What are the characteristics of old English?

Answer 1

"Oer" is the poetic license word for "over".

Answer 2

Old English is a form of English spoken from roughly 450 CE through 1150 CE. Because English spelling is very conservative, some common Old English words are still recognizable, but the language has changed considerably in pronunciation and vocabulary, though somewhat less in grammar. Consequently, reading and understanding Old English requires study similar to learning any foreign language. There are many resources online for learning Old English. One of the more accessible is The Electronic Introduction to Old English, by Peter Baker, hosted at the University of Michigan site on the link below.

Answer 3

Some Characteristics of Old English

The pronunciation of Old English words differs somewhat from that of Modern English words. Especially the long vowels have changed a great deal. Take the Old English word stān for example. The word stān is the same word as the Modern English word stone, but the vowel is different, The a sound has shifted to the sound of o in Modern English.

Other vowels have also undergone changes, e.g.

fōt (Old English ) -- foot (Modern English)

cēne (Old English ) -- keen (Modern English)

hū (Old English ) -- how (Modern English)

Old English represented the sound of th by p and ð as in the word wiρ (O. E.) -- with (Mod. E.), and the word ðā (O. E.) -- then (Mod. E.), the sound of sh by sc as in scēap (O. E.) -- sheep (Mod. E.) or scēotan (O. E.) -- shoot (Mod. E.), and the sound of k by c as in cynn (O. E.) -- kin (Mod. E.) or nacod (O. E.) -- naked (Mod. E.).

The vocabulary of Old English consisted mainly of Anglo-Saxon words. But when the Norman Conquest in 1066 brought French to England much of the English vocabulary was replaced by words borrowed from French and Latin. If we open any Old English dictionary, we find that about 85 percent of the Old English vocabulary was no longer in use during this period. Of course, the basic elements of the vocabulary have remained. They express fundamental concepts of human life, such as: mann (man); wīf (wife), cild (child), hūs (house), bern (bench), mete (meat , food) , gærs (grass), lēaf (leaf) , fugol (fowl, bird), gōd (good), hēah (high), strang (strong), etan (eat), drincan ( drink ), slæpan (sleep ), libban (live ) . feohtan (fight), etc.

Old English was a highly inflected language. It had a complete system of declensions with four cases and conjugations. So Old English grammar differs from Modern English grammar in declensions and conjugations.

There are two classes of languages in the world: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one which shows the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of inflections. An analytic language is one which indicates the relation of words in a sentence by means of word order, prepositions or auxiliary verbs, rather than by inflections.

Old English is a synthetic language. Old English nouns and adjectives have four cases: the nominative case, the genitive case, the dative case and the accusative case. Apart from these four cases, Latin nouns have the ablative and the locative cases. That is to say, Latin nouns have six cases just like Modern Russian nouns.

Take a Latin sentence for example.

The sentence "Nero interfecit Agrippinam." (Nero killed Agrippina.) has the same meaning as the sentence "Agrippinam interfecit Nero." This is because the word Nero is in the nominative case, and the word Agrippinainis in the accusative case. Therefore no matter where these words stand, they express the same meaning.

In Modern English, a noun used as a subject and object does not have different forms. There remain today only two case forms: those of the nominative case and the possessive case: man, man's. Modern English depends upon word order to show the relation of words in a sentence. Different word order may result in different meaning. The sentence "Nero killed Agrippina." is completely opposite to the sentence "Agrippina killed Nero." in meaning.

Answer 4

Old English was a diverse group of dialects.

Answer 5

Modern English is the language that Shakespeare wrote in, and is not very different from our English. However, Old English is the language of Beowulf, and is very different from our English.

Answer 6

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a Germanic language, specifically West Germanic. It is closely related to Old Frisian.

Answer 7

the invading germante tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we now called old English