Old English

The language spoken in England from roughly 500 to 1100. See also: Key Dates in the History of the English Language.

Examples and Observations:

• Fæder ure
  ðu ðe eart on heofenum
  si ðin nama gehalgod
  to-becume ðin rice
  geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum.
  Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
  and forgyf us ure gyltas
  swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum
  ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge
  ac alys us of yfle.
  (The Lord's Prayer in Old English)



• The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons overwhelmed the native Britons is illustrated in their vocabulary. . . . Old English (the name scholars give to the English of the Anglo-Saxons) contains barely a dozen Celtic words. . . .
  
  "It is impossible . . . to write a modern English sentence without using a feast of Anglo-Saxon words. Computer analysis of the language has shown that the 100 most common words in English are all of Anglo-Saxon origin. The basic building blocks of an English sentence--the, is, you and so on--are Anglo-Saxon. Some Old English words like mann, hus and drincan hardly need translation."
  (R. McCrum et al., The Story of English, 1986)



• "Languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic, Old English a synthetic language. In its grammar, Old English resembles modern German. Theoretically, the noun and adjective are inflected for four cases in the singular and four in the plural, although the forms are not always distinctive, and in addition the adjective has separate forms for each of the three genders. The inflection of the verb is less elaborate than that of the Latin verb, but there are distinctive endings for the different persons, numbers, tenses, and moods."
  (A. C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 1978)