The oldest form of the English Language is Old English. This is very different from the English we speak today. The Old English Era in history was from about 449 AD to 1066AD. This language was highly influenced by Latin and surprisingly not much by the Celtics. Old English has many distinct characteristics, one being the alphabet or characters. If you look at a piece of Old English, you will notice that there are some characters that appear unfamiliar to modern English speakers. These are things like the thorn and ash. This is very different from our current alphabet, ABCD... etc. Also, Old English is packed with inflections. These are letter clusters that are found at the end of words to distinguish context such as verb tense. For example, ic lufie is present tense “I love”. And ic lufode is past tense for, “I Loved”.What is Old English?
Something else
that is characteristic about Old English is the fact that there is no punctuation
or capitalization. This also contributes to the hard readability
of Old English. Finally, Old English came before the rise of prescriptive
grammar, therefore, there many inconsistencies in spelling. Because
there was not a formal standard in Old English, there was no model and
writers often spelled words as they saw fit.