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.