6. Old English. Outer history. Dialectal classification.

Outer history

The history of the English language begins in the fifth century AD when the ruthless and barbaric Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, who up to that time had lived in western Europe between the Elbe and the Rhine, started their invasion of the British Isles.

The Celtic tribes, whose languages, the same as Germanic, also belonged to the Indo-European family, were at one time among its most numerous representatives. At the beginning of our era the Celts could be found on the territories of the present-day Spain, Great Britain, western Germany and northern Italy. Before that they had been known to reach even Greece and Asia Minor. The Romans invaded Britannia as it was then called in 55— 54 when the troops of Julius Caesar and others conquered the isles. No centralised government was formed, instead there existed petty principalities under the control of local landlords. In 407 AD, with the departure of the last Roman emissary Constantine hostilities among the native tribes in England began anew. To normalise the situation the local chieftains appealed to influential Germanic tribes who lived on the continent inviting them to come to their assistance, and in 449 the Germanic troops Jed by Hengest and Horsa landed in Britain.

Dialectal classification

The Old English dialects are generally named after the names of the kingdoms on the territory of which the given dialect was spoken — the Northumbrian dialect, the Mercian dialect, the Wessex dialect, etc. Though the differences between the three types were later to assume considerable importance, they were at first slight, and records of the 8^th and 9^th centuries reveal that Englisc, as it was collectively called, had by that time emerged as an independent, language. The virtually complete geographical separation of England from the Continent was a factor favouring the further development of those characteristic features that already distinguished English from its parent Germanic language.

Among the principal Old English dialects the most important for us is the Wessex dialect, as the majority of Old English written records that we have can be traced back to that dialect. But the prominence of the Wessex dialect is also based on other extralinguistic criteria. As is known, efforts to unite England failed for a very long period of time, because as soon as one kingdom became great it was in the interests of the rest to pull it down.

7. Old English. Inner history. Phonetics. Spelling. Grammar. Vocabulary.

Phonetics

The phonetics of the Old English period was characterised by a system of dynamic stress. The fixed stress fell on the first root syllable: agane (gone); Ʒeseon (see); Ʒaderian (gather).

The vowels had the following characteristic features:

a) The quantity and the quality of the vowel depended upon its position in the word. Under stress any vowel could be found, but in unstressed position there were no diphthongs or long monophthongs, but only short vowels [a], [ej, [i], [o], [u].

b) The length of the stressed vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) was phonemic, which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel: metan (to mete, to measure) — metan (to meet) pin (pin) — pin (pain)

Spelling

The Old English spelling was mainly phonetic, i.e. each letter as a rule denoted one sound in every environment. Note should be taken that the letters f, s, Þ, ð could denote voiced consonants in intervocal positions or voiceless otherwise. The letter Ʒ could denote three different sounds:

[j] — before or after front vowels [ae], [e], [i] : Ʒiefan (give), Ʒēar (year), dᵆ y (day)

[Ɣ] — after back vowels [a], [o], [u] and consonants [1] and [r]: daƷas (days), folƷian (follow)

[g] — before consonants and before back vowels [a], [o], [u]: Ʒōd (good), Ʒlēo (glee)

Grammar

Old English was a synthetic language (the lexical and grammatical notions of the word were contained in one unit). It was highly inflected, with many various affixes. The principal grammatical means were suffixation, vowel interchange and supplition.

Suffixation: Ic cēpe (I keep) — pu cēpst (you keep) — he cēpð (he keeps)

Vowel interchange: wrītan (to write) — Ic wrāt (I wrote)

Supplition: Ʒān (to go) — eōde (went).