The History of the English Language, Part One, Old English

By this point, the Germanic tribes had inter-mixed sufficiently to be considered one group, and the language they spoke is called Old English. The period during which Old English was spoken is marked roughly from 450 ad to 1066 ad. Anyone who has tried to read Beowulf or other Old English texts in their original form knows that Old English is practically a foreign language compared to Modern English. To start, over 75% of the vocabulary from Old English has disappeared. Further, the word order in sentences was much freer. So for example, in Modern English, if I say, "Bob hit Bill" that means something different than "Bill hit Bob." This is because in English, the person doing the action, the subject, comes before the person affected by the action, the object. Now imagine that I could identify the subject and the object outside of where they sit in a sentence, perhaps with a special marker: "Bob-subject hit Bill-object". Now I can put these words in any order because their functions in the sentence are clearly defined. So I can say "Bill-object Bob-subject hit" and you will know that the meaning of this sentence is "Bob hit Bill." Old English was like this. Words were case-marked, marked with their function, allowing the order of the words to be very free. As we can see from our knowledge of Modern English, we have largely lost case marking. The one area in which it has been retained is in pronouns. That is why "she kicked the ball" but "the ball hit her." Pronouns are marked differently depending on their function:

Subject:I work. Object: Hand me the book. Possessive: That's my book.

The sounds of Old English are largely the same as Modern English, though there have been a few losses and gains. To get an idea of what Old English sounded and looked like,visit http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/old_e... as well as http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/hwaet/hw...

How did Old English develop into Modern English? Soon after the turn of the last millenium, Old English was to undergo a radical change that was to begin with another round of invaders, this time from the Norman coast of modern-day France.

William the Conqueror's Norman Conquest of 1066 ad was to radically affect the English language. The Bayeuz Tapestry, created half a century after the conquest, depicts William's ships sailing across the English Channel towards the English coast. Harold, the newly crowned King of England, receives the news

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