foreign language. So, in this series of articles, I am going to show the ways in which English has changed - and stayed the same - over the years.

In my next entry, I am going to go into some more detail about the origins of English - where the ancestors of the first English speakers came from, how they interacted with the people already living in Britain, and how Old English arose from a collection of different dialects.

References:

http://www.anglik.net/oldenglish.htm (2011) 

Crystal, D. (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge