1. The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language
1.1. Who were they?
MIDDLE ENGLISH GRAMMAR HERE
“Anglo-Saxon” is the term applied to the English-speaking
inhabitants of Britain from around the middle of the fifth century
until the time of the Norman Conquest, when the Anglo-Saxon line of
English kings came to an end.
According to the Venerable Bede, whose Historia Ecclesiastica
Gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People],
completed in the year 731, is the most important source for the
early history of England, the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the island of
Britain during the reign of Martian, who in 449 became co-emperor of
the Roman Empire with Valentinian III and ruled for seven years.
Before that time, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages: the Scots and Picts in the north, and in the south various groups which had been united under Roman rule since their conquest by the emperor Claudius in A.D. 43. By the beginning of the fifth century the Roman Empire was under increasing pressure from advancing barbarians, and the Roman garrisons in Britain were being depleted as troops were withdrawn to face threats closer to home. In A.D. 410, the same year in which the Visigoths entered and sacked Rome, the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn and the Britons had to defend themselves. Facing hostile Picts and Scots in the north and Germanic raiders in the east, the Britons decided to hire one enemy to fight the other: they engaged Germanic mercenaries to fight the Picts and Scots.
It was during the reign of Martian that the newly-hired mercenaries arrived. These were from three Germanic nations situated near the northern coasts of Europe: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. According to Bede, the mercenaries succeeded quickly in defeating the Picts and Scots and then sent word to their homes of the fertility of the island and the cowardice of the Britons. They soon found a pretext to break with their employers, made an alliance with the Picts, and began to conquer the territory that would eventually be known as England—a slow-moving conquest that would take more than a century.
It has been many years since Bede’s narrative was accepted uncritically, but recent research has introduced especially significant complications into his traditional account of the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. Genetic research generally suggests that neither the Anglo-Saxon invasion nor any other brought about a wholesale replacement of the British population, which has remained surprisingly stable for thousands of years: presumably the landholding and ruling classes were widely replaced while the greatest proportion of the population remained and eventually adopted Germanic ethnicity—a process that has parallels on the continent. Yet in some areas it may well be that some, at least, of the older British landholding class survived by intermarrying with the invaders. The occurrence of Celtic names among early West Saxon kings points to the possibility, and genetic research appears to bear it out, especially for the south. It increasingly appears that the “Anglo-Saxon invasion” is as much the invasion of an ethnicity as that of a population.
Though Bede’s account cannot be accepted without reservation, his story nevertheless gives us essential information about how the Anglo-Saxons looked at themselves: they considered themselves a warrior people, and they were proud to have been conquerors of the territory they inhabited. Indeed, the warrior ethic that pervades Anglo-Saxon culture is among the first things that students notice on approaching the field.
But Europe had no shortage of warrior cultures in the last half of the first millennium. What makes Anglo-Saxon England especially worthy of study is the remarkable literature that flourished there. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, and by the late seventh and early eighth centuries had already produced two major authors: Aldhelm, who composed his most important work, De Virginitate [On Virginity], twice, in prose and in verse; and the Venerable Bede, whose vast output includes biblical commentaries, homilies, textbooks on orthography, meter, rhetoric, nature and time, and of course the Historia Ecclesiastica, mentioned above. A small army of authors, Bede’s contemporaries and successors, produced saints’ lives and a variety of other works in prose and verse, largely on Christian themes.
These seventh- and eighth-century authors wrote in Latin, as did a great many Anglo-Saxon authors of later periods. But the Anglo-Saxons also created an extensive body of vernacular literature at a time when relatively little was being written in most of the other languages of western Europe. In addition to such well-known classic poems as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Battle of Maldon, they left us the translations associated with King Alfred’s educational program, a large body of devotional works by such writers as Ælfric and Wulfstan, biblical translations and adaptations, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other historical writings, law codes, handbooks of medicine and magic, and much more. While most of the manuscripts that preserve vernacular works date from the late ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were producing written work in their own language by the early seventh century, and many scholars believe that Beowulf and several other important poems date from the eighth century. Thus we are in possession of five centuries of Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature.
To learn more about the Anglo-Saxons, consult the Further Reading section of this book and choose from the works listed there: they will give you access to a wealth of knowledge from a variety of disciplines. This book will give you another kind of access, equipping you with the skills you need to encounter the Anglo-Saxons in their own language.
1.2. Where did their language come from?
Bede tells us that the Anglo-Saxons came from Germania.
Presumably he was using that term as the Romans had used it, to refer
to a vast and ill-defined territory east of the Rhine and north of the
Danube, extending as far east as the Vistula in present-day Poland and
as far north as present-day Sweden and Norway. This territory was
nothing like a nation, but rather was inhabited by numerous tribes
which were closely related culturally and
linguistically.[1]
The languages spoken by the inhabitants of Germania were a
branch of the Indo-European
family of
languages, which linguists believe developed from a single language
spoken some five thousand years ago in an area that has never been
identified—perhaps, some say, the Caucasus. From this ancient
language come most of the language groups of present-day Europe and
some important languages of South Asia: the Celtic languages (such as
Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic), the Italic languages (such as
French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian, descended from dialects of
Latin), the Germanic languages,
the Slavic languages (such as Russian and Polish), the
Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian), the Indo-Iranian languages
(such as Persian and Hindi), and individual languages that do not
belong to these groups: Albanian, Greek, and Armenian. The biblical
Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, or a language closely related to
the Indo-European family, and a number of other extinct languages (some of
them poorly attested) were probably or certainly Indo-European: Phrygian,
Lycian, Thracian, Illyrian, Macedonian, Tocharian and others.The Germanic branch of the Indo-European family is usually divided into three groups:
- North Germanic,
- that is, the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese;
- East Germanic,
- that is, Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a fragmentary biblical translation from the fourth century;
- West Germanic,
- which includes High German, English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian.
Surely the language spoken by the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain was precisely the same as that spoken by the people they left behind on the continent. But between the time of the migration and the appearance of the earliest written records in the first years of the eighth century, the language of the Anglo-Saxons came to differ from that of the people they had left behind. We call this distinct language Old English to emphasize its continuity with Modern English, which is directly descended from it.
1.3. What was Old English like?
We often hear people delivering opinions about different languages:
French is “romantic,” Italian “musical.”
For the student of language, such impressionistic
judgments are not very useful. Rather, to describe
a language we need to explain how it goes about doing the work that
all languages must do; and it is helpful to compare it with other
languages—especially members of the language groups it belongs
to.
Languages may be compared in a number of ways. Every language has its
own repertory of sounds, as known by all students who have had to
struggle to learn to pronounce a foreign language. Every language also
has its own rules for accentuating words and its own patterns of
intonation—the rising and falling pitch of our voices as we
speak. Every language has its own vocabulary, of course, though when
we’re lucky we find a good bit of overlap between the vocabulary of
our native language and that of the language we’re learning. And every
language has its own way of signalling how words function in
utterances—of expressing who performed an action, what the
action was, when it took place, whether it is now finished or still
going on, what or who was acted upon, for whose benefit the action was
performed, and so on.The following sections attempt to hit the high points, showing what makes Old English an Indo-European language, a Germanic language, a West Germanic and a Low German language; and also how Old and Modern English are related.
1.3.1. The Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages do certain things in much the same way. For
example, they share some basic vocabulary. Consider these words for
‘father’:
| Old English | fæder |
| Latin | pater |
| Greek | patḗr |
| Sanskrit | pitá |
You can easily see the resemblance among the Latin, Greek and Sanskrit
words. You may begin to understand why the Old English word looks
different from the others when you compare these words for ‘foot’:
| Old English | fōt |
| Latin | pedem |
| Greek | póda |
| Sanskrit | pdam |
If you suspect that Latin p will always correspond to
Old English f, you are right, more or less.
For now, it’s enough for you to recognize that the
Indo-European languages do share a good bit of vocabulary, though the
changes that all languages go through often bring it about that the
same word looks quite different in different
languages.[3]
All of the Indo-European languages handle the job of signalling the
functions of words in similar ways. For example, all add
endings to
words. The plural form of the noun meaning ‘foot’ was
pódes in Greek, pedēs in Latin, and
pádas in
Sanskrit—and English feet once ended with -s
as well, though that ending had already disappeared by the Old English
period. Most Indo-European languages signal the function of a noun in a
sentence or clause by inflecting[4] it for
case (though some languages no
longer do, and the only remaining trace of the case system in
Modern English nouns is the possessive ’s). And most
also classify their nouns by gender—masculine, feminine or
neuter (though some have reduced the number of genders to two).>Indo-European languages have ways to inflect words other than by adding endings. In the verb system, for example, words could be inflected by changing their root vowels, and this ancient system of “gradation” persists even now in such Modern English verbs as swim (past-tense swam, past participle swum). Words could also be inflected by shifting the stress from one syllable to another, but only indirect traces of this system remain in Old and Modern English.
1.3.2. The Germanic languages
Perhaps the most important development that distinguishes the
Germanic languages from others in the Indo-European family is the one
that produced the difference, illustrated above, between the
p of Latin pater and the f of Old English
fæder. This change, called “Grimm’s Law”
after Jacob Grimm, the great linguist and folklorist,
affected all of the consonants called
“stops”—that is, those consonants produced by
momentarily stopping the breath and then releasing it (for example,
[p], [b], [t], [d]):[5]
- Unvoiced stops
- ([p], [t], [k]) became unvoiced spirants ([f], [θ], [x]), so that Old English fæder corresponds to Latin pater, Old English þrēo ‘three’ to Latin tres, and Old English habban ‘have’ to Latin capere ‘take’.
- Voiced stops
- ([b],[6] [d], [g]) became unvoiced stops ([p], [t], [k]), so that Old English dēop ‘deep’ corresponds to Lithuanian dubùs, twā ‘two’ corresponds to Latin duo and Old English æcer ‘field’ to Latin ager.
- Voiced aspirated stops[7]
- ([bʰ], [dʰ],
[gʰ]) became voiced
stops ([b] [d], [g]) or spirants ([β],
[ð], [ɣ]), so
that Old English
brōðor corresponds to Sanskrit
bhrátar-
and Latin frater, Old English duru ‘door’ to Latin
fores and Greek thúra, and Old English
ġiest ‘stranger’ to Latin hostis ‘enemy’ and Old
Slavic gosti ‘guest’.
Almost as important as these changes in the Indo-European consonant
system was a change in the way words were stressed. You read in
§ 1.3.1 that the
Indo-European language sometimes stressed one form of a word on one
syllable and another form on another syllable. For example, in Greek
the nominative singular of the word for ‘giant’ was
gígās while the genitive plural was
gigóntōn. But in Germanic, some time after the
operation of Grimm’s Law, stress shifted to the first syllable. Even
prefixes were stressed, except the prefixes of verbs and the one that
came to Old English as ġe- (these were probably perceived as
separate words rather than prefixes). The fact that words in
Germanic were almost always stressed on the first syllable had many
consequences, not least of which is that it made Old English much easier
than ancient Greek for modern students to pronounce.
Along with these sound changes came a radical simplification of the
inflectional system of the Germanic languages.
For example, while linguists believe that the original Indo-European
language had eight cases, the Germanic languages have four, and
sometimes traces of a fifth. And while students of Latin and Greek
must learn a quite complex verb system, the Germanic verb had just
two tenses, present and past. Germanic did introduce
one or two complications of its own, but in general its inflectional
system is much simpler than those of the more ancient Indo-European
languages, and the Germanic languages were beginning to rely on a
relatively fixed ordering of sentence elements to do some of the work
that inflections formerly had done.1.3.3. West Germanic and Low German
The West Germanic languages differ from North and East Germanic in a
number of features which are not very striking in themselves, but
quite numerous. For example, the consonant [z] became
[r] in North and West Germanic. So while Gothic has
hazjan ‘to praise’, Old English has herian.
In West Germanic, this [r] disappeared at the ends of
unstressed syllables, with the result that entire inflectional endings
were lost. For example, the nominative singular of the word for
‘day’ is dagr in Old Icelandic and dags in Gothic
(where the final [z] was unvoiced to [s]), but
dæġ in Old English, dag in Old Saxon, and
tac in Old High German.
Low German is defined in part by something that did not
happen to it. This non-event is the “High German consonant
shift,” which altered the sounds of the High German dialects as
radically as Grimm’s Law had altered the sounds of
Germanic. Students of Modern German will
recognize the effects of the High German consonant
shift in such pairs as English eat and German essen,
English sleep and German schlafen, English
make and German machen, English daughter
and German Tochter, English death and German
Tod, English thing and German Ding. Another
important difference between High German and Low German is that the
Low German languages did not distinguish person in plural verbs. For
example, in Old High German one would say wir
nemumēs ‘we take’, ir nemet ‘you (plural) take’,
sie nemant ‘they take’, but in
Old English one said wē nimað ‘we
take’, ġē nimað ‘you (plural) take’, hīe
nimað ‘they take’, using the same verb form for the first, second
and third persons.The most significant differences between Old English (with Old Frisian) and the other Low German languages have to do with their treatment of vowels. Old English and Old Frisian both changed the vowel that in other Germanic languages is represented as a, pronouncing it with the tongue farther forward in the mouth: so Old English has dæg ‘day’ and Old Frisian dei, but Old Saxon (the language spoken by the Saxons who didn’t migrate to Britain) has dag, Old High German tac, Gothic dags, and Old Icelandic dagr. Also, in both Old English and Old Frisian, the pronunciation of a number of vowels was changed (for example, [o] to [e]) when [i] or [j] followed in the next syllable. This development, called i-mutation, has implications for Old English grammar and so is important for students to understand.
Old English dramatically reduced the number of vowels that could appear in inflectional endings. In the earliest texts, any vowel except y could appear in an inflectional ending: a, e, i, o, u, æ. But by the time of King Alfred i and æ could no longer appear, and o and u were variant spellings of more or less the same sound; so in effect only three vowels could appear in inflectional endings: a, e and o/u. This development of course reduced the number of distinct endings that could be added to Old English words. In fact, a number of changes took place in unaccented syllables, all tending to eliminate distinctions between endings and simplify the inflectional system.
1.3.4. Old and Modern English
The foregoing sections have given a somewhat technical, if rather
sketchy, picture of how Old English is like and unlike the languages it
is related to. Modern English is also “related” to Old English,
though in a different way; for Old and Modern English are really different
stages in the development of a single language. The changes that
turned Old English into Middle English and Middle English into Modern English took
place gradually, over the centuries, and there never was a time when
people perceived their language as having broken radically with the
language spoken a generation before. It is worth mentioning in this
connection that the terms “Old English,” “Middle
English” and “Modern English” are themselves modern:
speakers of these languages all would have said, if asked, that the
language they spoke was English.
There is no point, on the other hand, in playing down the differences
between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The
rules for spelling Old English were different from the rules for
spelling Modern English, and that accounts for some of the difference.
But there are more substantial changes as well. The three vowels that
appeared in the inflectional endings of Old English words were reduced
to one in Middle English, and then most inflectional endings
disappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost; so were most
of the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more
complex, adding such features as a future tense, a perfect, and a
pluperfect. While the number of endings was reduced, the order of
elements within clauses and sentences became more fixed, so that (for
example) it came to sound archaic and awkward to place an object
before the verb, as Old English had frequently done.The vocabulary of Old English was of course Germanic, more closely related to the vocabulary of such languages as Dutch and German than to French or Latin. The Viking age, which culminated in the reign of the Danish king Cnut in England, introduced a great many Danish words into English—but these were Germanic words as well. The conquest of England by a French-speaking people in the year 1066 eventually brought about immense changes in the vocabulary of English. During the Middle English period (and especially in the years 1250-1400) English borrowed some ten thousand words from French, and at the same time it was friendly to borrowings from Latin, Dutch and Flemish. Now relatively few Modern English words come from Old English; but the words that do survive are some of the most common in the language, including almost all the “grammar words” (articles, pronouns, prepositions) and a great many words for everyday concepts. For example, the words in this paragraph that come to us from Old English (or are derived from Old English words) include those in table 1.1.
| about | by | from | now | these |
| almost | come | great | of | this |
| all | Danish | in | old | thousand |
| and | do | into | or | time |
| are | England | it | some | to |
| as | English | king | speaking | was |
| at | everyday | many | such | were |
| borrowings | for | middle | ten | which |
| brought | French | more | than | word |
| but | friendly | most | the | year |
1.4. Old English dialects
The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons at the time of
their migration to Britain was probably more or less uniform. Over
time, however, Old English developed into four major dialects:
Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; Mercian, spoken in the
midlands; Kentish, spoken in Kent (in the far southeastern part of the
island); and West Saxon, spoken in the southwest.
All of these dialects have direct descendants in modern
England, and American regional dialects also have their roots in the
dialects of Old English. “Standard” Modern English (if there
is such a thing), or at least Modern English spelling, owes most to
the Mercian dialect, since that was the dialect of London.
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