Old English
Wherein Illithid tells us as much about Old English as she possibly can.
First she will start with a brief history of english in general, then she will give a history of old english and why she thinks it's better. The meat of the lesson being why and how awesome old english is, including but not limited to:
-The sentence stucture.
-Prominant speakers.
-illithid's personal experiances with old english.
-Old english in the future.
Each bulleted item constitutes a lesson and will be cut into one post a piece. Not all topics may be covered, but I demand they be. Discussion will follow each lesson (A.K.A. post) until illithid posts a new lesson. For reasons of expectancy discussion on each lesson will end when a new lesson begins. Discussion of the entire course may begin once Illitid says the course is over.
First she will start with a brief history of english in general, then she will give a history of old english and why she thinks it's better. The meat of the lesson being why and how awesome old english is, including but not limited to:
-The sentence stucture.
-Prominant speakers.
-illithid's personal experiances with old english.
-Old english in the future.
Each bulleted item constitutes a lesson and will be cut into one post a piece. Not all topics may be covered, but I demand they be. Discussion will follow each lesson (A.K.A. post) until illithid posts a new lesson. For reasons of expectancy discussion on each lesson will end when a new lesson begins. Discussion of the entire course may begin once Illitid says the course is over.
Comments
You might be safer calling him Andrew from now on, lol.
Okay, I guess the first lesson is a brief history of English. Okay, here goes.
First we start out in theoretical language land. We all know English had to come from somewhere, evolve from something. Through philological study, scholars have traced our language, as well as many other world languages, back to a theoretical mother language, titled "Proto-Indo-European". We don't have any extant writing in this language, so all that we can know of it is through language comparison.
So people spread out and settled in new areas, the PIE language started to mutate in different ways. These settlers didn't have contact with other groups regularly, so each group's language began to alter in certain ways. This happened multiple times and the Indo-European language tree branched and branched. Today, it is recognized that languages as far apart as English and Sanskrit both evolved from Indo-European.
So, though there are many branches, there are only two we're concerned with here; Germanic and Italic. These branches, in turn, branched like crazy, but to make things simple I'll tell you the path English took. Germanic > West Germanic > Old English. Remember the Italic branch for later.
So, at about 450 CE, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded and settled Britain, bringing with them their own Germanic dialects. These dialects settled slightly, and a loose Old English was born. Keep in mind, though, that there were multiple dialects of Old English. However, since the majority of surviving documents are in the West-Saxon dialect thanks to the unifying work of Alfred the Great.
So we have a period of about 700 years where Old English was spoken and written. During this time the language was much more in flux than it was today, especially concerning pronunciation. Since very few people wrote or read, regional dialects continued to grow and change, contributing to a great deal of the pronunciation shifts we see between Old and Middle English. Also, the Italic branch, which evolved into Latin and then into all of the Romance languages, loaned a great many words to Old English because of Roman occupation.
So as these 700 years passed, changes in the language and in dialects piled up continually. In 1066, the Normans invaded and settled. They brought with them their own Frankish language, evolved from the Italian branch, and replaced Anglo-Saxons as the ruling monarchy. So while French became the official language of the court, the vernacular was still English. However, because of the invasion of the French language and because of all the changes that had accrued over time, this is the point where scholars place the shift from Old to Middle English.
Middle English saw a lot of changes to the language as well. First, just as with Latin earlier, English received a large chunk of vocabulary from its French occupants. In this period we also see the Great Vowel Shift, where almost every vowel changed its pronunciation and brought it closer to what we use today. It is also important to note that, though the language was still changing, it changed at a much slower rate than Old English, since writing and reading became more common and institutionalized.
Middle English comes to an end in abut 1470 which, not coincidentally, was the year the printing press was invented by William Caxton. This was a revolution and not only allowed more people access to books, but also had a standardizing effect on spelling. So begins the Early Modern period.
There's not quite as much for me to say about this period, as it's pretty close to ours. But as more people learned to read and write, spelling no longer adhered to regional dialects as it once had and a standard was produced. Pronunciation still wasn't quite what we are used to today, but by the end of the period in 1650 it was pretty close.
Of course, just because we're now in the same period of Modern English as we were in 1700 doesn't mean changes haven't accrued. I remember reading somewhere that the modern British accent didn't evolve until the 1800s, which is why Americans don't carry it; we had separated by that time. But spelling was consistent. The only thing that still changed a bit was pronunciation.
As you can imagine, however, the introduction of voice recording and transmitting had its own standardizing effect on pronunciation. Now that voice and words are recorded and standardized, our language growth has slowed to a crawl compared to what it used to be. That is not to say that it isn't changing; look at the battles between who/whom and prepositions at the end of the sentence. These are changes that are slowly making their way into common usage but are butting heads with standardized usage.
Phew. Okay, there's the brief history of English. Anything else you'd like to know, or anything else you'd like more details about?
:tmyk:
Pretty interesting, about how long ago do people think Proto-Indo-European was spoken? And with all the colonization and imperialism from Europe are there any languages spoken today that can't be traced back to it?
EDIT: Well drat, I spend so much time reading about old english by the time I ask a question Hammy's pretty much answered it. Still, it looks like Russian and other Asian languages came from somewhere else. Any idea what preceded them?
Oh, and for future reference, the lesson structure was just a joke and you are in no way expected to conform to it. LaVeyan Satanism anybody?
Of course, this doesn't take into account the loan words that I mentioned.. there should be arrows from Latin and French to English. But I love this stuff, it's fascinating. I'll deal with the way the language is different and similar from our own next, perhaps later tonight.
Edit: and aren't tajik and farsi the same language?
Characters: The characters of Old English were borrowed by Latin, except for a few.
æ = ash
Short ash is pronounced as the 'a' in 'task'.
Long ash is pronounced as the 'ailles' in 'Versailles' (hehe, French is dumb).
Oh, and if you don't know how that's pronounced.. 'y' in 'sky'.
ð = eth or edh
Eth is pronounced 'th'.
þ = thorn
Thorn is pronounced 'th'. Eth and thorn are interchangeable.
Inflections: Like Latin, Old English is an inflected language. An inflected language is one in which endings are added to words when they function in different ways. For example, take the word stone, 'stan', (the a is pronounced as the 'ow' in cow). When it functions as the subject of a sentence, it is spelled 'stan'. When it functions in the possessive case, it is spelled 'stanes'. If it is a plural subject, it is spelled 'stanas'. There are more case endings, but you get the idea, and the same goes for adjectives, nouns, and verbs.
Modern English is mostly a non-inflected language; we rely mostly on word order to figure out how words are functioning in a sentence. Word order was still relatively set in Old English as ours is, Subject-Verb-Object. However, the heavy influence of Latin, where word order means very little, caused alternative word orders occasionally. But since the language was inflected, it was easier to do so.
Also, you can still see traces of inflection in certain words of ours. Most of our words are un-inflected, and we apply the same basic paradigm to do all things. So when something is plural, we add an 's'. When a verb is past tense, we generally add 'ed' to the end. But not all words function like that. What's the plural of goose? What's the past tense of 'throw'?
Though we don't see inflectional endings themselves, we see the effects of the endings that have dropped. Many sound changes affected inflected words, changing the vowels in the middle only in their inflected forms. That's why the vowel stayed in 'throw' but changed when the inflectional ending was added to the past tense.
The Corpus (vocabulary bank):
It's very interesting to look through the dictionary at certain types of words and see where they came from. English was something of a primitive language, especially when compared to Latin. It wouldn't become a concern until later, but after the French were expelled from England and people started using English in philosophy and science, people started to realize there were a lot of gaps. There weren't a great many abstract words in English, so scholars started borrowing terms from Latin. Some examples are the words 'cognition', 'philosophy', 'science', and many many more. Of course, this was seen by many as a sure sign of the fall of the English language... who knows what kind of bastard language we'd have if we didn't preserve the purity of our mother tongue?
Other than these examples, there's not much else worth going over. There's a lot that's the same between our languages. Let me write a sentence in Old English:
Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome.
Yes, that's Old English. Granted, the pronunciation of vowels would be quite different, and this sentence has been constructed solely to look just like English, but it's still Old English. Of course, so is this:
Ond he for þon often gebeorscipe, þonne þær wæs blisse intinga gedemed þæt heo ealle scalde þurh endebyrdnesse be hearpan singan, þonne he geseah þa hearpan him nealecan, þonne aras he for scome from þæm symble ond ham eode to his huse.
It's from the story of Cadmon, a bard who was given the gift of song by an angel. This passage says, basically, that when he was in feasts (the word is gebeorscipe, which literally means 'beership', they all sat around drinking beer) and they decided to have fun and pass around a harp and sing, he would decline and go home.
I hope we'll eventually see another of these, they're ever so leet.
Hahaha, n00b, you're talking in Early Modern English.
Double n00bage. Victorian Englanders spoke plain old Modern English. Early Modern English is its own distinct period from around 1450-1650.
And yes, I'll certainly try to get another lesson on here. Just have to find some time... AARGH!