Gramatyka historyczna 11.01.2013

Anglo saxon chronicle talks only about Angles, Saxons and Jutes, that arrived at British Isles to help fighting with Scots and Picks This is the very beggining of Old English, before English developed there.

First words were written in the runic alphabet – there were no round letters. Some of them were borrowed into the actual alphabet – wyn, and thorn.

Alphabet is called so, because of the first letters – alpha, beta. Runic is also called in that way – Fufork.

In Scandinavia, the Runic alphabet survived longer than in English, because Roman alphabet replaced it because of Christianity. We can find Runic inscriptions on:

• The Franks Casket – now in British Museum, in London. – one of the first written record of English – coming from the 1^st half of 8^th century AD.

• Ruthwell Cross – a stone cross of the late 7^th or early 8^th century. The Dream of the Rood, Nortumbrian dialec

Caedmon’s Hymn in Bede’s Latin Historia Ecclessiastica Gentis Anglorum . One of the 1^st records of written language. It is poetry, No proper rhymes, alliteration (the same sounds are repeated on the stressed syllable). Another thing is the break between the line, cezura. There were also very specific metaphorical descriptions referring to God (God almighty, etc.) – kennings.

Several very important features that characterise OE:

1. Synthetic, or fusional, rather than analytic or isolating

2. N, V, Adj, DET, Pron., were highly inflected. Consequently, word order was not as rigid as in Present-Day English. (Adj. In Old English took many inflections, number, gender etc. now it takes only comparative and superlative.)

3. Weak and strong declensions of N and ADJ.

4. Also weak and strong conjugations of V.

5. The vocabulary of OE was overwhelmingly Germanic in character (approximately 85 per cent of the vocabulary used in OE is no longer in use in Modern English.)

SOUND CHANGES IN pre-OE. (before OE was written)

1. Front Mutation, i-mutation, or i-umlaut. (it is important that I follows).

Consonant + u or o + C + i/j + C

C+ I or e + C + i/j + C

It counts for the existence of mutated plurals in English – foot/feet etc. fo:t fo:tiz plural form affected by I mutation, so after the change, the plural was fe:tiz then the plural ending was lost (loss of the inflectional ending), leaving fe:t, so the only way plural was marked was vowel. In case of fo:t the great vowel shift affected it, it became fu:t, fe:t became fi:t. Then in the process of shortening , fu:t was shortened to fut. The same with mouse and mice. Analogy made the irregular forms regular. But it affected forms that are not frequently used. Forms that are frequently repeated in language tends to stay. Like in Polish carols we can find archaisms, “cóż masz niebo nad ziemiami”.

1. Fricative voicing. – between voiced sounds . wife-wives, belief- believe

2. Palatalisation

3. Breaking

OE morphology – Nouns inflected. Pronouns inflected – 3^rd person inflected for gender, person. There were 3 numbers: Singular, Dual (used in old Germanic, even in Polish), Plural.

7 classes of strong verbs, they are not irregular verbs, they are still regular because they have the same vowels repeated in the forms of the verb. Quite a few of them became weak verbs. OE verbs inflected for two tenses(present, past), 3 moods (indicative, subjunctive (could be used for some orders, indirect speech,) Imperative (typically for orders).

Old English Syntax.

1. In OE there were no articles, they developed later and the indefinite article a comes from one (an), and the definite the from the demonstrative

Vocabulary of OE –

1. most borrowings from Latin (Christianity) and Danish (Viking invasion) – can be referred as Old Scandinavian or Old Norse.

2. Lots of prefixes and suffixes, some disappeared, some survived, (hood, ship, german ge).

3. Forming new words through compounding. (affixation and compounding the most popular processes of forming words in OE.)

Seven Kingdoms (Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy) – Cornwall, Wesses, Sussex, Essex, etc.

4 main dialects of OE – West Saxon( most important dialect of OE in the sense that greatest number of written records that preserved are in this dialect’), Mercian (present English basen on it), Kentish, Northumbrian