449 – 1100 OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

Jutes, Angles, Frisians, Saxons were the main tribes that arrived to British Isles.
Celtic people had inhabited British Isles since the end of 1st century BC. The main
factor which formed the development of the English language was an arrival of
different people speaking different languages. 449 – is the year the old period
started according to the venerable Bede who is a father of English history.
Green color – dialects in the kingdom (Northumbrian – the first cultural center,
Mergian, West Saxon (the main one) and Kentish), yellowish – do not belong to
Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

Alfred The Great, the king of Wessex was a defender of country and English
language. He translated manuscripts from Latin into English. He used West Saxon
dialect. He also opened a lot of schools where Old English was taught (venecular).
Beginning from the 8th century Vikings started to invade England. They were
speaking Old North Germanic language. They occupied the north-eastern part of
the country.

Orange color – Vikings

597 AD – the year when the Saint Augustinewith his mishanaries brought
Christianity to the British Isles. English adopted Latin alphabet. Before this runic
letters were used. The difference in
spelling and pronunciation can be explained by the fact Latin was not the
Germanic language.

the second letter – деш \ еш

letters g and w had different shapes
p – thong
letters v and z were introduced during the middle English period

Long vowel – oo (two vowels)

Old English has also double consonants which were marked by double consonants.
Then in middle period double consonants started to mark short vowels.
c – was pronounced as к or ч
there were four diphthongs
The first ever English poem and Cadman is the first ever English poem. (8th
century and 11th century). There were no function words in Old English, but it was
highly inflected language compared to Modern language. Old English had
declensions – відмінювання.
an – the inflexion that marks plurality
es – the inflection of Genitive case

Old English nouns were grouped in different stems. The most important stem is a-
stem Maskuline.
as – the inflection of plurality (now we have – es or – s)
es – genitive is the only leaving inflection
Why inflections disappeared? Because of the stress and because of influence of
Old North.
In old English period there were only two tenses. So there are three main factors of
development of English language grammar – simplification of inflexions, the
principle of analogy and the raise of analytical forms as a result of
grammaticalization.
Old English had no articles, instead they used demonstratives.

In old English we had strong and weak adjectives. Adjectives were declined
according to definiteness. This feature was also lost, but it is used in Modern
German. Demonstratives also were declined.

The phenomenon of Umlaut or i-mutation was suggested by Jacob Grimm, who

researched Germanic languages in 19th century. It is like чергування. Foot – but
feet. No s inflexion was needed for such words.
It is not about meaning, the gender was concode. We should see how words and
demostratives are changed.

Personal pronouns were changed a little bit. Duality (wit – we two) was lost in the
Old English.
to be (suppletive verbs – developed from different stems). Three classes of weak
verbs and seven classes of strong verbs.

Conjugation – declension of verbs

Will – did not belong to this clasess
The result of contact with Vikings –
• Personal pronouns they, them, their
• Old English sindon = are
• The 3rd person singular -s
• The loss of inflections
 • Scandinavian borrowings

Three main features of English language that make it a unique language: (although
FRISIAN language is the closest in terms of structure)

*inflectional simplicity
*grammatical gender (natural in Modern language)
*cosmopolitan vocabulary
Modern English tends to borrow new words extensively from all languages all over
the world. Old English resisted borrowing words. Still there were some borrowings
in Old English period, however, not numerous.
Old English vocabulary can be classified into four main categories –
o Native core vocabulary
o Affixation
o Compounding (a very important process during which two independent
words are joined to create a new one)
o Borrowing (not numerous)
The chief characteristic of the Old English period lexicon was the readiness to
build up words from numerous existing parts which is still present in the
modern English. It was a specific feature to use large classes of nouns,
sometimes even combining them.
ANGLO-SAXON vocabulary in Modern English (less than 1%)
Man, wife, child, son, daughter, brother, friend, live, fight, make, use, love,
like, look, drink, food, eat, sleep, sing, sun, moon, earth, ground, wood, field,
house, home, people, family, horse, fish, farm, water, time, eyes, ears, mouth,
nose, strong, work, come, be, go, find, see, look, laughter, night, day, sun, first,
many, one, two, other, some, what, when, which, where, word, to, for, but, and,
at, in, on, from
The words that changed their meanings
Silly (it was happy)
Field (open countryside)
* Brydguma Bridegroom (bride + man *guma)
Prefixation
Prefixes are not stressed

Compounding
 determinative compounding and self-explaining compounds

gospel, Sunday, grammar

KENNING – are compounds that have metaphorical meaning. These are noun
metaphors that express a familiar object in unfamiliar way. Old language is full
of kennings.
Whale road – sea
bone-house – body
battle light – weapon

guardian of mankind - guard

From 24, 000 lexical items in Old English time only 3% loan words were
borrowed. Now it is more than 80%.
FROM WHAT LANGUAGE OLD EGLISH BORROWED WORDS?
- Celtic language
- Latin (because of missionaries who brought Christianity, more impact in
early modern period – during the Reneissance)
*Jutes, Frisians, Anglosaxons, Germanic tribes – these four tribes reached
British Isles and met there Celts
- Vikings (next invasion – they spoke Scandinavian Germanic language – Old
Norse)
- Old Norse Scandinavian (fundamental effect on the development of English)
*th – appeared after Norman conquest
There are two reasons for loss of inflections and simplification^
1) phonological – because of stress (first syllable was stressed)
due to the stress English inflections are levelling up. English is prone to level up.
2) Old Norse invaded Britain and started to settle down and merry British people
speaking a foreign language – it was the simplification during the creolization.
All English latin loans can be divided into two groups – ecclesiastical (related to
church) and general.

THE EFFECT OF OLD NORSE (after Viking invasion)

Again, anger, awkward, bag, band, bank, birth, brink, bull, cake, call, clip, crawl,
crook, die, dirt, dregs, egg, flat, fog, freckle, gap, gasp, get, guess, happy, husband,
ill (old Norse word for old English sick), keen, kid, knife, law, leg, loan, muggy,
ugly, sister, skirt (a cognate for old English shirt), Thursday, tight, trust, want,
weak, window.

Subject – verb – object Modern English word order

In old English inflexions were used to show relationships. Demonstratives were
used instead of articles.
In old English they used no auxiliary \do\. This word has Celtic origin and was
used starting after early modern English period after 15th century. In old English
they didn`t use perfect and progressive tenses, and not often used passive forms.
Passive was used in free word combinations. Free word combinations were
grammaticalized in late middle English period as a result of process of
grammaticalization. Then this combinations turned to tenses.

Interesting process is a negation. In Modern English we have only one negation in

a sentence. In Old English they had single, double and multiple negations. Ne was
used instead of not. No auxiliaries were used then.
 Every entry was started like this. Um, e –
inflection for dative. 154 – no inflexion, only preposition.
METAHESIS
This phenomenon happened in the late old period – some words were permanently
metathesized.
Brid – bird
axian – ask
thurgt – through
hweat – what
beornt - bright

LECTURE GUIDE
The Old English Period (449-1100)

The Beginnings of English

Modern English is a rich example of the role of language contact in language

change. In broad strokes, it was shaped by a series of military and cultural
invasions. The recorded history of the English language begins in the British
Isles, where it was brought by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and
Frisians) from the Continent. English was later influenced by invading Norsemen,
and finally transformed by the occupation of French-speaking Normans.

The earliest inhabitants whose language can be reconstructed were Celtic

speakers who migrated from Europe sometime in the second half of the 1st
millennium B.C. The impact of the Celtic languages on English is considered to
be minimal. In fact, the predominant legacy is in place-names. The fact that
England has three rivers named Avon, for example, can be traced back to the
Celtic word for river. The place names below all have some distant Celtic link:

Cities: Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Glasgow, London, York

Rivers: Avon, Clyde, Dee, Don, Forth, Severn, Thames, Usk

Regions: Argyll, Cumbia, Devon, Dyfed, Glamorgan, Kent, Lothian.

The Romans colonized England under Julius Caesar and kept it as a colony
until the middle of the fifth century A.D. The Romans withdrew from Britain as
their empire collapsed in the early fifth century (by 410). They were soon
replaced by Germanic-speaking invaders – the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, and
later the Frisians. According to the Venerable Bede’s account in his Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, completed around 730, the date when the first
Germanic tribes arrived is 449. With it the Old English period begins. The
invading tribes came from northern Germany and settled in different parts of the
island. They spoke a number of closely related and hence very similar Germanic
dialects. By 600, they spoke dialects, which are called ‘Old English’, distinct
from the Germanic languages spoken on the continent. The Anglo-Saxons
overwhelmed the Celts linguistically as well as military; Old English contained
just a few Celtic words, but the most frequently used words in English today –
words like the, is, and you – are of Anglo-Saxon origin. Gradually, the country
became known as Engla-land – the land of the Angles – and their language was
called Englisc.

The Germanic settlement comprised seven kingdoms, the Anglo-

Saxon Heptarchy. North of the Humber River in England was Northumbria, the
first real center of English speaking, writing, learning, literature, and culture. In
the central part of England were the kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia, and Essex;
in the southeast was Kent and Sussex; and in the southwest was Wessex. Four
principal dialects were spoken in Anglo-Saxon England: Kentish, West Saxon,
Mercian, and Northumbrian. 'Standard' Modern English or at least Modern
English spelling, owes most to the Mercian dialect, since that was the dialect of
London.

Old English was influenced by Latin in the seventh century when in 597 St.
Augustine and a group of monks converted Britain to Christianity. Dozens of
Latinate words survive from this period including angel and devil, disciple,
martyr, and shrine. Christian churches and monasteries produced many written
texts – excellent evidence of what Old English was like. However, Christianity
had been introduced to the British Isles much earlier. Having been introduced to
Ireland before the year 400, it developed there into a form quite different from
that of Rome. England could have gone with the Celts, but at a Synod held at
Whitby in 664 the preference was given to the Roman customs. That decision
was symbolic of the important alignment of the English Church with Rome and
the Continent.

The earliest writing which the Angles and Saxons brought over from the
Continent used runes. Written English began after the establishment of
monasteries in the seventh century. Monks wrote and copied Latin manuscripts
and therefore adapted the Roman alphabet for the writing of English. The Old
English alphabet had 24 letters. By the tenth century a stable spelling system had
been established in the West Saxon dialect, which became a standard for written
manuscripts throughout the country by the 11th century. This standard was lost in
the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.
 Northumbria was the first area of Anglo-Saxon efflorescence. The historian
known as the Venerable Bede, who was monk and scholar, started to write the
first ever history of the English speaking people. He was writing in Latin, the
language of scholarship. The monasteries of Northumbria produced beautiful
manuscripts of the Bible and other literary texts. The earliest written records
found in Old English are translations of these Latin texts written in the
Northumbrian dialect.

But the real heart of later Anglo-Saxon culture was Wessex. And the most
important dialect of Old English was West Saxon, the form of the language
spoken and written in the southwestern part of the country. West Saxon was the
dialect of King Alfred (899), who is the only king called “the Great”. From the
time of King Alfred until the Norman Conquest, Wessex dominated the rest of
Anglo-Saxon England politically and culturally.

Between 800 and 1050, invasions by pagan Viking raiders, who sacked various
churches and monasteries, had a profound impact on Old English. The Vikings
gained possession of practically the whole eastern part of England, where Danish
law held sway, an area therefore known as the Danelaw. In 878 King Alfred of
Wessex beat the Vikings in battle and forced a treaty by which the Vikings
withdrew to the north and the Old English-speaking Saxons ruled the south.
Alfred created a sense of national identity among the various groups of Saxons in
the south by appealing to their shared language and mandating that English, not
Latin, would be the language of education.

Alfred was a kind of defender of the English language. He established schools

and courts of translation to teach the classics in Old English. He was responsible
for translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation and for the
compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – the two major sources of our
knowledge of early English history. From Bede's Ecclesiastical History we know
the Caedmon story. Caedmon was the illiterate farmer, cowherd who became
England's first Christian poet we know by name, sometime in the late seventh
century. Caedmon's Hymn is the earliest surviving Old English poem.
 The English language was certainly one of the earliest highly developed
vernacular tongues in Europe. The chief literary work of the Old English period is
the heroic poem Beowulf. The poem is set in the fifth century, shortly after the
Saxons started to settle in England, it is generally accepted that it was not written
until the eighth century. It is quite likely that the story was passed down orally
from generation to generation before it was eventually written down.

The poem revolved around three battles. At the start of the story, Beowulf goes
to the aid of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, who is being tormented by a monster
called Grendel. This monster has been attacking the resident warriors of the mead
hall, but Beowulf shows great courage in slaying both Grendel and the monster's
mother with a magical sword.

After these two battles, Beowulf returns home and becomes King of the Geats
– his tribe. Many years later a servant steals a cup from the lair of a dragon. The
dragon goes on a rampage, attacking homes across the kingdom, and Beowulf is
forced to try to protect his people and defend his kingdom. He eventually tracks
the dragon down and slays it, but in the process he is mortally wounded and dies.

The poem was written in England, but was set in Scandinavia. Although it is
based on historical events, much of it is fictional and it is often difficult to
separate fact from fiction. Clearly the dragon is not real – although many stories
and legends at this time contain references to them. However, certain events and
characters in the story certainly existed.

Pronunciation and Spelling

English adopted the Roman alphabet, in other words, the alphabet of another
language – Latin. Today we have over forty phonemes in English, but only
twenty-six letters by which to represent those phonemes. Even in Old English the
Latin alphabet on its own was not enough. In addition to Latin consonant letters,
the Runic 'thorn' and the Irish Gaelic 'eth' were used, some Old English phonemes
were represented by pairs of letters, which we call digraphs (Old English scep –
Modern English sheep, Old English ecg – Modern English edge). In addition to
Latin vowel letters, the letter 'ash' æ was developed by combining a and e, and
was used for the phoneme [æ] that we now represent with a. Also, the
digraphs ea and eo were used, as in the Old English words eare 'ear'
and beor 'beer'.

The vowel letters in Old English were a, æ, e, i, o, u, and y. Late West Saxon
had two long diphthongs, ēa [æ:ǝ] and ēo [e:ǝ]. In Modern English period they
fell together as [i:], as in beat from Old English bēatan and creep from crēopan.

Short and long vowels were contrastive in Old English , for example, coc with
a short [o] meant cock, and with a long [o] meant cook; ful with [u] meant full,
and with [u] meant foul. Sometimes long vowels were written with a double
letter, for example, cooc for cook or fuul for foul, but although there are now
plenty of words spelt with <ee> and <oo>, spellings with <aa>, <ii> and <uu>
did not survive.

The consonant letters in Old English were b, c, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, þ,

w, x, and z. The letters j, q, and v were not used for writing Old English,
and y was always a vowel.

In Old English, [v], [z], and [ð] were not phonemes; they occurred only
between voiced sounds. There were thus no contrastive pairs like feel-veal, leaf-
leave, seal-zeal.

Mutation is a change in a vowel sound caused by a sound in the following

syllable. The mutation of a vowel by a following i or y is called i-mutation or i-
umlaut. i-mutation (the first vowel shift) or i-umlaut (a German term meaning
'sound alteration') is thought to have taken place during the seventh century. The
accent of the Anglo-Saxon invaders after they arrived in Britain changed. The
Old English vowels changed in quality between the time Old English was first
written down. In Germanic there were many words where a vowel in a stressed
syllable was immediately followed by a high front vowel ([i]) or vowel-like
sound ([j]) in the next syllable. The plural of *fōt is thought to have been *fōtiz,
with the stress on fō. For some reason the quality of this high front sound caused
the preceding vowel to change (mutate). The ō became ē, which ultimately came
to be pronounced [i], as in modern feet. The -iz ending dropped away, for once
the plural was being shown by the e-vowel, it was unnecessary to have an ending
as well. Fēt therefore emerged as an irregular noun in English.

Old English words of more than one syllable were generally stressed on the
first syllable of their main element. Be-, for-, and ge- were not stressed in any
part of speech. This heavy stressing of the first syllable of practically all words
has had a far-reaching effect on the development of English. Because of it, the
vowels of final syllables began to be reduced to a uniform [ǝ] sound as early as
the tenth century.

The Major Linguistic Features

Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern
English. Like all the Germanic languages, Old English had declensions for nouns,
adjectives, demonstrative and interrogative pronouns. They could be inflected for
up to five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental). To
signal relationships in a sentence, endings (not prepositions) were added to the
words. These are known as case endings. Old English used more grammatical
endings on words and was less dependent on word order and function words than
Modern English.

There were seven classes of 'strong' verbs and three of 'weak' verbs, and their
endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. Word order was much
freer than today, the sense was carried by the inflections (and only later by the
use of propositions).

Old English differs markedly from Modern English in having grammatical

gender in contrast to the Modern English system of natural gender. The three
genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) were characteristic of Indo-European
and were preserved in Germanic. They survived in English into the Middle
English period. Old English wῑf ‘wife, women’ (German cognate Weib)
and mægden ‘maiden,’ (German Mädchen) are neuter, bridd ‘young bird’
and drēam ‘joy’ are masculine, strengþu ‘strength’ and eaxl ‘shoulder’ are
feminine.

Old English nouns were in different groups or classes (or stems) and had a
large number of patterns for declining or declensions.

Masculine Neuter a- r-Stem n-Stem Ō-Stem Root-

a-Stem Stem Consonant
Stem
‘hound’ ‘deer’ ‘child’ ‘ox’ ‘love’ ‘foot’
Singular
Nom. hund dēor cild oxa lufu fōt
Acc. hund dēor cild oxan lufe fōt
Gen. hundes dēores cildes oxan lufe fōtes
Dat. hunde dēore cilde oxan lufe fēt
Plural
N.-Ac. hundas dēor cildru oxan lufa fēt
Gen. hunda dēora cildra oxena lufa fōta
Dat. hundum dēorum cildrum oxum lufum fōtum
More than half of all commonly used nouns were inflected according to the a-
stem pattern, which was in time to be extended to practically all nouns. The
Modern English possessive singular and general plural forms in -s come directly
from the Old English genitive singular (-es) and the masculine nominative-
accusative plural (-as) forms. These two different forms fell together in late Old
English because the unstressed vowels had merged as shwa. In Middle English
both endings were spelled -es. Only in Modern English have they again been
differentiated in spelling by the use of the apostrophe.

Modern English possessive singular and general plural forms in -s come

directly from the Old English genitive singular (-es) and the masculine
nominative-accusative plural (-as) forms, which fell together because the
unstressed vowels had merged as schwa. Nowadays the genitive case is the only
living declension. Already in the Old English period there appeared a tendency to
the unification of plural endings in the noun paradigm. This process was
intensified in Early Middle English. The Old English ending –as was reduced to
to –es. This ending was transformed to nouns of different Old English stems by
analogy.

The adjectives in Old English agreed with the noun it modified in gender, case,
and number; but Germanic had developed a distinctive adjective declension – the
weak declension, used after the two demonstratives (1) se, ꝥaet, seo, ꝥa and
(2) ϸēs, ϸis, ϸēos and after possessive pronouns, which made the following noun
definite in its reference.

Adjectives were inflected for definiteness as well as for gender, number, and
case. The so-called weak declension of adjectives was used to indicate that the
modified noun was definite. The weak form occurred after a demonstrative or a
possessive pronoun, as in “se gōda dǣl” (‘that good part’) or “hire geonga sunu”
(‘her young son’). The strong declension was used when the modified noun was
indefinite because not preceded by a demonstrative or possessive or when the
adjective was in the predicate, as in “gōd dǣl” (‘a good part’) or “se dǣl wæs
gōd” (‘that part was good’).

Personal pronouns today are almost as complex as they were in Old English.
Except for the loss of the dual number (we both and you both) and the old second
person singular forms (ꝥu).

Old English had a few verbs that were originally strong but whose strong
preterit had come to be used with a present-time sense. Consequently, they had to
form new weak preterits. They are called preterit-present verbs and are the main
source for the important group of modal verbs in Modern English. Table 2.2
shows ones that survive as present-day modals. The Old English willan ‘wish,
want,’ whose preterit was wolde and which became a part of the present-day
modal system, does not belong to this group.

Infinitive Present Preterit

āgan ‘owe’ āh āhte (ought)
cunnan ‘know how’ cann (can) cūðe (could)
 magan ‘be able’ mæg (may) meahte (might)
*mōtan ‘be allowed’ mōt mōste (must)
sculan ‘be obliged’ sceal (shall) sceolde (should)

The linguistic result of prolonged period of contact with Vikings was

significant for English. The Scandinavian tongues of those days were enough like
Old English to make communication possible between the English and the Danes.
The Saxons and the Vikings lived alongside each other for generations (despite
occasional wars), and their continued contact played a significant role in greatly
simplifying the structure of Old English. Old English and Old Norse speakers
shared many Germanic root words but their grammatical and inflectional systems
differed. Over generations of contact, Old English lost many of its inflectional
markings and borrowed dozens of words of Norse origin, like hit, skin,
want, and wrong. Scandinavian personal pronouns they, them, and their replaced
the earlier Old English forms: heo, him, hira. Old Norse influenced the verb to
be. Sind(on) was replaced by are, which is almost certainly the result of
Scandinavian influence, as is the spread of the 3 rd person singular -s ending in the
present tense in other verbs. Many of the borrowed words were added alongside
Old English synonyms – for example, rear (English) and raise (Norse).

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Old English differed from that of later historical stages of
English in two main ways: it included relatively few loanwords (3%), and the
gender of nouns was more or less arbitrary, in other words grammatical gender.

Latin has been a major influence on English throughout its history. The
Scandinavian influence certainly began during the Old English period. Despite
these foreign influences, the word stock of Old English was far more thoroughly
Germanic than is our present-day vocabulary.
 Many Old English words of Germanic origin were identical to the
corresponding Modern English words – for example, god, gold, hand, helm, land,
oft, under, winter, and word. Others have changed in meaning. Thus, Old
English brēad meant ‘bit, piece’ rather than ‘bread’, similarly, drēam was ‘joy’
not ‘dream,’ dreorig ‘bloody’ not ‘dreary,’ hlāf ‘bread’ not ‘loaf,’ mōd ‘heart,
mind, courage’ not ‘mood,’ scēawian ‘look at’ not ‘show.’

Some Old English words and meanings have survived in Modern English only
in set expressions. Thus, Old English guma ‘man’ (cognate with the Latin word
from which we have borrowed human) survives in the
compound bridegroom, tῑd ‘time’ when used in the proverb ‘Time and tide wait
for no man.’

Latin loan words for newer religious concepts, older Celtic terms from the
indigenous Celtic peoples living in the British Isles, and words from the
Scandinavian languages of Viking and Danish raiders in England came into the
Germanic languages. Words from Celtic and Latin Christianity borrowed in the
sixth and seventh centuries include cross, priest, shrine, rule, school, master,
and pupil.

Words from Scandinavian Germanic languages were borrowed after contact

with the Vikings and the Danes during their raids on England in the eighth and
ninth centuries. These words were distinguished by special sounds in the
Scandinavian languages, in particular, the sounds sk and k which corresponded to
the sounds sh and ch in Old English. Thus, Scandinavian skirt has Germanic
family cognate in Old English shirt. Scandinavian languages also had a
hard g sound that was not present in Old English; the words ugly and egg are
Scandinavian borrowings; certain words with the ll sound, such as ill, were also
borrowed (OE sick), the word husband.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, during the period of the Benedictine
Reform, more elaborate and learned Latin words came into Old English,
including Antichrist, apostle, canticle, demon, font, nocturne, Sabbath, synagogu
e, accent, history, paper. Despite these foreign influences, the word stock of Old
English was far more thoroughly Germanic than is our present-day vocabulary.
 Old English created words by combining words, by adding prefixes, and by
bringing together nouns and suffixes. The Old English vocabulary is immensely
rich in compounds, new words coined by combining existing words. Modern
English replaced this by borrowing. Determinative compounding is common to
all the Germanic languages and involves forming new words by yoking together
two normally independent nouns or a noun and an adjective. Examples of
determinative compounding with two nouns include earhring ‘earring,’ bocstæf
‘letter,’ aþwedd ‘oath-promise, vow,’ bōchord ‘book-hoard,
library,’ cræftsþrǣc ‘craft-speech, technical language,’ drēorwurþe ‘dear-worth,
precious,’ folcriht 'folk-right, common law,' nῑfara 'new-farer,
stranger,' rῑmcrӕft 'counting-skill, computation.' Examples with an adjective and
a noun include middangeard (middle-yard, “Earth”), and bonlocan (bone locker,
“body”).

Many of these words make up the unique poetic vocabulary of Old English
literature, especially in metaphorical constructions known as kennings. A
kenning is a noun metaphor that expresses a familiar object in unfamiliar ways.
For example, hronrād 'whale road,' bānhus 'bone-house,' beadolēoma 'battle
light,' heofonrīces weard 'guardian of heaven's kingdom,' moncynnes
weard 'guardian of mankind.' Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes great
use of compounds: there are over a thousand of them, comprising a third of all
words in the text.

Repetitive compounding brings together words that are nearly identical or that
complement and reinforce each other for specific effect. Thus, holtwudu meant,
essentially, wood-wood, in Old English, or forest; gangelwæfre meant the going-
about weaver or the swift-moving one, that is, a spider. Noun-adjective
formations constitute another approach to compounding, giving such words
as græsgrene ‘grass green,’ lofgeorn ‘praise-eager, or eager for praise,’
and goldhroden ‘gold-adorned.’ In Modern English, this form of compounding is
revived in such phrases as king-emperor or fighter-bomber.

Prefix formations were the most common way of creating new words in Old
English and other Germanic languages. Old English had many prefixes that
derived from prepositions and altered the meanings of words in special ways. For
example, the prefix and- meant ‘back’ or ‘in response to.’ Thus, one could swear
in Old English or andswar, meaning ‘to answer.’ The prefix with- meant
‘against.’ One could stand or withstand something in Old English, meaning ‘to
stand against.’

Most of Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the cultural attack of the
Vikings and the Normans who would come after them. Less than 1% of modern
English vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon, but it includes some of the most fundamental
and important, such
as man, wife, child, son, daughter, brother, friend, live, fight, make, use, love, like
, look, drink, food, eat, sleep, sing, sun, moon, earth, ground, wood, field, house,
home, people, family, horse, fish, farm, water, time, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, stron
g, work, come, go, be, find, see, look, laughter, night, day, sun, first, many, one, t
wo, other, some, what, when, which, where, word, as well as the most important
“function” words, such as to, for, but, and, at, in, on, from. Because of this, up to
a half of everyday modern English will typically be made up of Old English
words.

The Natural Changes in Old English before the Norman Conquest

Some natural changes in Old English took place from its earliest times. Both
noun endings and adjective endings (such as those that delineated number or
gender) were lost in this period of Old English. Verb endings were maintained,
but simplified. The distinctive feature of Old English dual pronoun was also lost.
Grammatical gender disappeared, to be replaced by natural gender. Nouns were
no longer masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Why did these changes take place? Some theories have been proposed that
hinge on stress, form, and function. Old English, like all Germanic languages,
had fixed stress on the root syllable of the word. In other words, regardless of
what prefixes or suffixes were added to the word, the stress remained on the root
syllable. This insistent stress tended to level out the sounds of unstressed
syllables. Any sound or syllable that did not take the full word stress, such as a
grammatical ending, would not have been pronounced clearly. As final endings
became harder to distinguish, new ways of establishing meaning were necessary.

Old English had a fully developed set of prepositions: of, with, before, on,
and to. These were used to signal relationships among words in various kinds of
phrases, but case endings still served the same function. Thus, a noun in the
dative case did not need a preposition. In Late Old English and Middle English,
these grammatical categories lost their distinctions and prepositions took over.
Patterns of word order also became regularized as syntax (rather than case
endings) became the way of expressing grammatical relationships in a sentence.
Thus, word order patterns were regularized. The order of subject-verb-object
became the standard for the simple declarative sentence.

Over time, the sound of the language also changed. Old English began to lose
some of the characteristic consonant clusters that gave it its distinctive sound.
The hl-, hr-, hn-, and fn- clusters leveled out to l-, r-, n-, and sn-. Compression of
syllables occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, guardian of the loaf, which was
shortened to become Lord. Certain Old English words underwent a special sound
change called metathesis. This is the inversion of sounds in order. We hear this
when we identify certain regional dialects by the pronunciation “aks” for ask.
During the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods, certain words
permanently metathesized their
sounds: brid → bird; axian → ask; thurgh → through; beorht → bright. Some
strong verbs (need, help, wax) changed to weak ones.

The system of making meaning was changing at the same time that newer
French words were inflecting the language.