WEEK FIVE LESSON FILE

UNDERSTANDING OLD ENGLISH

By the end of this lesson you will be able to read a little Old English.

Last week we said

Vocabulary – Germanic

Spelling and sounds – some different to modern English

But the really different thing is the GRAMMAR

We looked at runes briefly last week but we are not going to look at inscriptions written in runes
or try to translate them.  We will focus on documents using Roman letters.   
What types of documents have been found written in Old English?    Why these types of
documents?
Old English was a synthetic (or inflectional) language.      I'll try to explain this simply. 
Synthetic/inflectional in linguistics means that in the grammar there are
- tenses (verb endings show present, past, future)  These are called inflections. In Old English
there were different groups of verbs, also with different endings depending on whether the verb
was 1st 2nd or 3rd person, singular or plural, present, past or something else.

- agreement (verbs and adjectives agree with nouns, for example plurals)
- genders (nouns are classed as masculine, feminine or neuter)

And in Old English there were different groups of nouns. Each group had different endings for
the nouns depending if the noun was the subject in the sentence, or the object or something else.
These are called cases.

- cases (nominative = subject of sentence, accusative = object of sentence, genitive = possessive,

dative= indirect object - special endings for nouns and verbs)
These special endings on the verbs, nouns and adjectives carry much of the grammar and
meaning.     Therefore time words, prepositions and word order  (and in some languages 
pronouns) are less important as sentences make sense without them.
Read McIntyre pages 40-44
Latin and Greek are synthetic, and Sanskrit and French and German.... 
Children learn all these endings as they acquire a language.    It is much harder for us as adults to
learn all the endings and remember to use them.     What about Arabic?    What is your
experience of the inflections (special endings of the words which shows tense, gender, and case)?
Present Day English still uses some verb tense endings and noun plurals and pronouns but much
has been lost.

Many of these endings were lost in Modern English as the language became less synthetic and
more analytic, which means using more pronouns and prepositions and word order and less verb
and nouns and adjective endings.    

We are not going to compare the different dialects of Old English!  But you need to know that
there were 4 main ones. The map is from wikipedia. Baugh & Cable page 60-83 can be
summarized as -  Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon
that formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period, but Mercian
that became formative for Middle and Modern English. (What language was spoken in
the white areas?)
NOW YOU TRY. I will ask you to share some of your answers in week 6 and some in week 8

Using van Gelderen’s book. Read van Gelderen pages 47-78. (There are good summaries at
see bottom of pages 58, 64 and 72).

Exercises that I want you to do now.

1. Table 4:8. Next to the Old English words put the English words that we use today.
How many pronouns have been lost?
2. Look at pages 61-62. Instead of 3 genders for nouns and different noun classes and 4
case endings in Present Day English we just have singular and plural. Of course there
are quite a lot of irregular plurals. Instead of all those endings nowadays we just have
stone-S
word-
love-
son-
man-
earth-

3. Table 4:13. Adjectives in Present Day English do not have any special endings except
comparative superlative Type of grammar
Wet synthetic

Beautiful analytic

  

4. And Verbs.
On Table 4:14 next to the OE words for ‘drifan’ put all the parts of the Modern English verb ‘to
drive’ (strong verb).

5. On Table 4:15 next to the OE words for ‘fremman’ put all the parts of the Modern
English verb ‘to do’ (weak verb).

6. On Table 4:16 next to the OE words for ‘eom’ put all the parts of the Modern English
verb ‘to be’ that we use today (irregular verb)
OLD ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
We need to think about letters/graphemes and spelling and pronunciation (IPA).
7. Page 51 suggests you listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=049PnnCEYNs
Caedmon's hymn.
After listening - How do you think Old English sound different from Present Day English?

Review: Remember that some Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians started moving into what is
now England from 449 AD/CE. They spoke related West Germanic dialects. In England over
time their dialects converged and the language they used we call Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
It is West Germanic vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar with a little bit of Celtic and Latin
vocabulary. Did you watch a video clip about the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England last week?

8. Page 74 – try to pronounce the words in the box on page 74 using this guide/key to help you.

OLD ENGLISH short & long Like the sound in PDE words
grapheme/letters IPA How to pronounce
used
a [a:] calm
æ (ash) [æ] or [ɛ:] bad/be-ed
e [ɛ] or [e:] bed/Indonesian 'sate' but long
i [ɪ] or [i:] bid/bead
o [ɒ] or [o:] bod/Indonesian 'oto' but long
u [ʊ] or [u:] good/food
y [y] or [y:] bid/bead (with rounded lips)
f [f] fine
f [v] very
c [k] king
c [tʃ] cheap
g and ʒ [g] gold
g and ʒ [j] or [ɣ] (fricative) yellow/Dutch 'goed'
s and ſ [s] so
s and ſ [z] zoo
ð (eth) & þ (thorn) [ð] or [θ] then/three
sc [ʃ] she
cg [dʒ] joy
cw [kw] queen
ƿ (wynn) [w] we
h [h] he
h [x] (fricative) Indonesian ‘kh’
 9. Page 73 – Read about ‘kennings’ . Can you find PARTS of OE words related to Present
Day English ‘think’ ‘thought’, ‘love’, ‘deep’, ‘less’? If you are interested in literature
you can see that using these types of words makes the poetry or prose very colorful.

10. Now putting the grammar and spelling and pronunciation and vocabulary together, look
at Riddle Eight on page 85.

Try and pronounce the riddle. What kind of an animal do you think this is?

Homework:
Do exercises van Gelderen page 77-79 numbers 1, 2, 5, 12.