Chapter 1 The Place of Old English

1.1. Scholars of the English language divide it for historical treatment into three stages:

Though These dates are set up partly for convenience, they nevertheless reflect a linguistic reality: by each of the boundary times, 1100 and 1500, the accumulation of gradual changes has become so considerable that in each case the language is clearly seen to have entered a new phase.

1.2. In its earliest phase one cannot even properly speak of the language as "English"; it was a collection of dialects brought over to Britain from the continent by Germanic invaders (the familiar Angles, Saxons, and Jutes²). These dialects were members of the Germanic (Gmc) branch of Indo-European (IE), the "family" to which most present European languages belong. The history of Old English cannot be fully understood unless its Gmc and IE connections are recognized. The accompanying Diagram 1 shows how the chief members of the IE family are related to one another:

"Satem languages"³: Indo-Iranian; Armenian; (Thracian); Albanian; Balto-Slavic
"Centum languages"³: Tocharian; Anatolian; Hellenic; Italic; Celtic; (Illyrian); Germanic

1.3 Since the Gmc branch is at the center of our present interest, it needs to be seen in fuller detail than the others (Diagram 2):

East Germanic (EGmc): Gothic
North Germanic (NGmc): Old Norse (ON); Icelandic; Norwegian; Danish; Swedish
West Germanic (WGmc): Old High German (OHG); Old English (OE); Old Frisian (OF); Old Low German

Language Relationships

1.4. A word in any language which can be shown to have descended from the same source as one in another language is said to be cognate⁴ with it. For Example, the English word bear, carry, is descended from OE beran, which is cognate within the Gmc branch with OS and OHG beran, ON bera, and Gothic bairan, all having the same meaning. Scholars have hypothesized a common Primitive Germanic (PrGmc) source for or base *ber-⁵ from which all of these could have developed regularly. These Gmc forms are in turn cognate with forms from other IE branches: Latin ƒer- (Italic branch), Greek φερ- (Hellenic branch), Sanskrit bhar- (Indo-Iranian branch). And in turn an IE base *bher- is hypothesized from which all the historically attested forms in the various branches could have developed regularly.

1.5. Generally speaking, the farther apart two languages are in time and/or space, the less alike their cognate forms will look. The preceding diagrams suggest a much nearer relationship between OE and ON than between either of these languages and Latin, and a comparison of cognate forms in the three languages bears out this conclusion:

Lat. pecus, ON ƒé, OE ƒeoh (MnE fee)
Lat. quod, ON hvat, OE hwæt, (MnE what)

It is not often that a series of cognates from distantly related languages shows consistently similar forms, but consider the case of the humble mouse: OE mūs, Old Irish mús, Lat. mūs, Gr. μυς, Skt. mūš, all going back to an IE base *mūs-.

1.6. What we know of these complex interrelationships is the product of Comparative Indo-European Philology, a study which has occupied many of the greatest language scholars since the late eighteenth century. The plentiful remains preserved in OE were of considerable value in working out the details of the Gmc branch, hence also the larger scheme of IE. Old English, then, should be seen in its historical context, not only as the earliest phase of the present English language, but also as a member of the Gmc branch, and in relation to the other IE languages. (No systematic account of IE or of Gmc will be given in this book, however.)

1.7. Because of the paucity of documents surviving in the other OE dialects, all introductory study of the language is based on West Saxon (WS), the language of King Ælfred the Great (reigned 871-899) and of the writers who followed him until the Norman Conquest.⁶ Hence the texts in this book are WS, as is also the outline of grammar. Even a cursory inspection of the texts will show, however, that the usage and spelling of Ælfred's time differed considerably from those of the time of Ælfric (c955-c1012), about a century later. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between Early West Saxon (EWS), which is presented in the grammar and exemplified in texts 1, 2, 7, and 8, and Late West Saxon (LWS), which is exemplified in texts 11, 12, 13, and 14.

1.8. Though many changes have come into the language as OE has developed through ME to MnE, there has always been a high degree of continuity. The impression of strangeness which one receives at the first sight of an OE text is therefore somewhat misleading. It results largely from the presence of three unfamiliar symbols (þ, ð, and æ) and a number of unfamiliar clusters of otherwise familiar symbols (hw-, -cg, -sc, etc.). Most of these represent sounds still present in MnE though now spelled differently. For example, OE pæð is the familiar MnE path and sounded the same in OE as it does for most speakers today. As soon as these OE spellings become familiar the text will no longer have the look of a foreign language. One will begin to discover, in fact, that a great many OE words or word bases can be recognized by their MnE descendants.

Vocabulary

1.9. Vocabulary-counts of present day English have shown that, of the 1000 words most frequently used, about 83 percent are of OE origin. The proportion decreases rapidly in the less frequent thousands but remains throughout at about 30 percent despite the large number of non-English words that have been borrowed down through the centuries.⁷

1.10. Similar word-counts of the OE poetic vocabulary⁸ test this continuity in the other direction: of the 1000 most frequently used words, fully 55 percent have survived into recognizable form into MnE, and of the 100 most frequent, 76 percent have survived.

1.11. Analyzing only this last group, the one hundred or so most frequently used words in OE poetry, we find the following:

NOUNS	:	Surviving into MnE with little or no change in form or meaning (about 40 percent)	god, mann, heoƒon, eorðe, weorold, līƒ, luƒu, word, weorc, dæg, hand, cynn, riht, þanc, engel,	God man heaven earth world life love word work day hand kin right thank angel
		With greater change in form or meaning (about 30 percent)	cyning, mōd, (mood), ƒolc, (folk), mynd, (mind), dōm, (doom), ƒēond, (fiend), ƒæsten, (fastness), gāst, (ghost), sōþ, (sooth), burg, (borough),	king courage people memory judgement enemy fortification spirit truth walled town
		With no Standard English descendant (about 30 percent)	dryhten, hyge, rīce, þēod, wuldor, æðeling, scop, līc, ƒeorh, wer	lord, mind, thought dominion (cogn. Ger. Reich) people, nation glory nobleman, prince poet, singer body, corpse life man (cogn. Lat. vir)
PRONOUNS	:	Surviving with little change (about 80 percent)	ic, þū, hē, hit, þæt, hwā, hwæt, þis, selƒ, hwelc	I thou he it that who what this self, same which
		Essentially different forms (about 20 percent)	hēo, sē,sēo þēs, þēos	she the this
VERBS	:	Surviving with little change of the base form or of meaning (about 35 percent)	sittan, sēcan, healdan, beran, gieƒan, cuman, sēon, bēon, wæs, dōn, dyde,	sit seek hold bear give come see be, was do, did
		Surviving with considerable change (about 46 percent)	wieldan, (wield), habban, hæƒde, mæg, meahte, willan, wolde, sculan, sceolde, mōtan, mōste, āgan, secgan, ƒaran, (fare), cunnan, cūðe, (can, couth), cweðan, cwæð, (quoth), scieppan, (shape),	control have, had may, might will, would shall, should be able, must own say journey, travel know say, said create
		Not surviving in Mn Standard English (about 18 percent)	hātan, hātte, (ME hight), weorðan, (ME worth), beorgan, witan, (wit), munan,	be called become protect know remember
ADJECTIVES	:	Surviving with little change (about 57 percent)	gōd, wīd, ƒæst, hālig, rīce, ān, nān, hēah, hīerra, hīehst, micel, māra, mǣst,	good wide fast holy rich one, none high, -er, -est much, more, most
		Surviving with considerable change (about 14 percent)	swelc, lēoƒ, (lieve),	such beloved
		Not surviving in Mn Standard English (about 29 percent)	ēce, swīð, æðele, eƒt,	eternal strong noble (cogn. Ger. edel) later
ADVERBS	:	Surviving with little change (about 53 percent)	tō, eall swā, þǣr, þanne, nū, ǣr, wīde,	too all so, as there then now ere, before widely
		Surviving with considerable change (about 27 percent)	ēac, (eke), swelce, (so-like), ā, nā, gelīc,	also likewise aye; never, not at all like
		Not surviving in MnE	ne, þā, swīðe,	not, neither then, when very, extremely
PREPOSITIONS	:	Surviving with little change (about 82 percent)	in, on, tō, ƒor, oƒer under æƒter, æt, þurh,	in, on in, on to, toward for over under after at through
		Surviving with changed meaning (about 9 percent)	wið, (with),	against, opposite
		Not surviving in MnE	mid,	with, accompanying (cogn. Ger. mit)
CONJUNCTIONS	:	Surviving with little change (about 75 percent)	and, ond, giƒ, þēah,	and if though
		Not surviving	ac,	but

1.12. In sum, it should be evident that there is a considerable degree of continuity in the core of the English vocabulary between OE times and the present. The enormous increase in the number of words has been due to addition rather than to wholesale replacement. In any present-day use of English the ancient native element is virtually inescapable and stays normally at the center. Almost all our MnE function-words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles) are from OE, as also the pronouns, numerals, and auxiliary verbs. Thus even if a writer today were to avoid the native nouns, verbs, adectives, and adverbs, using borrowed ones instead, the structural framework of most sentences would remain Anglo-Saxon. The first sentence of this paragraph (a random example which was not written to be used as such) would look like this if only the native words were retained and the others deleted:

In _____, it should be _____ that there is a _____ of _____ in the _____ of the English _____ between OE times and the _____.

More than 77 percent of the words in this sentence are native. The others are from Latin, directly or through French.

FOOTNOTES

¹"Anglo-Saxon" is properly used of the people, their history, their literature, and frequently of their language. "Old English" specifically refers to the language, or to the literature written in it.

²So named by the Venerable Bede. Precisely who the "Jutes" were is not known; they can hardly have been from present Jutland. Scholarly opinion now inclines to identify them with the Frisians.

³IE languages have been broadly divided into centum [kɛntum] and satem [satɛm] (the Latin and the Avestan words for "one hundred"), indicating that a k sound found in languages of the first group was palatalized to an s or similar sound in languages of the second. This does not however reflect any basic split within the IE family. (For items in parentheses the evidence is not conclusive.)

⁴Lat co-gnatus "of common origin," sprung from the same stock. To be properly called cognate, two words must share a common ancestor. If one is the source of the other the relationship is different. For example, MnE garage is a loanword (borrowing) from MnFrench.

⁵Hypothetical or reconstructed forms are regularly preceded by an asterisk (*) to distinguish them from historically recorded or attested forms.

⁶West-Saxon was spoken in southwestern England (south of the Thames and west of Kent), Other dialects were Kentish (in Kent and adjoining parts of Sussex and Surry) and the Anglian dialects, which included Northumbrian (northward from the Humber to Scotland) and Mercian (between the Thames and the Humber - the large midland area). King Ælfred's capital was at Winchester (the "Casterbridge" of Thomas Hardy's novels).

⁷A. H. Roberts, A Statistical Analysis of American English, The Hague (Mouton) 1965, p. 37.

⁸J. F. Madden and F. P. Magoun, Jr., A Grouped Frequency Word-List of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Dept. Of English, Harvard University, 1960.

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