OLD ENGLISH – A BRIEF INSIGHT INTO THE BEGINNING OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Introduction
The English language that we use today, the one that influenced cultures around the globe and
became a source for the vocabulary used in many modern domains has undergone many stages in
its evolution. Old English, the starting point in its development, is the language of the Germanic
inhabitants of England, between the 5th and the 11th century. The Germanic parent, which is not
attested, is referred to as Proto-Germanic. During its existence, Old English gave rise to three
dialects: West Saxon, Kentish and Anglian. The alphabet used to write was adopted from Latin
and it was written in the same way it was pronounced. Old English was a synthetic language with
a lot of inflectional endings and the word order was free. The poem Beowulf is a vivid evidence
of the variety and richness of vocabulary of the time.

1. Rooting of English
The roots of Old English lie in a group of related languages that have a common ancestor defined
by linguists as Proto-Germanic or Primitive Germanic. Although no written records survived, the
theory of its existence is based on correspondences between the various languages that
descended from it. The links with West Germanic languages, on one side and the affinities with
North Germanic languages on the other side are the vivid proof of its existence. Old High
German, Old Saxon and Old Frisian are all supposed to belong to the West Germanic languages.
The other branch of North Germanic languages are Old Norse and East Germanic. Linguists such
as Hogg and Gelderen established the origin of the ProtoGermanic language in areas now
comprising southern Scandinavia and northern Germany After the beginning of the 4th century
this language was no longer spoken. But all these languages belong to a wider family of Indo-
European languages, so, as a conclusion, we can state that English began as a dialect of the
Germanic branch of Indo-European. Although there are no records of its origin, the language was
probably spoken about five thousand years ago in Europe, in an area between the Baltic and the
Alps in the north and the south on one hand, and up to the Rhine, on the other hand

2. Dialects of Old English

Early Old English was not much of a language itself. It was rather a group of dialects tightly
connected, that were carried to southern Britain by Germanic invaders. There were already
various differences in the dialects of the tribes involved in the invasion, including angles, Saxons
and Jutes. But these discrepancies continued to evolve within the separate kingdoms formed
under tribal ruling. A major factor that contributed to the evolution of the dialects was the
frequent balance in power, as well as recurrent warfare. So, at the beginning of the 7th century
seven major kingdoms emerged, also known as heptarch of North Umbria, Mercia, East Anglia,
Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent, speaking distinct languages. Today we can refer to these as the
four dialects of the Old English Language meaning Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West
Saxon. Linguists refer to Mercian and Northumbrian as Anglian [5]. We can relate to English as
a national language only in the late 9th century, when England was united under the rule of King
Alfred the Great, as a reaction to a feasible invasion of the Vikings

3. Alphabet and Pronunciation

when Germanic tribes invaded Britain, they brought a writing method named, by historians,
runes. They were using straight-sided characters mostly made for carving on hard surfaces such
as stone, bone or wood. Towards the end of the 6th century, the Roman missionaries introduced
the Latin alphabet. The new writing system, with rounded-letter forms, was more suitable for
writing on parchment. The character set was not very different from the letters we use today.
Some letters were rarely used or were completely missing such as j, k, q, v and z, but there were
also some letters that have since fallen out of use. Some of these are æ, a vowel pronounced as
the sound in the word bat, the consonants þ and ð both used for the voiced and unvoiced sounds,
written in today English as th, and pronounced similar to the sound in them (voiced) and theme
(unvoiced) [6]. In Old English the vowels could be pronounced differently, namely short or long,
but with no difference in spelling. Most of the texts from that period marked long vowels using a
"diacritic" in order to distinguish between identical forms. Words such as god "God" and gōd
"good" are an adequate example of how words were written to differentiate one from another

4. Vocabulary
Researchers claim that a considerable part of the everyday vocabulary derives from Old English.
Although many of the words have completely changed their spelling and some other developed
or even modified their meaning it is still evident, they are the precursors of presentday English.
Studying the literature from the period when Old English was used, it is obvious that many Old
English words are very comparable to words found in Modern English.

For example:

• Eald - old

• Brodor - brother

• Hus - house

• Nett - net

• Riht - right
 In some cases, it is difficult to have a clear perspective of the meaning of some Old English
words as there are words that share the same meaning. A clear example for this situation can be
illustrated by the three descriptions of females:

For example:

• Widuwe - widow

• Wif - wife

• Wifmann -woman.

In today's English more than 80 percent of the thousand most common words in Modern English
come from Old English, but if we use any modern English dictionary that includes etymologies,
we will find hundreds or even thousands more

5. Grammatical Structure
Old English was a synthetic language with many inflectional endings in the grammatical
function of a sentence components. The word order was rather free. Contemporary English is
considered, by contrast, an analytic language. The word order compels and is based on strict
rules. For example, in contemporary English a word such as king has two main forms: the
singular king and the plural kings and with an apostrophe used to mark the possessive king’s or
kings’

Conclusions
To wrap up, one of the features of Old English was the fact that it was not static language, and
that its usage and evolution over a period of more than 700 years reveal the Germanic origin of
the language. Naturally, during this evolution the language assimilated some features of the
languages that it came into contact with, however, some important features can be traced back to
Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse, which basically provided alternatives or
synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words. One of the most significant influences over Old English was,
by far, the Latin influence which had started long before the Roman invasion. Latin words
express a very important semantic range and noticeably enriched the Old English vocabulary.
Yet the Old English grammar is rather similar with modern German grammar, having different
inflectional endings and four distinctive cases. Still, roughly half of the most common words in
Modern English have Old English roots and the rest of the Old English words went out of use
and cannot be recognized in the language we speak today.