Old English—an overview

Content

● Historical background
● Some distinguishing features of Old English
● The beginning of Old English
● The end of Old English
● Old English dialects
● Old English verbs
● Derivational relationships and sound changes

Old English is the name given to the earliest recorded stage of the English language, up
to approximately 1150AD (when the Middle English period is generally taken to have
begun). It refers to the language as it was used in the long period of time from the
coming of Germanic invaders and settlers to Britain—in the period following the collapse
of Roman Britain in the early fifth century—up to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and
beyond into the first century of Norman rule in England. It is thus first and foremost the
language of the people normally referred to by historians as the Anglo-Saxons.

‘Anglo-Saxon’ was one of a number of alternative names formerly used for this period in
the language’s history. On the history of the terms see Old English n. and adj., Anglo-
Saxon n. and adj., English adj. (and adv.) and n., and also Middle English n. and adj.

Historical background

Before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, the majority of the population of Britain spoke
Celtic languages. In Roman Britain, Latin had been in extensive use as the language of
government and the military and probably also in other functions, especially in urban
areas and among the upper echelons of society. However, it is uncertain how much
Latin remained in use in the post-Roman period.
During the course of the next several hundred years, gradually more and more of the
territory in the area, later to be known as England, came under Anglo-Saxon control.
(On the history of the name, see England n.)

Precisely what fate befell the majority of the (Romano-)British population in these areas
is a matter of much debate. Certainly very few words were borrowed into English from
Celtic (it is uncertain whether there may have been more influence in some areas of
grammar and pronunciation), and practically all of the Latin borrowings found in Old
English could be explained as having been borrowed either on the continent (i.e.
beforehand) or during or after the conversion to Christianity (i.e. later).

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which began in the late sixth
century and was largely complete by the late seventh century, was an event of huge
cultural importance. One of its many areas of impact was the introduction of writing
extensive texts in the Roman alphabet on parchment (as opposed to inscribing very
short inscriptions on wood, bone, or stone in runic characters). Nearly all of our
surviving documentary evidence for Old English is mediated through the Church, and
the impress of the literary culture of Latin Christianity is deep on nearly everything that
survives written in Old English.

Conflict and interaction with raiders and settlers of Scandinavian origin is a central
theme in Anglo-Saxon history essentially from the time of the first recorded raids in the
late eighth century onwards. However, the linguistic impact of this contact is mainly
evident only in the Middle English period. Likewise, the cataclysmic political events of
the Norman Conquest took some time to show their full impact on the English language.

Some distinguishing features of Old English

In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of
English by greater use of a larger set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and
pronouns, and also (connected with this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also
preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.

An example: The following couple of lines from Ælfric’s De temporibus anni:

‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða
hætan ufan.’

may be translated word-for-word as:

Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air draws the moisture to it from
below and the heat from above.

To pick out a very few grammatical features:

The nouns hæte, ‘heat’, and wæta, ‘moisture’, both have the inflection –an in the first
sentence, because both are in the dative case, governed by the preposition of ‘from’.

In the second sentence they both again have the inflection –an, but this time they are in
the accusative case, as the direct objects of tyhð ‘draws’.

The forms of the definite article agree with these nouns, but you will note that they are
different in each instance, þone wætan ‘the moisture’ (direct object), but ða hætan ‘the
heat’ (also direct object). The difference arises because wæta ‘moisture’ is masculine
but hæte ‘heat’ is feminine, and the article (like other adjectives) agrees in gender as
well as case.

For another example of gender agreement, look at the pronoun hire (i.e. the antecedent
of modern English her) referring to seo lyft (feminine) ‘the air’.

In vocabulary, Old English is much more homogeneous than later stages in the history
of English. Some borrowings from Latin date back to before the coming of the Anglo-
Saxons to Britain (i.e. they were borrowed on the continent), while many others date
from the period of the conversion to Christianity and later. However, words borrowed
from Latin or from other languages make up only a tiny percentage of the vocabulary of
Old English, and the major influx of words from French and from Latin belongs to the
Middle English period and later. (There are also numerous loan translations and
semantic loans from Latin in Old English, reflecting the influence of Latin on the
language of religion and learning.)

Some Old English words of Latin origin that have survived into modern English include
belt, butter, chalk, chest, cup, fan, fork, mile, minster, mint, monk, pepper, school, sock,
strop, wine.

Some borrowing from early Scandinavian is attested in later Old English, but again the
major impact of contact with Scandinavian settlers becomes evident only in Middle
English.

There is also a great deal of continuity between Old English and later stages in the
history of the language. A great deal of the core vocabulary of modern English goes
back to Old English, including most of the words most frequently used today.
For a very few examples see I pron. and n.², one adj., n., and pron., and conj.¹, adv.,
and n., man n.¹ (and int.), woman n.

For further information on which Old English words are included in the OED, and on
how Old English material is dated in the dictionary, see Old English in the OED by
Anthony Esposito.

Some letters from the Old English alphabet which modern English has lost:

● þ, ð both represent the same sounds as modern th, as e.g. in thin or then;
● æ and a represent distinct sounds in Old English, formed with the tongue
respectively at the front and back of the mouth.

The pronunciation of e.g. trap or man in many modern varieties of English comes close
to Old English æ, whereas Old English a was more like the sound in modern German
Mann ‘man’ or Spanish mano ‘hand’ (like the sound in modern English father, but
shorter).

The beginning of Old English …

It is very difficult to say when Old English began, because this pushes us back beyond
the date of our earliest records for either Old English or any of its closest relatives (with
the exception of very occasional inscriptions and the evidence of words and names
occurring in Latin or in other languages). Everyone agrees in calling the language of our
earliest extensive sources found in contemporary copies ‘Old English’: these are Latin-
English glossaries from around the year 700. (Some other material was certainly
composed before 700, but survives only in later copies.) By this time Old English was
already very distinct from its Germanic sister languages (see below) as a result of many
sound changes (i.e. changes in how certain sounds were pronounced, chiefly when they
occurred near to certain other sounds) and other linguistic developments. In fact, most
of the most important changes which we can trace through our surviving Old English
documents had already happened before this time. Some of them were very probably
well in progress or even complete before the time of the settlement in England.

Some Latin-English glosses from one of our earliest sources (the Épinal Glossary):
 ● anser goos (i.e. ‘goose’)
● lepus, leporis hara (i.e. ‘hare’)
● nimbus storm (i.e. ‘storm’)
● olor suan (i.e. ‘swan’)

Some scholars distinguish the undocumented period before our earliest texts as ‘pre-
Old English’, while others are happy just to use the name ‘Old English’ for this period as
well as for the documented period. In practice, the dividing line is hazy. Most of our
documentary evidence for Old English comes from much later (late ninth century and
onwards), and even in the later period there is much that we do not know. In the earlier
part of the documented period, the gaps and uncertainties mean that we often know just
as little about a certain topic as we do for the preceding undocumented period.

If we trace its history back further, Old English belongs to the West Germanic branch of
the Germanic languages, along with Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and the
various dialects which later gave rise to Old Dutch. The major early representatives of
the North Germanic branch are Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Swedish, and Old
Danish (although the earliest extensive remains for all of these are much later than the
earliest Old English documents), while the only representative of the East Germanic
branch for which extensive remains survive is Gothic. Ultimately, all of these branches
diverged from a single hypothetical ancestor, (proto-)Germanic, which itself constitutes
a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. Other branches of Indo-
European include Celtic, Italic (including Latin and hence the Romance languages),
Greek, Indo-Iranian (including Sanskrit and Persian), Baltic, and Slavonic (these last
two being regarded by many as a single branch, Balto-Slavonic).

In fact, very many details of the pre-historic relationships between Old English and the
other Germanic languages are much debated and very controversial, which greatly
complicates any attempt to say when ‘Old English’ began.

The end of Old English

The conventional dividing date of approximately 1150 between Old English and Middle
English reflects (very roughly) the period when these changes in grammar and
vocabulary begin to become noticeable in most of the surviving texts (which are not very
numerous from this transitional period). In what is often called ‘transitional English’ the
number of distinct inflections becomes fewer, and word order takes on an increasing
functional load. At the same time borrowings from French and (especially in northern
and eastern texts) from early Scandinavian become more frequent. All of these
processes were extremely gradual, and did not happen at the same rate in all places.
Therefore any dividing date is very arbitrary, and can only reflect these developments
very approximately.

Old English dialects

The surviving Old English documents are traditionally attributed to four different major
dialects: Kentish (in the south-east), West Saxon (in the south-west), Mercian (in the
midland territories of Mercia), and Northumbrian (in the north); because of various
similarities they show, Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as
Anglian. This division is largely based on linguistic differences shown by various of the
major early sources, although many of the details are highly controversial, and some
scholars are very critical of the traditional association of these linguistic differences
(however approximately) with the boundaries of various politically defined areas (which
are themselves only poorly understood), and today many of the details of where each
variety was centred geographically are subject to debate. For political and cultural
reasons, manuscripts written in the West Saxon dialect hugely predominate among our
later records (although much of the verse is something of a special case), reflecting the
widespread adoption of a form of West Saxon as a written language in the later Old
English period.

There are only a few named figures in the history of writings in Old English. In the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography you can read about: Ælfric of Eynsham,
Wulfstan [Lupus], Alfred [Ælfred], Æthelwold, Cædmon, and Cynewulf.

Old English verbs

Verbs in Old English show an extensive range of inflections, reflecting distinctions of

person and number (e.g. first person singular, first person plural, etc.), tense (present or
past), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, or imperative); many other distinctions are
realized by periphrastic constructions with be v., worth v., will v., or shall v. as auxiliary
in combination with non-finite forms of the verb.

With the exception of some (mostly high frequency) irregular or anomalous verbs, Old
English verbs belong to one of two main groupings: strong verbs and weak verbs.

The strong verbs realize differences of tense by variation in the stem vowel. They are
assigned to seven main classes, according to the vowel variation shown. Thus RIDE v.,
a Class I strong verb, shows the following vowel gradation in its “principal parts”, from
which all of its other inflections can be inferred:
 ● infinitive: rīdan
● past tense singular: rād
● past tense plural: ridon
● past participle: (ge)riden

Similarly, the Class III strong verb BIND v. shows the following principal parts:

● infinitive: bindan
● past tense singular: band (or bond)
● past tense plural: bundon
● past participle: (ge)bunden

The principal parts of the various classes can simply be memorized as fairly arbitrary
sets (with various subclasses and exceptions). To understand the causes of this
variation we need to go back to a much earlier system of vowel gradation called ablaut,
which Germanic inherited from Indo-European, and which Germanic made extensive
use of in the strong verb system.

Since ablaut also ultimately explains the relationships between many other Old English
words, it can be very useful to have some understanding of how it works, although it is
far from simple. See the text box for a very short sketch.

A very short introduction to ablaut The stem vowels ī, ā, i, i shown by rīdan ultimately
reflect Indo-European *ei, *oi, *i, *i (giving by regular development Germanic *ī, *ai, *i, *i,
giving ultimately Old English ī, ā, i, i). Thus the principal parts in Old English can be
explained as reflecting Indo-European *i in combination with either *e (hence *ei), *o
(hence *oi), or nothing (hence *i). For these reasons, the infinitive rīdan is said to show
the Indo-European e-grade, the past tense singular rād is said to show the Indo-
European o-grade, and the past tense plural ridon and past participle (ge)riden are said
to show the Indo-European zero-grade, even though, confusingly, the Old English forms
themselves do not show e, o, or zero. Similarly bindan ultimately reflects a sequence
*en, *on, *n, *n, in which *e, *o, or nothing appear in combination with *n. Similar
variation figures largely in a great many etymologies: for some examples see e.g. LOVE
n.¹, OWE v., RAW adj. and n.¹, COOL adj., adv., and int., RED adj., n., (and adv.), RIFT
n.,
The weak verbs form the past tense and past participle in a quite different way, using a
suffix with a vowel followed by -d-, which is the ancestor of the modern inflection in -ed
(see ‘-ED’ suffix¹). Thus lufian LOVE v.¹ (a weak Class II verb) shows 1st and 3rd
person past singular lufode.

Weak verbs often originated as derivative formations, and often preserve some aspect
of this in their meaning, as for example showing causative or inchoative meaning: see
below on cēlan ‘to (cause to) cool’ and cōlian ‘to become cool’.

Derivational relationships and sound changes

Many Old English words belong to large groups of words all derived ultimately from the
same base, and are related to one another in ways that would have been fairly
transparent to speakers of the language. However, in the period of our literary
documents the relationships between words were often much less clear than they are
likely to have been earlier, because sound changes and other developments had
obscured the derivational relationships.

For example, cōl ‘cool’ (see COOL adj., adv., and int.) has a small family of related
words in Old English, including cōlnes COOLNESS n., which clearly shows the same
base plus ‘-NESS’ suffix. The relationship is similarly clear in the case of the derivative
Class II weak verb cōlian ‘to become cool’ (see COOL v.¹).

However, the relationship is less immediately clear in the case of the derivative Class I
weak verb cēlan ‘to (cause to) cool’ (see KEEL v.¹). In this case the difference in the
stem vowel was caused by an important process called i-mutation which occurred
before the date of our earliest records. The earlier form was probably *kōljan. In the
process called i-mutation an i or j caused a change in the vowel in the preceding
syllable, in this case *ō > *ē. In this word (as in many others) the j was then itself lost, so
that by the time of our surviving texts we find cēlan in the same word family as cōl,
cōlnes, and cōlian.

The same process explains the variation that we find in the stem vowel in the plural of
some words. The word mouse of course shows in modern English the plural form mice;
similarly in Old English we find singular mūs but plural mȳs. The earlier forms would
have been singular *mūs, plural *mūsi (earlier *mūsiz); i-mutation caused the change *ū
> *ȳ in the plural, and then the i was in turn lost, so that in our surviving texts we find
singular mūs but plural mȳs.

This and similar processes explain many of the rather complex relationships between
related word forms in Old English.
Old English in the OED

Content

● When did Old English end and Middle English begin?

● The OED‘s policy regarding Old English
● OED3: policy and procedures with regard to Old English
● The ordering of Old English material in OED3

Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, as it is sometimes called) is the term used to refer to the
oldest recorded stage of the English language, i.e. from the earliest evidence in the
seventh century to the period of transition with Middle English in the mid-twelfth century.

When did Old English end and Middle English begin?

When plans for what became known as the Oxford English Dictionary were being drawn up
in the late 1850s, it was a commonly held view that the borderline between Old English
and later forms of English should be regarded as 1250, rather than 1150. In the
scholarship of the time this earliest stage of English was in fact usually considered to be a
wholly different language from later English—and therefore not properly within the remit
of an English dictionary.

These early views are evident in the Proposal for the Publication of a New Dictionary by the
Philological Society (1859) which envisages a starting point for the dictionary of 1250 (the
date of the ‘rise’ of ‘our language’), very much in accordance with the thinking of Herbert
Coleridge (the first editor of the proposed dictionary), whose own Dictionary of the first, or
Oldest Words in the English Language (1863) covers the period 1250-1300.
Prof. Glanville Price (Languages in Britain & Ireland (2000) 148) has remarked with some truth
that ‘the language of Beowulf would be almost as unintelligible to a man of Chaucer’s time as
it is to the modern reader.’

By the time James Murray was appointed editor of the OED in 1879 scholarly opinion had
been revised to the extent that the starting point of English had become fixed a hundred
years earlier in the mid-twelfth century (at roughly the time of writing of the final annals
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)—the period of transition from Old to Middle English.

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The OED‘s policy regarding Old English

Murray states the policy of the OED with regard to Old English very explicitly in the
‘General Explanations’ in the first volume (1888: p.xviii) of the New English Dictionary (NED):

The present work aims at exhibiting the history and signification of the English words now in
use, or known to have been in use since the middle of the twelfth century. This date has been
adopted as the only natural halting-place, short of going back to the beginning, so as to
include the entire Old English or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Vocabulary. To do this would have involved the
inclusion of an immense number of words, not merely long obsolete but also having obsolete
inflexions, and thus requiring, if dealt with at all, a treatment different from that adapted to the
words which survived the twelfth century… Hence we exclude all words that had become
obsolete by 1150. But to words actually included this date has no application; their history is
exhibited from their first appearance, however early.

The final sentence is important: Old English was to be only partially excluded from the
dictionary. It was to be admitted to the OED when required to illustrate the early history of
words remaining in use after 1150, which in practice led to the inclusion of a very
substantial amount of Old English material in OED. In fact, the OED currently includes
more than 7500 entries for which the first evidence of use is dated 1150 or earlier—in
effect, a large component of the core vocabulary of English.

It has been estimated by Prof. Eric Stanley (‘OED and the earlier history of English’, in Lynda
Mugglestone (ed.) Lexicography & the OED (2000) 132) that had all of Old English been
included in the New English Dictionary it would have resulted in an increase of about 10% in
the overall size of the dictionary (or, in terms of the 20-volume OED2, an additional two
volumes). This was no small practical consideration in terms of editing time, but a further, and
perhaps more decisive, practical concern was simply that reliable editions of Old English texts
had not at that time been produced in sufficient numbers, and without these the work of
excerption of quotations for the dictionary was rendered practically impossible.

It was precisely to provide accurate texts from which the New English Dictionary could
quote that the Early English Text Society had been set up in 1864 by Murray’s predecessor
as editor, Frederick Furnivall. But the overwhelming majority of texts published by the
society in the first twenty years of its existence were not Old but Middle English.

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OED3: policy and procedures with regard to Old English

The third edition of the OED continues to adhere to the policy laid down by James Murray.
To change the policy at this point to include the entire vocabulary of Old English would be
to replicate the work already well in progress of the University of Toronto’s Dictionary of
Old English (first volume published in 1986) and to which OED entries are now linked.
However, for the Old English material that is represented in OED it is now possible to take
advantage of over a hundred years of Old English scholarship. There are now many reliable
editions of Old English texts, a comprehensive dictionary of Old English, and the whole
corpus of Old English is now available in searchable electronic form. All of this has
revolutionized lexicographical methods.

The revision of Old English material in the third edition is thoroughgoing. Every single Old
English quotation, whether already in OED or newly added, is being checked against the
most recent reliable edition of the text, with new bibliographical details and additional
context being given where appropriate.

The dating system for Old English quotations cited in OED3

The dating of quotations has been radically revised: the New English Dictionary‘s practice of
assigning putative composition dates to quotations typically preserved in manuscripts of
much later date (a practice which resulted in quotations from Beowulf being given no date
at all because of its uncertain date of composition) has been abandoned. In fact, individual
dating of Old English quotations has itself been abandoned and replaced by a simple
threefold division of all pre-1150 quotations into ‘early OE’ (600-950), ‘OE’ (950-1100), and
‘late OE’ (1100-1150), based firmly on manuscript dates as agreed by the most recent
authorities, principally N. R. Ker Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (1957;
reissued with supplement 1990), and (for manuscripts of charters—not included by Ker) P.
H. Sawyer Anglo-Saxon Charters (1968), more especially in the fully revised and electronic
version published by the University of Cambridge as Electronic Sawyer (2006-).

It should be noted that the three divisions of eOE, OE, and lOE, adopted by OED3, are equal
neither in span of years nor in wealth of material. By far the majority of manuscripts
containing Old English that have survived belong to the period 950-1100 (fewer than 20
manuscripts out of nearly 200 principal manuscripts listed by Ker can be assigned to the
mid-tenth century or earlier).

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The ordering of Old English material in OED3

Even within the broad parameters of this new system of dating it has been thought
advisable not to extend OED3‘s otherwise strict adherence to the chronological principle to
Old English material earlier than 1100 as the surviving record is so fragmentary that
reliable chronological interpretation is impossible, and it would be misleading to impose
an absolute dating of the sense structure based on the chance survival of an Old English
word from the earliest period (where, as we have seen, the number of surviving
manuscripts is vanishingly few). Therefore, although within quotation paragraphs strict
chronology is maintained even for Old English examples, no conclusions are drawn from
this with application to the relative ordering of senses, for the purposes of which all
material earlier than 1100 (i.e. eOE and OE) has been regarded as coeval, and hence
ordered logically, rather than chronologically. Material for the subsequent (much shorter)
period of 1100-50 (i.e. lOE), much of which is demonstrably later in composition as well as
in manuscript date, has been treated in the same way as later material.