2.2. Characteristics of oe
There’s no point in playing down differences between OE and MnE, for they are obvious at a glance. Take a look at this piece of OE prose and see if you can understand any of it:
OE:
Ōhthere sæde his hlāforde, Ælfrēde cyninhe, þæt hē ealra Norðmonna norþmest būde. Hē cwæð þæt hē būde on þæm lande norþweardum wiþ þā Westsæ.
Choose what you think this is about:
a feast at King Alfred’s palace
a voyage to some countries
an ambassador’s arriving at the English court
In fact, these lines tell about the voyage of the Scandinavian traveler Ohthere who arrived in England and told King Alfred of his experiences. This is how it might run in MnE:
Ohthere told his Lord (King ælfred) that he lived to the north of all the Northmen. He said that he dwelt in that land to the northward, opposite the West Sea.
The rules for OE spelling are different from the rules for MnE spelling. The pronunciation is different, too. There are a few words you might recognise: his, he, on, lande. Some words make sense if you hear them: þæt, wiþ, sæde.
Actually, OE is quite different from MnE in many aspects.
In fact, OE was a highly inflected language, with many various endings. There existed an elaborate nominal declension and verb conjugation systems. As OE relied on inflections to mark grammatical relations, the word order was relatively free. The OE vocabulary was composed of native words and very few borrowings from Celtic and mainly from Latin. At the end of the period many new loan-words entered it due to the Scandinavian invasion.
3. The Middle English period
3.1. Scandinavian Invasion and its impact on English
D
uring
the later part of the Old English period, two different groups of
non-English speakers invaded the country. Both groups were
Scandinavian in origin, but whereas the first had retained its
Scandinavian speech, the second had settled in northern France and
become French-speaking. Both the languages, Old Norse and Old French,
had a considerable influence on English.
The Scandinavian Invasion was a long process. It began in 787 AD and continued at intervals for 2 centuries. As a result of the invasion the Vikings, who were referred by the Anglo-Saxons as Dene 'the Danes", occupied the north-eastern part of England, which as recognized as Danelahu or the Danelaw.
The linguistic influence of this prolonged contact was immense. The constant contacts and the intermixture of the English and the Scandinavians brought about many changes in different spheres of the English language: mostly in vocabulary and grammar.
The Scandinavian invasion has left its mark on English place-names. There were about 1,500 such place-names in England. Over 600 end in –by, the Scandinavian word for 'village', e.g. Derby, Rugby, etc. Many of the remainder end in –thorp 'secondary settlement, outlying farmstead', -thwaite 'clearing', and –toft 'plot of land, etc.
Scandinavian influence on English went a good deal farther than place-names, however. Many general words entered the language, nearly 1000 eventually becoming part of Standard English. They include egg, score, fellow, take, cake, call, knife, etc. The closeness of the contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians is clearly shown by the extensive borrowings. Some of the commonest words in Mn English came into the language at that time, such as but, same, both, get, give. Even the personal pronoun system was affected, with they, them, and their replacing the earlier forms.
The most remarkable influx of Old Scandinavian in grammar is the replacement of 3 person plural sind(on) of the verb to be by are as the spread of the 3 person sg –s ending in present tense in other verbs. Moreover, one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Scandinavian and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence.
The great mixture between the two languages took place, for there existed no political or social barrier between the two peoples as they were approximately the same in culture, habits and customs due to their common origin. Besides, the language difference was not so strong as to make their mutual understanding impossible, because the languages descended from the same source – PGmc. They had grammar systems similar in essence, their phonetic structures were very close, the basic vocabulary of both the languages was practically the same. All this made no difficulties in communication.