the English of their own day, they found it convenient to distinguish
by a name which was applied to themselves by those who
spoke it.[1] To these scholars “Anglo-Saxon” and “English”
were separated by a gulf which it was reserved for later scholarship to bridge across, and show the historical continuity of the English of all ages.
As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense, presents three main stages of development—Old, Middle and Modern—distinguished by their inflectional characteristics. The latter can be best summarized in the words of Dr Henry Sweet in his History of English Sounds:[2] “Old English is the period of full inflections (nama, gifan, caru), Middle English of levelled inflections (naame, given, caare), and Modern English of lost inflections (name, give, care = nām, giv, cār). We have besides two periods of transition, one in which nama and name exist side by side, and another in which final e [with other endings] is beginning to drop.” By lost inflections it is meant that only very few remain, and those mostly non-syllabic, as the -s in stones and loves, the -ed in loved, the -r in their, as contrasted with the Old English stán-as, lufað, luf-od-e and luf-od-on, þá-ra. Each of these periods may also be divided into two or three; but from the want of materials it is difficult to make any such division for all dialects alike in the first.
As to the chronology of the successive stages, it is of course impossible to lay down any exclusive series of dates, since the linguistic changes were inevitably gradual, and also made themselves felt in some parts of the country much earlier than in others, the north being always in advance of the midland, and the south much later in its changes. It is easy to point to periods at which Old, Middle and Modern English were fully developed, but much less easy to draw lines separating these stages; and even if we recognize between each part a “transition” period or stage, the determination of the beginning and end of this will to a certain extent be a matter of opinion. But bearing these considerations in mind, and having special reference to the midland dialect from which literary English is mainly descended, the following may be given as approximate dates, which if they do not demarcate the successive stages, at least include them:—
| Old English or Anglo-Saxon | to 1100 |
| Transition Old English (“Semi-Saxon”) | 1100 to 1150 |
| Early Middle English | 1150 to 1250 |
| (Normal) Middle English | 1250 to 1400 |
| Late and Transition Middle English | 1400 to 1485 |
| Early Modern or Tudor English | 1485 to 1611 |
| Seventeenth century transition | 1611 to 1688 |
| Modern or current English | 1689 onward |
Dr Sweet has reckoned Transition Old English (Old Transition) from 1050 to 1150, Middle English thence to 1450, and Late or Transition Middle English (Middle Transition) 1450 to 1500. As to the Old Transition see further below.
The Old English or Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was highly inflectional, though its inflections at the date when it becomes known to us were not so full as those of the earlier Gothic, and considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their classical periods. They corresponded more closely to those of modern literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms were more numerous and distinct; for example, the German guten answers to three Old English forms,—gódne, gódum, gódan; guter to two—gódre, gódra; liebten to two,—lufodon and lufeden. Nouns had four cases. Nominative, Accusative (only sometimes distinct), Genitive, Dative, the latter used also with prepositions to express locative, instrumental, and most ablative relations; of a distinct instrumental case only vestiges occur. There were several declensions of nouns, the main division being that known in Germanic languages generally as strong and weak,—a distinction also extending to adjectives in such wise that every adjective assumed either the strong or the weak inflection as determined by associated grammatical forms. The first and second personal pronouns possessed a dual number = we two, ye two; the third person had a complete declension of the stem he, instead of being made up as now of the three stems seen in he, she, they. The verb distinguished the subjunctive from the indicative mood, but had only two inflected tenses, present and past (more accurately, that of incomplete and that of completed or “perfect” action)—the former also used for the future, the latter for all the shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponded generally to that of German. Thus from King Alfred’s additions to his translation of Orosius: “Donne þy ylcan dæge hi hine to þæm ade beran wyllað þonne todælað hi his feoh þaet þær to lafe bið æfter þæm gedrynce and þæm plegan, on fif oððe syx, hwilum on ma, swa swa þaes feos andefn bið” (“Then on the same day [that] they him to the pile bear will, then divide they his property that there to remainder shall be after the drinking and the sports, into five or six, at times into more, according as the property’s value is”).
The poetry was distinguished by alliteration, and the abundant use of figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and archaic words never found in prose. Thus in the following lines from Beowulf (ed. Thorpe, l. 645, Zupitza 320):—
| Stræt wæs stán-fáh, stig wisode Gumum ætgædere. gúð-byrne scán Heard hond-locen. hring-iren scir Song in searwum, þa hie to sele furðum In hyra gry′re geatwum gangan cwomon. |
| Trans.:— |
| The street was stone-variegated, the path guided (The) men together; the war-mailcoat shone, Hard hand-locked. Ring-iron sheer (bright ring-mail) Sang in (their) cunning-trappings, as they to hall forth In their horror-accoutrements going came. |
The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few foreign elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives entirely from its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned from the Romans in the German wars had been adopted into the common West Germanic tongue, and are found in English as in the allied dialects. Such were stræte (street, via strata), camp (battle), cásere (Cæsar), míl (mile), pín (punishment), mynet (money), pund (pound), wín (wine); probably also cyrice (church), biscop (bishop), læden (Latin language), cése (cheese), butor (butter), pipor (pepper), olfend (camel, elephantus), ynce (inch, uncia), and a few others. The relations of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent those of destroyers; and with the exception of the proper names of places and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained by the new population, few British words found their way into the Old English. Among these are named broc (a badger), bréc (breeches), clút (clout), púl (pool), and a few words relating to the employment of field or household menials. Still fewer words seem to have been adopted from the provincial Latin, almost the only certain ones being castra, applied to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as cæstre, ceaster, now found in composition as -caster, -chester, -cester, and culina (kitchen), which gave cylen (kiln). The introduction and gradual adoption of Christianity, brought a new series of Latin words connected with the offices of the church, the accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign productions either actually made known, or mentioned in the Scriptures and devotional books. Such were mynster (monasterium), munuc (monk), nunne (nun), maesse (mass), schol (school), œlmesse (eleemosyna), candel (candela), turtle (turtur), fic (ficus), cedar (cedrus). These words, whose number increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are commonly called Latin of the second period, the Latin of the first period including the Latin words brought by the English from the continent, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the Roman provincials or the Welsh. The Danish invasions of the 8th and 10th centuries
- ↑ Æthelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter “Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes”; Eadred in 955 is “Angul-seaxna cyning and cásere totius Britanniae,” and the name is of frequent occurrence in documents written in Latin. These facts ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the 17th century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as if they had invented it. By “Anglo-Saxon” language they meant the language of the people who sometimes at least called themselves “Anglo-Saxons.” Even now the name is practically useful, when we are dealing with the subject per se, as is Old English, on the other hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with English as a whole.
- ↑ Transactions of the Philological Society (1873–1874), p. 620; new and much enlarged edition, 1888.
