Beorn
01-08-2009, 11:34 PM
The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language
1.1. Who were they?
"Anglo-Saxon" is the term applied to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain up to the time of the Norman Conquest, when the Anglo-Saxon line of English kings came to an end. The people who were conquered in 1066 had themselves arrived as conquerors more than six centuries earlier.
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 Celtic peoples: 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increasing pressure from advancing barbarians, and the Roman garrisons in Britain were being depleted as troops were withdrawn to face threats closer to home. In A.D. 410, the same year in which the Visigoths entered and sacked Rome, the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn and the Britons had to defend themselves.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 is now difficult to measure the accuracy of Bede's account of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. But Bede's story gives us essential information about how these people 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 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 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/read.html) 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.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For an early account of the Germanic tribes, see Germania, a work by the late first- and early second-century Roman historian Tacitus.]
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. Within the West Germanic group, the High German dialects (which include Modern German) form a subgroup distinct from English and the other languages, which together are called "Low German" because they were originally spoken in the low country near the North Sea.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [The Low German languages are often called "Ingvaeonic" after the Ingvaeones, a nation that, according to Tacitus, was located by the sea.]
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':
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro01.gif 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':
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro02.gif
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.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For example, it's not at all obvious that Modern English four and Latin quattuor, or Modern English quick and Latin vivus 'alive', come from the same Indo-European word--but they do.]
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 it for casehttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) (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" (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html#def: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 who discovered it, 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]):http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For the meanings of these International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols and of terms such as "stop," "spirant," "voiced" and "unvoiced," see Appendix B (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ipa.html). IPA symbols in this book are enclosed in square brackets.]
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],http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [The consonant [b] for some reason was exceedingly rare in Indo-European, as a glance at the b entries in a Latin dictionary or the p entries in an Old English dictionary will show. Indo-European antecedents for Germanic words beginning with [p] are difficult to find.] [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( [dʰ], [gʰ])http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [An aspirated stop is a consonant that is accompanied by an h-like breathing sound. Most Indo-European languages altered the voiced aspirated stops in some way; for example, in Latin [bʰ] and [dʰ] became f, and [gʰ] became h.] became voiced stops ( [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 indo-european (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html#indo-european) 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 seven 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.
[B]
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 or [j] followed in the next syllable. This development, called i-mutation (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronuncation.html#pronounce:imutation), 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.
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.
Most Old English literature is not in the Mercian dialect, however, but in West-Saxon, for from the time of King Alfred (reigned 871-899) until the Conquest Wessex dominated the rest of Anglo-Saxon England politically and culturally. Nearly all Old English poetry is in West Saxon, though it often contains spellings and vocabulary more typical of Mercian and Northumbrian--a fact that has led some scholars to speculate that much of the poetry was first composed in Mercian or Northumbian and later "translated" into West Saxon. Whatever the truth of the matter, West Saxon was the dominant language during the period in which most of our surviving literature was recorded. It is therefore the dialect that this book will teach you.
Source (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html)
2 Pronunciation
2.1. Quick start
No one knows exactly how Old English sounded, for no native speakers survive to inform us. Rather, linguists have painstakingly reconstructed the pronunciation of the language from various kinds of evidence: what we know of Latin pronunciation (since the Anglo-Saxons adapted the Latin alphabet to write their own language), comparisons with other Germanic languages and with later stages of English, and the accentuation and quantity of syllables in Old English poetry. We believe that our reconstruction of Old English pronunciation is reasonably accurate; but some aspects of the subject remain controversial, and it is likely that we will never attain certainty about them. The greatest Old English scholar in the world today might very well have difficulty being understood on the streets of King Alfred's Winchester.
Despite the uncertainties, you should learn Old English pronunciation and get into the habit of reading texts aloud to yourself. Doing so will give you a clearer idea of the relationship between Old and Modern English and a more accurate understanding of Old English meter, and will also enhance the pleasure of learning the language.
2.1.1. Vowels and diphthongs
Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs (two-part vowels), ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions. Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions for students, and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts.
When we speak of vowel length in Old English, we are speaking of duration, that is, how long it takes to pronounce a vowel. This fact can trip up the modern student, for when we speak of "length" in Modern English, we are actually speaking of differences in the quality of a vowel. If you listen carefully when you say sit (with "short" i) and site (with "long" ī), you'll notice that the vowels are quite different: the "short" version has a simple vowel [ɪ],http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [This book frequently uses symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for convenience of reference, though it also gives examples wherever possible. For a table of the IPA symbols relevant to the study of Old English, see Appendix B (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ipa.html).] while the "long" version is a diphthong, starting with a sound like the u in but and ending with a sound like the i in sit [ʌɪ]. The same is true of other long/short pairs in Modern English: they are always qualitatively different. We do give some vowels a longer duration than others (listen to yourself as you pronounce beat and bead), but this difference in duration is never significant: that is, it does not make a difference in the meaning of a word. Rather, we pronounce some vowels long and others short because of the influence of nearby sounds.
Vowel length (that is, duration) is significant in Old English because it does make a difference in the meanings of words. For example, Old English is means 'is' while īs means 'ice', ac means 'but' while āc means 'oak', and ġe means 'and' while ġē means 'you' (plural). The significance of length means that the macrons that appear in the texts you will be reading are not there only as guides to pronunciation, but also to help you decide what words mean. If you absent-mindedly read mǣġ 'kinsman' as mæġ 'may', you will never figure out the meaning of the sentence you are reading.
Simple vowels
The following list of vowels deals with quality only; you may assume that the short and long vowels sound alike except for a difference in duration. The list cites a number of Modern English words for comparison: these are from the Mid-Atlantic dialect of American English and may not be valid for speakers of British English or other American dialects.
a is pronounced [ɑ], as in Modern English father. Examples: macian 'make', bāt 'boat'. æ is pronounced [æ], as in Modern English cat. Bæc 'back', rǣdan 'read'. e is pronounced [e], as in Modern English fate; that is, it is like the e of a continental European language, not like the "long" or "short" e of Modern English (actually or [ɛ]). [I]Helpan 'help', fēdan 'feed'. i is pronounced [i], as in Modern English feet; that is, it is like the i of a continental European language, not like the "long" or "short" i of Modern English (actually [ʌɪ] or [ɪ]). Sittan 'sit', līf 'life'. o is pronounced [o], as in Modern English boat. God 'God', gōd 'good'. u is pronounced [u], as in Modern English tool; it is never pronounced [ʌ] as in Modern English but. Full 'full', fūl 'foul'. y is pronounced [y], like the ü in German über or Füße, or like the u in French tu or dur. Make it by positioning the tongue as you do to say feet while rounding the lips as you do to say tool. Cyning 'king', brȳd 'bride'. ie which appears mainly in early West Saxon, is difficult to interpret. It was probably approximately [ɪ], like the i of Modern English sit. In late West Saxon, words that contained this vowel are rarely spelled with ie, but rather with i or y. Ieldesta 'eldest', hīeran 'hear'.
Many grammars tell you to pronounce short e as [ɛ], like the e in Modern English [I]set, short i as [ɪ], like the i of Modern English sit, and short u as [ʊ], like the u of Modern English pull. You can get away with these pronunciations, though they probably do not represent the Old English vowels accurately.
In unaccented syllables, where few vowel sounds were distinguished (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html#fewvowels), vowels were probably pronounced less distinctly than in accented syllables. In late Old English (ca. 1000 and later), frequent spelling confusion shows that by then the language was beginning to approach the Middle English situation in which all vowels in unaccented syllables were pronounced [ə] (a neutral schwa, like the a in China). But unaccented vowels were distinguished in Old English, and it is important to pronounce them, for vowel quality often is the only thing that distinguishes one ending from another. For example, dative singular cyninge and genitive plural cyninga, genitive singular cyninges and nominative plural cyningas are distinguished only by vowel quality.
Diphthongs
Old English has two digraphs (pairs of letters) that are commonly interpreted as diphthongs: ea and eo.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [A digraph io appears primarily in early texts, and for the student's purposes is best taken as a variant of eo.] Both ea and eo can represent short or long sounds, equivalent in length to the short and long vowels. Beyond this generally agreed fact, there is controversy about what sound these digraphs represent. Here we present the most widely accepted view.
eo represents [eo] or [eʊ], a diphthong that started with [e] and glided to a rounded sound, [o] or [ʊ]. Examples: ċeorl 'freeman' (Modern English churl), dēop 'deep'. ea represents [æɑ], a diphthong that started with [æ] and glided to [ɑ] (as in father). Feallan 'fall', rēad 'red'. Some grammar books say that the spelling ie also represents a diphthong, but this book interprets it as a simple vowel.
Perhaps the most common error students make when trying to pronounce Old English diphthongs is to break them into two syllables--for example, to pronounce Bēowulf as a three-syllable word when in fact it has only two syllables. Remember that there is a smooth transition between the two vowels of a diphthong, and this is as true of the unfamiliar diphthongs of Old English as it is of the familiar ones of Modern English (like those of site and sound).
2.1.2. Consonants
Most Old English consonants are pronounced as in Modern English, and most of the differences from Modern English are straightforward:
Old English scribes wrote the letters [I]þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") interchangeably to represent [θ] and [ð], the sounds spelled th in Modern English. Examples: þing 'thing', brōðor 'brother'.
There are no silent consonants. Old English cniht (which comes to Modern English as knight) actually begins with [k]. Similarly hlāf (Modern English loaf) and hring (ring) begin with [h], gnæt (gnat) with [ɡ], and wrīðan (writhe) with [w]. Some Old English consonant combinations may be difficult to pronounce because they are not in Modern English. If you find this to be so, just do your best.
The consonants spelled f, s and þ/ð are pronounced as voiced [v], [z] and [ð] (as in then) when they fall between vowels or other voiced sounds. For example, the f of heofon 'heaven', hæfde 'had' and wulfas 'wolves' is voiced. So are the s of ċēosan 'choose' and the ð of feðer 'feather'.
These same consonants were pronounced as unvoiced [f], [s], and [θ] (as in thin) when they came at the beginning or end of a word or adjacent to at least one unvoiced sound. So f is unvoiced in ful 'full', cræft 'craft' and wulf 'wolf'. Similarly s is unvoiced in settan 'set', frost 'frost', and wulfas 'wolves', and þ/ð is unvoiced in þæt 'that' and strengð 'strength'.
When written double, consonants must be pronounced double, or held longer. We pronounce consonants long in Modern English phrases like "big gun" and "hat trick," though never within words. In Old English, wile 'he will' must be distinguished from wille 'I will', and freme 'do' (imperative) from fremme 'I do'.
This book sometimes prints c with a dot (ċ) and sometimes without. Undotted c is pronounced [k]; dotted ċ is pronounced [ʧ], like the ch in Modern English chin. This letter is never pronounced [s] in Old English. It has a special function in the combination sc (see item 10 below).
The letter g, like c, is sometimes printed with a dot and sometimes without. Dotless g is pronounced [ɡ], as in good, when it comes at the beginning of a word or syllable. Between voiced sounds dotless g is pronounced [ɣ], a voiced velar spirant.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [Practice making this sound: Raise the back of your tongue to the velum (the soft palate) as you do when pronouncing a k. Instead of a stop, though, pronounce a spirant, somewhat like the ch of German Nacht, but voiced. If you are sure you cannot pronounce the [ɣ], pronounce it [w] instead.] This sound became [w] in Middle English, so English no longer has it. Dotted ġ is usually pronounced [j], as in Modern English yes, but when it follows an n it is pronounced [ʤ], as in Modern English angel.
The combination cg is pronounced [ʤ], like the dge of Modern English sedge. Examples: hrycg 'ridge, back', brycg 'bridge', ecg 'edge'.
Old English h is pronounced [h], as in Modern English, at the beginnings of syllables, but elsewhere it is pronounced approximately like German ch in Nacht or ich--that is, as a velar [x] or palatal [ç] unvoiced spirant (pronounced with the tongue against the velum [soft palate] or, after front vowels, against the hard palate). Examples: nēah 'near', niht 'night', þēah 'though', dweorh 'dwarf'.
The combination sc is usually pronounced [ʃ], like Modern English sh: scip 'ship', æsc 'ash (wood)', wȳscan 'wish'. But within a word, if sc occurs before a back vowel (a, o, u), or if it occurs after a back vowel at the end of a word, it is pronounced [sk]: ascian 'ask' (where sc was formerly followed by a back vowel), tūsc 'tusk'. When sc was pronounced [sk] it sometimes underwent metathesis (the sounds got reversed to [ks]) and was written x: axian for ascian, tux for tusc. Sometimes sc is pronounced [ʃ] in one form of a word and [sk] or [ks] in another: fisc 'fish', fiscas/fixas 'fishes'.
2.1.3. Sermonette
When students of Old English go wrong in translating, it is often because they have done a sloppy job of looking up words in a dictionary or glossary. Remember, when you look up words, that vowel length is significant, and so is the doubling of consonants. Biddan 'ask, pray' and bīdan 'await, experience' are completely different words, but some students mess up their translations because they look at them as equivalent. Don't fall into this trap!
On a related point, you will notice as you go along that the spelling of Old English is somewhat variable. Scribes at that time lacked our modern obsession with consistency. Rather than insisting that a word always be spelled the same way, they applied a set of rules for rendering the sounds of their language in writing, and these rules sometimes allowed them to get the job done in more than one way. Further, scribes sometimes mixed up the dialects of Old English, writing (for example) Mercian þēostru 'darkness' instead of West Saxon þīestru. These minor inconsistencies sometimes lead students to believe that anything goes in Old English spelling, and this belief leads them into error.
It is not true that anything goes in Old English spelling. Though you will have to get used to frequent variations, such as ie/i/y and iung for ġeong 'young', you won't often see confusion of æ and ea, or indeed of most vowels, or of single and double consonants, or of one consonant with another. For a list of spelling variants that you will frequently see, consult Appendix A (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/variants.html).
Get into the habit of recognizing the distinctions that are important in Old English and doing an accurate job of looking up words, and you will avoid a lot of frustration.
2.2 More about vowels
[B]2.2.1. Short a, æ and ea
The short sounds spelled a, æ and ea are all derived from the same vowel (spelled a in most other Germanic languages). The split of one vowel into two vowels and a diphthong, which occurred before the period of our written texts, was conditioned by the sounds that surrounded it in the word (the details are complex and controversial: see Lass 1994 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/bib.html#lass1994a), pp. 41-53). The effects of this split were not long-lasting; by the Middle English period a, æ and ea had coalesced into one vowel, spelled a.
The reason it is important for you to know about the relationship of a, æ and ea is that these sounds vary within paradigms. If æ or ea occurs in a short syllable (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html#pronounce:syllweight) and a back vowel (a, o, u) follows, the æ or ea becomes a. Add the plural ending -as to dæġ 'day' and you get dagas; add plural -u to ġeat 'gate' and you get gatu.
2.2.2. I-mutation
I-mutationhttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [German linguists call it Umlaut. Because of the great influence of German linguistics at the time when the historical evolution of the Germanic languages was being worked out, you will occasionally see this term even in grammars written in English.] is a shift in the quality of a vowel so that it is pronounced with the tongue higher and farther forward than usual--closer to its position when you pronounce the vowel (as in feet). The correspondences between normal and mutated vowels are shown in table 2.1. Notice that the i-mutation of a produces a different result depending on whether a nasal consonant (m or n) follows.
The effects of i-mutation are still evident in Modern English. The vowels of such athematic (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflnoun.html#nouns:athematic) plurals as men (singular man), lice (louse) and teeth (tooth) exhibit i-mutation, as does the comparative adjective (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/infladj.html#infladj:compar) elder (old); and i-mutation accounts for most of the verbs that both change their vowels and add a past-tense ending (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html#weak:vowel:change) (e.g. sell/sold, buy/bought, in which the present has i-mutation but the past does not).
All of these categories of Modern English words exhibiting i-mutation were already present in Old English. I-mutation also appears in some forms of certain nouns of relationship (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflnoun.html#inflnoun:relat), some comparative adverbs (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/advconprep.html#advconprep:compar), and many verb forms (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html). Examples: the nominative plural of mann 'man' is menn; the nominative plural of lūs 'louse' is lȳs; the comparative of eald 'old' is ieldra; the comparative of the adverb feor is fier; the third-person singular of the strong verb ċēosan 'choose' is ċīest.
Some Modern English words which we still perceive as being derived from other words have mutated vowels: for example, [I]length from long, feed from food, heal from whole. These words and many more were present in Old English: lengðu from lang, fēdan from fōda, hǣlan from hāl.
2.2.3. Silent e; o for u
When ċ, ġ or sc (pronounced [ʃ]) occurs before a back vowel, it is sometimes followed by an e, which probably should not be pronounced, but merely indicates that the ċ should be pronounced [ʧ], the ġ [j] or [ʤ], and the sc [ʃ]. For example, you will see sēċean 'seek' as well as sēċan, ġeþinġea 'of agreements' as well as ġeþinġa, and sceolon 'must' (plural) as well as sculon.
Notice that sceolon has o in the first syllable while sculon has u. These two spellings do not indicate different pronunciations; rather, the Old English spelling system appears (for unknown reasons) to have prohibited the letter-sequence eu, and scribes sometimes wrote eo instead to avoid it. Other words that are spelled with o but pronounced [u] are ġeō 'formerly', ġeong 'young', ġeoguð 'youth' and Ġeōl 'Yule'. For these you may also encounter the spellings iū, iung, iuguð, Ġiūl and Iūl.
Source and further reading. (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html)
1.1. Who were they?
"Anglo-Saxon" is the term applied to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain up to the time of the Norman Conquest, when the Anglo-Saxon line of English kings came to an end. The people who were conquered in 1066 had themselves arrived as conquerors more than six centuries earlier.
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 Celtic peoples: 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 is now difficult to measure the accuracy of Bede's account of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. But Bede's story gives us essential information about how these people 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 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 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/read.html) 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.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For an early account of the Germanic tribes, see Germania, a work by the late first- and early second-century Roman historian Tacitus.]
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. Within the West Germanic group, the High German dialects (which include Modern German) form a subgroup distinct from English and the other languages, which together are called "Low German" because they were originally spoken in the low country near the North Sea.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [The Low German languages are often called "Ingvaeonic" after the Ingvaeones, a nation that, according to Tacitus, was located by the sea.]
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':
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro01.gif 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':
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro02.gif
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.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For example, it's not at all obvious that Modern English four and Latin quattuor, or Modern English quick and Latin vivus 'alive', come from the same Indo-European word--but they do.]
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 it for casehttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) (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" (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html#def: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 who discovered it, 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]):http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [For the meanings of these International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols and of terms such as "stop," "spirant," "voiced" and "unvoiced," see Appendix B (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ipa.html). IPA symbols in this book are enclosed in square brackets.]
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],http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [The consonant [b] for some reason was exceedingly rare in Indo-European, as a glance at the b entries in a Latin dictionary or the p entries in an Old English dictionary will show. Indo-European antecedents for Germanic words beginning with [p] are difficult to find.] [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( [dʰ], [gʰ])http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [An aspirated stop is a consonant that is accompanied by an h-like breathing sound. Most Indo-European languages altered the voiced aspirated stops in some way; for example, in Latin [bʰ] and [dʰ] became f, and [gʰ] became h.] became voiced stops ( [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 indo-european (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html#indo-european) 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 seven 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.
[B]
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 or [j] followed in the next syllable. This development, called i-mutation (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronuncation.html#pronounce:imutation), 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.
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.
Most Old English literature is not in the Mercian dialect, however, but in West-Saxon, for from the time of King Alfred (reigned 871-899) until the Conquest Wessex dominated the rest of Anglo-Saxon England politically and culturally. Nearly all Old English poetry is in West Saxon, though it often contains spellings and vocabulary more typical of Mercian and Northumbrian--a fact that has led some scholars to speculate that much of the poetry was first composed in Mercian or Northumbian and later "translated" into West Saxon. Whatever the truth of the matter, West Saxon was the dominant language during the period in which most of our surviving literature was recorded. It is therefore the dialect that this book will teach you.
Source (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html)
2 Pronunciation
2.1. Quick start
No one knows exactly how Old English sounded, for no native speakers survive to inform us. Rather, linguists have painstakingly reconstructed the pronunciation of the language from various kinds of evidence: what we know of Latin pronunciation (since the Anglo-Saxons adapted the Latin alphabet to write their own language), comparisons with other Germanic languages and with later stages of English, and the accentuation and quantity of syllables in Old English poetry. We believe that our reconstruction of Old English pronunciation is reasonably accurate; but some aspects of the subject remain controversial, and it is likely that we will never attain certainty about them. The greatest Old English scholar in the world today might very well have difficulty being understood on the streets of King Alfred's Winchester.
Despite the uncertainties, you should learn Old English pronunciation and get into the habit of reading texts aloud to yourself. Doing so will give you a clearer idea of the relationship between Old and Modern English and a more accurate understanding of Old English meter, and will also enhance the pleasure of learning the language.
2.1.1. Vowels and diphthongs
Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs (two-part vowels), ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions. Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions for students, and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts.
When we speak of vowel length in Old English, we are speaking of duration, that is, how long it takes to pronounce a vowel. This fact can trip up the modern student, for when we speak of "length" in Modern English, we are actually speaking of differences in the quality of a vowel. If you listen carefully when you say sit (with "short" i) and site (with "long" ī), you'll notice that the vowels are quite different: the "short" version has a simple vowel [ɪ],http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [This book frequently uses symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for convenience of reference, though it also gives examples wherever possible. For a table of the IPA symbols relevant to the study of Old English, see Appendix B (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ipa.html).] while the "long" version is a diphthong, starting with a sound like the u in but and ending with a sound like the i in sit [ʌɪ]. The same is true of other long/short pairs in Modern English: they are always qualitatively different. We do give some vowels a longer duration than others (listen to yourself as you pronounce beat and bead), but this difference in duration is never significant: that is, it does not make a difference in the meaning of a word. Rather, we pronounce some vowels long and others short because of the influence of nearby sounds.
Vowel length (that is, duration) is significant in Old English because it does make a difference in the meanings of words. For example, Old English is means 'is' while īs means 'ice', ac means 'but' while āc means 'oak', and ġe means 'and' while ġē means 'you' (plural). The significance of length means that the macrons that appear in the texts you will be reading are not there only as guides to pronunciation, but also to help you decide what words mean. If you absent-mindedly read mǣġ 'kinsman' as mæġ 'may', you will never figure out the meaning of the sentence you are reading.
Simple vowels
The following list of vowels deals with quality only; you may assume that the short and long vowels sound alike except for a difference in duration. The list cites a number of Modern English words for comparison: these are from the Mid-Atlantic dialect of American English and may not be valid for speakers of British English or other American dialects.
a is pronounced [ɑ], as in Modern English father. Examples: macian 'make', bāt 'boat'. æ is pronounced [æ], as in Modern English cat. Bæc 'back', rǣdan 'read'. e is pronounced [e], as in Modern English fate; that is, it is like the e of a continental European language, not like the "long" or "short" e of Modern English (actually or [ɛ]). [I]Helpan 'help', fēdan 'feed'. i is pronounced [i], as in Modern English feet; that is, it is like the i of a continental European language, not like the "long" or "short" i of Modern English (actually [ʌɪ] or [ɪ]). Sittan 'sit', līf 'life'. o is pronounced [o], as in Modern English boat. God 'God', gōd 'good'. u is pronounced [u], as in Modern English tool; it is never pronounced [ʌ] as in Modern English but. Full 'full', fūl 'foul'. y is pronounced [y], like the ü in German über or Füße, or like the u in French tu or dur. Make it by positioning the tongue as you do to say feet while rounding the lips as you do to say tool. Cyning 'king', brȳd 'bride'. ie which appears mainly in early West Saxon, is difficult to interpret. It was probably approximately [ɪ], like the i of Modern English sit. In late West Saxon, words that contained this vowel are rarely spelled with ie, but rather with i or y. Ieldesta 'eldest', hīeran 'hear'.
Many grammars tell you to pronounce short e as [ɛ], like the e in Modern English [I]set, short i as [ɪ], like the i of Modern English sit, and short u as [ʊ], like the u of Modern English pull. You can get away with these pronunciations, though they probably do not represent the Old English vowels accurately.
In unaccented syllables, where few vowel sounds were distinguished (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/genintro.html#fewvowels), vowels were probably pronounced less distinctly than in accented syllables. In late Old English (ca. 1000 and later), frequent spelling confusion shows that by then the language was beginning to approach the Middle English situation in which all vowels in unaccented syllables were pronounced [ə] (a neutral schwa, like the a in China). But unaccented vowels were distinguished in Old English, and it is important to pronounce them, for vowel quality often is the only thing that distinguishes one ending from another. For example, dative singular cyninge and genitive plural cyninga, genitive singular cyninges and nominative plural cyningas are distinguished only by vowel quality.
Diphthongs
Old English has two digraphs (pairs of letters) that are commonly interpreted as diphthongs: ea and eo.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [A digraph io appears primarily in early texts, and for the student's purposes is best taken as a variant of eo.] Both ea and eo can represent short or long sounds, equivalent in length to the short and long vowels. Beyond this generally agreed fact, there is controversy about what sound these digraphs represent. Here we present the most widely accepted view.
eo represents [eo] or [eʊ], a diphthong that started with [e] and glided to a rounded sound, [o] or [ʊ]. Examples: ċeorl 'freeman' (Modern English churl), dēop 'deep'. ea represents [æɑ], a diphthong that started with [æ] and glided to [ɑ] (as in father). Feallan 'fall', rēad 'red'. Some grammar books say that the spelling ie also represents a diphthong, but this book interprets it as a simple vowel.
Perhaps the most common error students make when trying to pronounce Old English diphthongs is to break them into two syllables--for example, to pronounce Bēowulf as a three-syllable word when in fact it has only two syllables. Remember that there is a smooth transition between the two vowels of a diphthong, and this is as true of the unfamiliar diphthongs of Old English as it is of the familiar ones of Modern English (like those of site and sound).
2.1.2. Consonants
Most Old English consonants are pronounced as in Modern English, and most of the differences from Modern English are straightforward:
Old English scribes wrote the letters [I]þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") interchangeably to represent [θ] and [ð], the sounds spelled th in Modern English. Examples: þing 'thing', brōðor 'brother'.
There are no silent consonants. Old English cniht (which comes to Modern English as knight) actually begins with [k]. Similarly hlāf (Modern English loaf) and hring (ring) begin with [h], gnæt (gnat) with [ɡ], and wrīðan (writhe) with [w]. Some Old English consonant combinations may be difficult to pronounce because they are not in Modern English. If you find this to be so, just do your best.
The consonants spelled f, s and þ/ð are pronounced as voiced [v], [z] and [ð] (as in then) when they fall between vowels or other voiced sounds. For example, the f of heofon 'heaven', hæfde 'had' and wulfas 'wolves' is voiced. So are the s of ċēosan 'choose' and the ð of feðer 'feather'.
These same consonants were pronounced as unvoiced [f], [s], and [θ] (as in thin) when they came at the beginning or end of a word or adjacent to at least one unvoiced sound. So f is unvoiced in ful 'full', cræft 'craft' and wulf 'wolf'. Similarly s is unvoiced in settan 'set', frost 'frost', and wulfas 'wolves', and þ/ð is unvoiced in þæt 'that' and strengð 'strength'.
When written double, consonants must be pronounced double, or held longer. We pronounce consonants long in Modern English phrases like "big gun" and "hat trick," though never within words. In Old English, wile 'he will' must be distinguished from wille 'I will', and freme 'do' (imperative) from fremme 'I do'.
This book sometimes prints c with a dot (ċ) and sometimes without. Undotted c is pronounced [k]; dotted ċ is pronounced [ʧ], like the ch in Modern English chin. This letter is never pronounced [s] in Old English. It has a special function in the combination sc (see item 10 below).
The letter g, like c, is sometimes printed with a dot and sometimes without. Dotless g is pronounced [ɡ], as in good, when it comes at the beginning of a word or syllable. Between voiced sounds dotless g is pronounced [ɣ], a voiced velar spirant.http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [Practice making this sound: Raise the back of your tongue to the velum (the soft palate) as you do when pronouncing a k. Instead of a stop, though, pronounce a spirant, somewhat like the ch of German Nacht, but voiced. If you are sure you cannot pronounce the [ɣ], pronounce it [w] instead.] This sound became [w] in Middle English, so English no longer has it. Dotted ġ is usually pronounced [j], as in Modern English yes, but when it follows an n it is pronounced [ʤ], as in Modern English angel.
The combination cg is pronounced [ʤ], like the dge of Modern English sedge. Examples: hrycg 'ridge, back', brycg 'bridge', ecg 'edge'.
Old English h is pronounced [h], as in Modern English, at the beginnings of syllables, but elsewhere it is pronounced approximately like German ch in Nacht or ich--that is, as a velar [x] or palatal [ç] unvoiced spirant (pronounced with the tongue against the velum [soft palate] or, after front vowels, against the hard palate). Examples: nēah 'near', niht 'night', þēah 'though', dweorh 'dwarf'.
The combination sc is usually pronounced [ʃ], like Modern English sh: scip 'ship', æsc 'ash (wood)', wȳscan 'wish'. But within a word, if sc occurs before a back vowel (a, o, u), or if it occurs after a back vowel at the end of a word, it is pronounced [sk]: ascian 'ask' (where sc was formerly followed by a back vowel), tūsc 'tusk'. When sc was pronounced [sk] it sometimes underwent metathesis (the sounds got reversed to [ks]) and was written x: axian for ascian, tux for tusc. Sometimes sc is pronounced [ʃ] in one form of a word and [sk] or [ks] in another: fisc 'fish', fiscas/fixas 'fishes'.
2.1.3. Sermonette
When students of Old English go wrong in translating, it is often because they have done a sloppy job of looking up words in a dictionary or glossary. Remember, when you look up words, that vowel length is significant, and so is the doubling of consonants. Biddan 'ask, pray' and bīdan 'await, experience' are completely different words, but some students mess up their translations because they look at them as equivalent. Don't fall into this trap!
On a related point, you will notice as you go along that the spelling of Old English is somewhat variable. Scribes at that time lacked our modern obsession with consistency. Rather than insisting that a word always be spelled the same way, they applied a set of rules for rendering the sounds of their language in writing, and these rules sometimes allowed them to get the job done in more than one way. Further, scribes sometimes mixed up the dialects of Old English, writing (for example) Mercian þēostru 'darkness' instead of West Saxon þīestru. These minor inconsistencies sometimes lead students to believe that anything goes in Old English spelling, and this belief leads them into error.
It is not true that anything goes in Old English spelling. Though you will have to get used to frequent variations, such as ie/i/y and iung for ġeong 'young', you won't often see confusion of æ and ea, or indeed of most vowels, or of single and double consonants, or of one consonant with another. For a list of spelling variants that you will frequently see, consult Appendix A (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/variants.html).
Get into the habit of recognizing the distinctions that are important in Old English and doing an accurate job of looking up words, and you will avoid a lot of frustration.
2.2 More about vowels
[B]2.2.1. Short a, æ and ea
The short sounds spelled a, æ and ea are all derived from the same vowel (spelled a in most other Germanic languages). The split of one vowel into two vowels and a diphthong, which occurred before the period of our written texts, was conditioned by the sounds that surrounded it in the word (the details are complex and controversial: see Lass 1994 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/bib.html#lass1994a), pp. 41-53). The effects of this split were not long-lasting; by the Middle English period a, æ and ea had coalesced into one vowel, spelled a.
The reason it is important for you to know about the relationship of a, æ and ea is that these sounds vary within paradigms. If æ or ea occurs in a short syllable (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html#pronounce:syllweight) and a back vowel (a, o, u) follows, the æ or ea becomes a. Add the plural ending -as to dæġ 'day' and you get dagas; add plural -u to ġeat 'gate' and you get gatu.
2.2.2. I-mutation
I-mutationhttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/blueball.gif (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/ns.html) [German linguists call it Umlaut. Because of the great influence of German linguistics at the time when the historical evolution of the Germanic languages was being worked out, you will occasionally see this term even in grammars written in English.] is a shift in the quality of a vowel so that it is pronounced with the tongue higher and farther forward than usual--closer to its position when you pronounce the vowel (as in feet). The correspondences between normal and mutated vowels are shown in table 2.1. Notice that the i-mutation of a produces a different result depending on whether a nasal consonant (m or n) follows.
The effects of i-mutation are still evident in Modern English. The vowels of such athematic (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflnoun.html#nouns:athematic) plurals as men (singular man), lice (louse) and teeth (tooth) exhibit i-mutation, as does the comparative adjective (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/infladj.html#infladj:compar) elder (old); and i-mutation accounts for most of the verbs that both change their vowels and add a past-tense ending (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html#weak:vowel:change) (e.g. sell/sold, buy/bought, in which the present has i-mutation but the past does not).
All of these categories of Modern English words exhibiting i-mutation were already present in Old English. I-mutation also appears in some forms of certain nouns of relationship (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflnoun.html#inflnoun:relat), some comparative adverbs (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/advconprep.html#advconprep:compar), and many verb forms (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/inflverb.html). Examples: the nominative plural of mann 'man' is menn; the nominative plural of lūs 'louse' is lȳs; the comparative of eald 'old' is ieldra; the comparative of the adverb feor is fier; the third-person singular of the strong verb ċēosan 'choose' is ċīest.
Some Modern English words which we still perceive as being derived from other words have mutated vowels: for example, [I]length from long, feed from food, heal from whole. These words and many more were present in Old English: lengðu from lang, fēdan from fōda, hǣlan from hāl.
2.2.3. Silent e; o for u
When ċ, ġ or sc (pronounced [ʃ]) occurs before a back vowel, it is sometimes followed by an e, which probably should not be pronounced, but merely indicates that the ċ should be pronounced [ʧ], the ġ [j] or [ʤ], and the sc [ʃ]. For example, you will see sēċean 'seek' as well as sēċan, ġeþinġea 'of agreements' as well as ġeþinġa, and sceolon 'must' (plural) as well as sculon.
Notice that sceolon has o in the first syllable while sculon has u. These two spellings do not indicate different pronunciations; rather, the Old English spelling system appears (for unknown reasons) to have prohibited the letter-sequence eu, and scribes sometimes wrote eo instead to avoid it. Other words that are spelled with o but pronounced [u] are ġeō 'formerly', ġeong 'young', ġeoguð 'youth' and Ġeōl 'Yule'. For these you may also encounter the spellings iū, iung, iuguð, Ġiūl and Iūl.
Source and further reading. (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html)