Old English

"Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonumSi þin nama gehalgod" - Old English for "Our
Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed by Thy Name"

My latest commuting CD has been the History of the English Language by Professor Seth Lerer for the Teaching Company. I’ve always been interested in words – my MS in Mathematics included a minor in Linguistics. So I’ll take a pause from end of the world doomsday scenarios, moden warfare, disturbing political trends, a depressed economy, and emergency preparedness to discuss the English language we know and love.

As early as 1583 scholars noticed that India and Europe shared some common sounding words: devah/dio "God", sarpah/serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven", asta/otto "eight", nava/nove "nine"). Since that time linguists have traced 449 languages and dialects from Europe, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent to a theoretical ancestor language called Indo-European used by people who lived around the Black Sea before 2500 BC.
Perhaps you’ve wondered who invented the irregular (strong) verbs we use like run/ran, bring/brought, sing/sang, etc? Credit goes to the ancient Indo-Europeans who indicated the tense of verbs (future/past/other) by changing the root vowel of the verb. All new verbs added to English have been “weak” verbs that take and “ed” for past tense like talk/talked.

Consider another oddity of English – the overlap of the letters k, c, and s. Sometimes c is pronounced like k and sometimes like the soft s. Around 2500 BC migrations split the future Europeans (West) from the Slavs/Indians/Asians (East). This resulted in a language split called the Satem-Centum Isogloss after the East-West words for 100. Eastern speakers used “soft” sounds for c (Satem=100). Western speakers used the “hard” c (Centum=100, pronounced Kentum). Today we say, “Hail Cesear” with a soft c but the Romans actually pronounced it more like Kaser. The German word for emperor, Kaiser, is close to the original Latin.

Around 1000 BC the Celts arrived in England. Their language is sometimes called Brythonic->Brittonic->British. In 449 AD, the Anglo-Saxons-Jutes invaded England and gave the island their name (Angles -> Aenglaland -> England). The Angles were a Germanic tribe from the "angle" or corner of land in present-day Schleswig-Holstein. These German/Danes replaced the Celtic people quite ruthlessly and established what we call “Old English” as read in Beowulf. Few Celtic words survived into English; e.g. Avon (river), hubbub, peat, bucket, and crock. Scholars think Celtic had a bigger lexigraphical impact giving English two verb formations not found in Europe.

1. Use of auxiliary verbs like “do” and “be”: in German the only way to say “I love” is “Ich liebe” while English allows variants like “I am loving” and “I do love”.
2. Europeans have fixed expressions for asking if one can contradict the truth of a statement, namely “nicht wahr?” (German) and “n'est-ce pas?” (French). English is more flexible with “won’t he?”, “isn’t she?”, “cann’t they”, “aren’t I?” and so on.

Before we say goodbye to the Germanic tribes and Danes, there are a few more contributions to note. Old English quickly broke up into regional dialects with the Jutes in Kent, the Angles in Northumbria and the Saxons in the south. During the 9th century AD, Northumbria was devestated by frequent Viking invasions. Some raiders decided to stay and contributed words with hard g’s to the northern dialect: muggy, ugly, anger, get, give, leg, soggy, and egg. A tale is told in the late 1400’s of two Northumbrian merchants stopping in Kent to buy “eggs” and the famer’s wife had no idea what they meant.

Other Old Norse words include sky, cake, skin, window, husband, fellow, skill, flat, odd, take, raise, call, and die. We can thank the Danes for our personal pronouns of they, their, and them. We can also credit the Norse Gods for naming many days of week: Odin’s Day = Wodin = Wednesday, Thor’s Day = Thursday, Freya’s Day = Friday, Tyr’s Day = Tuesday. (Of the remaining days, one is Latin, Saturn’s Day = Saturday, and the other two are named for the Sun=Sunday and Moon=Monday.)

Many Old English words and their Old Norse counterparts competed vigorously with each other for supremacy in the language. In some cases both words survived: anger/wrath, nay/no, fro/from, raise/rear, bask/bathe, skill/craft, skin/hide, dike/ditch, skirt/shirt, scatter/shatter, and skip/shift. The Danes favored a hard “sk” while the English preferred a soft “sh” or “ch”. Ironically a later language shift would reverse the drift and push soft “ch” words in English to hard ‘k” like Church > Kirk.

Another influence on Old English was Latin. Latin reached Britannia in two ways – via the Roman occupation AD 43 to 410 and via the Catholic Church. Romans brought new foods and new engineering skills and the words to describe them: street, fort, kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese, pea, peach and wine. Christian missionaries introduced religious words like angel, bishop, abbot, martyr, and candle.

Bottom Line
While fewer than 5,000 Old English words remain unchanged and in common use today, these constitute the basic building blocks of our language. They include the everyday household words, most parts of the body, as well as the numerous pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs that hold the language together. Most of our “dirty” & profane words date back to Old English. After France conquered England in 1066, the nobility spoke primarily French and Latin for several centuries. King Henry IV, who ascended the throne in 1399, was the first King since the Norman Conquest whose mother tongue was English. So from 1066 thru the 1300s English was looked down upon as the language of the coarse and “vulgar” peasant.