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Old English Syntax: Part 1

What the &$#@%! is Syntax?

Sorry for introducing yet another technical term relating to grammar, but gosh, if you don't learn it here, where are you going to learn it?

Syntax is, roughly speaking, the set of rules by which speakers of a language put together its words in ordered sequence to form sensible statements, questions, and so on (i.e. "utterances").

In other words, syntax accounts for the fact that

*The the the on cat man bench dropped.

(our sentence from Lesson 1) is a meaningless sentence in English, despite the fact that it has a lot of meaningful words in it.

Speakers of a language do not, by and large, have any idea what the rules are that they use to put words together into sentences. The rules are internalized and applied without thinking. If you learn to speak a language other than the one you grew up using, however, you may well need to learn its rules consciously and apply them deliberately, and this is also true if you simply want to be able to decode a language like Old English

This course does not attempt to give anything like a full treatment of Old English syntax (for which see pre-eminently Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985]). Instead, it tries to clarify some simple points that will seem mysterious to students approaching the language from a knowledge of Modern English.

The syntax pages in the course are for this reason simply fairly random collections of observations about word order and the construction and relation of various kinds of phrases and clauses, without any real attempt at coverage or comprehensiveness. Some of these fairly random observations follow here. (These remarks are intended to be useful at once in connection with the story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard from the Chronicle).

Subject, Verb, Object

The standard order of subject, object, and verb in a declarative sentence in Modern English is subject first, followed by verb, followed by object (we'll use that colour scheme in what follows):

The cat scratched the dog.

This standard Modern English word order is often represented as SVO (i.e. Subject Verb Object) word order.

Now the big secret about learning Old English is that Old English doesn't always use SVO order in its sentences and clauses.

For instance, in "Cynewulf and Cyneheard" we have examples of the following orders:

There is a simple lesson to be learned here. (There are complex, subtle lessons to be learned as well, involving subordinate clauses, temporal adverbs, and so on, but we'll avoid them!) YOU NEED TO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO INFLECTIONS IF YOU WANT TO BE SURE WHAT A SENTENCE IS SAYING. If something is in the accusative case, it probably isn't the subject of a sentence; if something is in the nominative case, it probably isn't the object, even if it's after the verb. Enough preaching.

Prepositions? Postpositions?

The funny thing about Old English prepositions is that they often come after their "object"; that is, an Old English prepositional phrase can consist of a noun or noun phrase followed by a preposition.

God cwæð him þus to
God said thus to him

þæs cyninges þegnas þe him beæftan wærun

The king's thegns who were behind him.

þa gatu him to belocen hæfdon
had locked the gates against them

hiera mægas him mid wæron
their relatives were with them

Notice that in all of the examples given, the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun. Prepositions usually precede their objects when the object is a noun, but they often follow the object if the object is a pronoun.

Compound Subjects and Objects

Compound subjects and objects are often treated quite differently than in Modern English. It is especially surprising to beginners in the language to find the compound subject divided and only the first element being considered as a subject for the verb:

Her Cynewulf benam Sigebryht his rices & West Seaxna wiotan for unryhtum dædum.

Here (in this year) Cynewulf and the council of the West Saxons deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for bad deeds.

Notice in this example that even though there are multiple agents in the sentence, only one of these precedes the verb in Old English, and the verb agrees with it in being singular! This is absolutely standard syntax in Old English, not a special awkwardness of the passage, by the way.

Likewise, a compound object can also be separated by one or more other sentence elements:

Hie . . . þone æþeling ofslogon, & þa men þe him mid wærun.

They . . . killed the prince and the men who were with him.

 


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Contact: Murray McGillivray at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca or the Listserv at mailto:eg401-m@acs.ucalgary.ca