THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
OLD ENGLISH – Anglo-Saxon
It's never easy to pinpoint exactly when a specific language began, but in the case of English we can at least
say that there is little sense in speaking of the English language as a separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons
came to Britain. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders
came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth
centuries. These invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian,
German and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic).
The reason that we know so little about the linguistic situation of this period is because we do not have much
in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages of north-western Europe until several
centuries later.
When Old English writings begin to appear in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries there is a good deal of
regional variation, but not substantially more than that found in later periods. This was the language that
Alfred the Great referred to as ‘English’ in the ninth century (Alfred the Great is known for having ordered
the translation of Latin works and writing ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). – The most important literary
output of the era is Beowulf (MS Cotton Vitellus). Other 4 extant MSS are: ‘Junius’, the ‘Exeter Book’, the
‘Vercelli Book’ and the ‘Cotton Vitellus or Nowell Codex’.
The Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in 449, but there are few obvious
traces of their language in English today. The number of loanwords known for certain to have entered Old
English from this source is very small. Those that survive in modern English include brock (badger), and
coomb, a type of valley, alongside many place names (River Thames, Greenwich).
England then knew the so-called ‘dark age’ (449 – 597), when St. Augustine christianised England, whereas
starting from 787 it was ravaged by invasions led by Vikings and Danes.
GRAMMAR
• Weird spelling: sounds that were not present in the Latin alphabet (thorn, eth, ash);
• Inflected language: declensions and cases (that’s why the Saxon genitive still exists today);
• Varied word order: verbs before the subject or at the end of a sentence (like Latin);
• 7 groups of ‘strong’ verbs (i.e. our modern irregular verbs, mainly).
RUNES AND FUTHARK
Invented in the Rhine river area because of commercial contacts between Germanic tribes and the Romans,
this alphabet is heavily influenced by the Latin alphabet. Futhark (from the first six letters of the Runic
alphabet) originally had 24 letters; 31 in Britain to cover all the sounds of Old English.
Such alphabet was said to hide mystical meanings and massages.
The Bluetooth
The name comes from medieval Scandinavia: Harald Bluetooth was a Viking king of Denmark, who was
famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway into one nation. Like the modern wireless technology, he
