nglisc

(a.k.a. Old English)

BY DANICA POPOVI STEFAN STOJKOVI

Origins of OE*
The classification of the OE language

IndoEuropean

Germanic

West Germanic

Ingvaeonic AngloFrisian Anglic

Old English

These are three separate groups , there are just too many of them for this chart to make sense

*Old English , this abbreviation will be used throughout this presentation.

History of OE
The OE language is the first of the three stages of the evolution of the

English language (the other two being Middle English and Modern English). However , Old English can be divided into three periods as well. These periods are :

Prehistoric Old English (c. 650 650); very few testaments to its existence exist , considered to be a reconstructed language by linguists. Early Old English (c. 650 900); Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum by Saint Bede the Venerable is the most common example of the EOE period. Late Old English (c. 900 1066); the final stage of the OE period. After the Norman conquest , Middle English replaced OE.

Who spoke OE ?
In a nutshell , the people living in the area that we

today call England and southern and eastern Scotland and a very small part of modern Wales. The Angles, Saxons and the Jutes. It had four dialects :

Kentish Mercian Northumbrian West Saxon

The distribution of the OE looked something like this

OE writing system
In its early stages , Old English was written using

Anglo-Saxon runes (or futhorc) It had somewhere between 26 and 33 characters.

OE writing system
Naturally , the runes were replaced by the Old

English Latin alphabet around the 9th century with the arrival of Irish Christian missionaries.

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ&

Beowulf (a conventional title)

The most famous OE text is the epic poem Beowulf

written by an unknown author. Its date of origin is estimated to be c. 975-1025 It (mainly) tells the story of Beowulf , a Geatish hero and his ordeals with the monster Grendel. Appears in the Cotton Vitellius manuscript.

Grammar
It was a highly inflected language , meaning that

words could have been modified to reflect grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice etc. Reminiscent of modern Icelandic and modern High German (to somewhat of a lesser extent), in terms of morphology. Five cases nominative , accusative , genitive , dative and instrumental Two grammatical numbers , three grammatical genders (masculine , feminine , and neuter).

Syntax
Similar in many ways to modern English , yet with a

few key differences.

Word order resembled modern German. No do-support in questions and negatives. Multiple negatives were tolerated.

Phonology
Highly speculative , as OE is preserved only as a

written language. Still , some conclusions can be drawn.

Consonants Vowels

Lexicon
Modern English borrows

words a lot. This was also the case in OE. The pie chart to the right demonstrates the small percentage of Germanic words that constitute modern English.

Lexicon
A big portion of words in OE was borrowed from

Latin (then considered to be the lingua franca of Europe). Another constituent of the OE lexicon are words borrowed from Norse languages that came with the invasion of the Vikings Celtic loanwords make up a small but significant part of the OE lexicon.

Sources
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English Vsauce Youtube channel (ENGLISH.) http://youtu.be/atI-JPGcF-k