What was Old English like?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at the very oldest form of English and asking what it was like, how it was different from modern English, and what made it change.

LANGUAGES are always changing, especially languages that are primarily oral and not used very much in writing.
We can see this with Tok Pisin; the way that people speak today is quite different from the way people spoke Tok Pisin 40 or 50 years ago. The vocabulary has been constantly changing as new words and expressions are invented or borrowed from English and other languages, and even the grammar has changed.
The same can be said about English. Today’s modern English is the result of intense language contact, in which the French and Scandinavian languages spoken by invaders of Britain blended with the original English language spoken by Germanic tribes that had themselves invaded England after the fall of the Roman Empire. Scholars looking at the history of the English language use the term “Old English” to describe the original English language that was spoken by these early Germanic invaders before the Scandinavian invasions of England between the 700s and 1100s and the French invasion of 1066.
This original Old English language itself was the result of a blend of closely related languages brought by three groups of invaders in the 400s and 500s from what is today northern Germany and Denmark. The Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons. Because the last two groups were the largest, this new language is often also called “Anglo-Saxon”. The Angles were especially powerful, so much so that they gave their name to the country they invaded, “Angle-land”, which today we pronounce “England”.
There were people already living in England when these three tribes invaded. These indigenous people spoke Celtic languages, but many also spoke Latin because they had been under Roman rule for several centuries and many people from other parts of the Roman Empire had settled there. When the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons invaded, these people either moved to other areas or integrated into the new society that the invaders built. They had little impact on the new language that was developing. While many places in England do have Celtic names, there are only a few original Celtic words in the English language itself.
The three invading tribes spoke similar Germanic languages and could probably understand each other without much difficulty. In Britain their speech merged into one language that over the years became different from the way Germanic people on the European continent spoke.
That language was so different from the way we speak English today that we would need an interpreter to communicate if we could take a time machine to go back to that time. Scholars who want to read documents from this time need to study Old English as if it were a foreign language. You can see this by comparing the early translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Old English on this page with a translation in today’s English.
One of the difficulties is vocabulary. More than half the words used in Old English have disappeared, being replaced in later years by Scandinavian and French words. This includes many common words such as “they”, “them”, and “husband”, all of Scandinavian origin, and “pray”, “money”, and “marry”, all of French origin. Sometimes foreign words, especially French words used by the invading rulers of England after 1066, were adopted in English while the older Old English words were still retained. When this happened, people tended to have the idea that the French words were more elegant or educated than their Old English equivalents, which are thought to be more simple. We can see this with “infant”, “royal”, and “battle”, all of French origin, and their equivalents of original Old English origin: “child”, “kingly”, and “fight”.
Another difficulty is the more complicated grammar of Old English. In modern English the only time a verb needs a special ending is when we add a final -s on a present tense verb used with “he”, “she”, or “it” or a singular noun “he goes”, but “I / we / you / they go”. Old English was more difficult, as speakers needed to add a different ending for each different subject.
Similarly, in modern English we don’t need to change a word to mark whether it is the subject or the object of a sentence. For example, the words “the black dog” don’t change whether the dog is the subject of the sentence (“The black dog belongs to her”) or the object (“She bought the black dog”). But in Old English, all three of the words “the”, “black”, and “dog” would have had different endings depending on whether the dog is the subject, as in the first sentence, or the object, as in the second sentence.
To make things even more complicated, we would have to know whether “dog” was considered a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun. All nouns in Old English belonged to one of those three categories and had different endings depending on their grammatical category. This grammatical gender was quite arbitrary “ring” was masculine, while “cup” was feminine, and “pig” was neuter. There was no logical way to work out to which gender category a noun belonged. But this grammatical category was important not only because of the endings on the words, but because the grammatical category determined whether you would refer to the word as “he” (“the ring, he”), “she” (“the cup, she”) or “it” (“the pig, it”).
Like modern Tok Pisin, Old English was used primarily in speaking, and most of its speakers were illiterate. For this reason, there were few schools to keep the language unchanged and the language changed quickly with contact with invaders speaking French and Scandinavian languages. With extended contact with Scandinavians and French people, complicated grammatical constructions that were difficult for foreigners to learn were simplified or done away with completely and new words were borrowed easily.
This changed Old English to the simpler English language we use today. In just a few hundred years, English changed from being a language that is completely foreign to us in to the language that is familiar to us from the King James Bible translation, one that we can understand with little difficulty.

• Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland and an adjunct professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok.