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You are here: English 401 > Course Information > About Old English
Old English is the name given to the germanic language spoken in the southern part of the island of Britain before the Norman Conquest in 1066 c.e. (and for about 100 years after the Conquest). This language is the ancestor of the Modern English spoken today, although it is quite different in appearance and sound at first glance. Most of our records of the Old English language date from the period between about 875 c.e. and about 1100 c.e., and there is very little evidence indeed of the precise state of the language before the Christian missionary efforts at the end of the 6th century c.e., or about the stages by which Old English had become Middle English by about 1250 c.e.
Migration from the continent by the ancestors of the people who spoke Old English probably occurred over a period of several centuries, though we have few written records from the time, and probably involved germanic tribes from around the base of the Jutland penninsula and nearby areas such as the German Low Countries and the modern Netherlands. The germanic migrants displaced, enslaved, or mingled with the previous celtic inhabitants of the island and their language became the socially dominant tongue except in Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland. The descendants of the germanic migrants referred to their ancestors as Angles and Saxons, and you will still find some references in modern reference books to their language as the "Anglo-Saxon language", though Old English is now the preferred term. The medieval languages most closely related to Old English are Old Frisian, Flemish, and Old Low German.
We are lucky to have quite a lot of evidence about the nature of the Old English language, thanks to the survival of numerous manuscripts from the period. Many of the manuscript texts are religious in nature, but there are also many literary texts and documents of historical interest.
It's probably best to begin answering this question by admitting that not everyone should learn Old English. If you have no curiosity about the past, no interest in language, no taste for experiencing cultures that are different from your own, and if you find stretching your mind to meet new challenges unpleasant, then you will almost certainly be unhappy with this course.
On the other hand, students who have completed the course successfully have reported that they enjoy being given a window on the past, an enhanced understanding of language in general and of English in particular, and a taste of a literary culture that is quite different from what they encounter in literature courses on more recent periods. They also frequently find the sheer challenge of the course different from their other experiences at university, and worthwhile in itself.
If your interest is historical, you probably know that it is essential to read Old English to get a really good handle on a period of English (and Welsh, Scottish, even Irish) history of almost a millenium. Although the language is not the only language you should know if you intend to study early medieval insular history (you need at least Latin as well), many documents of historical interest are written in Old English or contain Old English expressions, and Old English literary texts are of prime importance as cultural documents for the period, too.
In fact, Old English literary texts comprise what may be the most important collection of prose and poetry in a vernacular language of the early Middle Ages, and it is worth emphasizing that the surviving texts are of high interest for their literary qualities and cultural significance. The poem Beowulf is well known, at least by name, but students of the literature of the period would place many other works beside it as being worthy of prolonged study, including such briefer poetic compositions as the Seafarer, the Wife's Lament, and the Dream of the Rood, and the prose works of Wulfstan and Ælfric
Students find the possibility of contact with these ancient masterpieces exhilarating, but they also report, sometimes as a more important effect of the course, that their understanding of language in general, and in particular of the English language, has been improved and extended. Learning Old English requires a student to gain functional mastery of areas of grammar that either hardly exist in Modern English (for example, the case system), or that exist in Modern English but the fluent speaker never has to think about consciously. If you're planning a career where understanding of correct grammar will be important (e.g. writing or teaching), you will find your understanding enhanced by this course even if you think you have a pretty strong mastery of grammar now.
In sum, learning Old English is worthwhile and interesting for the access it provides to the past and to the thought and literary expression of the past, and it is worthwhile and interesting because of the light it throws on language in general and the English language in particular. The course is a challenging one, but the rewards are many. For many students, indeed, the challenge of the course itself is one of the rewards, because this is a course unlike many others you may take in your life, and it uses different parts of your mind. I hope you enjoy it.
Why is Old English so different from Modern English?
Well, first of all, Old English was spoken most recently almost a thousand years ago. Languages just do change, gradually and inevitably, over time, a phenomenon that linguistics has a fairly hard time explaining, and certainly predicting. But there are a couple of factors that affected the English language that tended to hasten linguistic change in English. (In contrast, Icelandic, a language quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas in school without need for much adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing.)
The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a fairly large number of people who spoke Old Norse, and the arrival over a period of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French. This wouldn't have made much of a difference if these people had simply assimilated to the English-speaking population, but they didn't, they maintained their own languages and probably even insisted on them. Moreover, the groups who spoke these languages had prestige, whether locally in the "Danelaw" in the case of the Viking settlers who spoke Old Norse, or nationally in the case of the Norman conquerors--which meant that there was some pressure for English-speaking people to learn and even to prefer the other languages. Under these conditions, various kinds of linguistic mixture occurred: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and so on. In other words, English took on sounds, words, and ways of constructing sentences from these other languages.
The second important factor producing rapid language change was the fact that for approximately two hundred years after the Norman conquest, English was hardly a written language at all, since almost all writing went on either in the language of the ruling Norman invaders (French) or in the international language of the church, of diplomacy, and of learning (Latin). (In fact, for a further hundred years after that, English was still not a prestigious language, although it was beginning to be a written language again.) Writing normally acts as a kind of brake to language change, since literate people are influenced in their linguistic habits not only by what they hear but by what they read, which is liable to be stuff from some time ago. Without writing, and exposed to influence from other languages with which it was mixing, English changed rapidly. By the time of Chaucer (end of the 14th century) when it was reestablishing itself as a prestige language in England, English had adopted hundreds of words from French and quite a few from Old Norse, and had undergone important simplifications in its system of inflections.
Whether as a result of language mixture, or for some other reason (linguists disagree), there was later a lot of sound change in the English vowel system. During a period perhaps from about 1450 to about 1750 c.e. the change called the Great Vowel Shift occurred. It accounts for the quite startling differences in pronunciation between Modern English "long" vowels and Old English long vowels--most of the consonants stayed pretty much the same, and so did the short vowels.
So to sum up, Modern English is different from Old English because languages just do change over time, because linguistic change was accelerated during a period of contact with other languages and the removal of written language from the equation, and because phonological change, especially the Great Vowel Shift, was added to lexical change (all those loan words) and syntactic/inflectional change.
What will the English language look like in another thousand years, as English encounters other languages globally and as society becomes more and more oral again with the prevalence of electronic media? It would be interesting to find out!
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Contact: Murray McGillivray at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca or the Listserv at TBA
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