ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 52: Old English Old-English, also called Anglo-Saxon or &AE
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 52: Old English Old-English, also called Anglo-Saxon or Ænglisc, is a West Germanic language and direct ancestor to modern English. The language gets its name from the Angles, one of many Germanic tribes that came and intermingled in Great Britain after the retreat of Roman rule. The Angles themselves were likely named for the literal angle created where the Jutland peninsula sticks out from Germany, in what is today Holstein. Old English was spoken in Britain as far back as the 5th century CE and was written using Runes, knows as the Futhorc, up until the 9th century. The grammar of Old English is significantly different from the modern language, having a nominal system of 5 cases and three genders and verbs that conjugated to agree with the subject (much like other Indo-European languages) as well as more tense/aspect distinctions. Why so much change? The later Norman invasion of the isles would instate Norman, a French relative, as the language of the ruling class. The fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman would cause a destruction of the case system and simplification of morphology in general, resulting in the isolating language we know today. Old English did not distinguish between /f/ and /v/, instead /v/ was simply how /f/ sounded when between two vowels. This is why we have words like wolf and wolves, staff and staves, leaf and leaves, etc. (the second “e” was also pronounced). Later words however don’t need to do this, which is why, for example, the plural of knife may be knives but when used as a third person verb you say “she knifes him”. “Dwarf”, being a later addition to the language should pluralize to “dwarfs”, but Tolkein, a linguist well aware of these rules, always wrote it “dwarves” to make it seem more authentic. -- source link