THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Old English Notes
(Anglo-Saxon)

Western Germanic Family of Languages

The Western Germanic Languages

English, the target language of this paper and meister_z Web Site, pertains to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic, or TEUTONIC, Family of languages. That is to say, first you have the Teutonic Family of languages, which is in turn divided into three branches or subgroups of tongues:

1. Western Germanic,
2. North Germanic,
3. East Germanic.

And in each of these three branches of Teutonic languages, you will find in turn a short list of languages which have been developed as related tongues derived from the same parent tongue lost somewhere in the remote linguistic and historical past. If we graphically represent these three branches or small families of Teutonic (Germanic) tongues, then our graph would perhaps look something like this:

The Western Germanic languages form a branch of the Germanic languages (which themselves constitute a branch of the larger Indo-European language family). Other branches are the Northern Germanic languages and the now extinct Eastern Germanic languages. The Western Germanic language with the largest number of speakers and the widest geographical distribution is English. Other languages in this group are Dutch, Afrikaans (a descendant of Dutch), Frisian and German. There are also dialects of English, Dutch and German that are sufficiently different from the standard languages (e.g. Scottish English and Swiss German) to justify considering them separate languages. Yiddish is another Western Germanic language, and it was once spoken by millions of Jews in Europe. This language developed out of German but was heavily influenced by Hebrew and later by several Slavic languages.

Notwithstanding the differences in pronunciation, grammar and spelling between the various Western Germanic languages, even a layman in comparative linguistics will be able to deduce that these languages are related by comparing the words in them that make up the basic vocabulary. The following table shows a few of these words.

The common ancestor of the Western Germanic languages was a highly inflectional language, comparable in this respect to Latin or Classical Greek. That is, the ancient pre-English Germanic tongues or Dialects were highly "inflected" because they were characterized by many categories of word ENDINGS which changed the grammatical function of each form of the word. One ending or "inflection" which has remained for English, for example, is the "-ed" attachment at the end of the "Regular" verbs. But nowadays, due to incessant evolution and development, most of these languages have lost much of their inflectional character, although not all to the same extent. As far as inflections are concerned, German is the most conservative of the Western Germanic languages which therefore still preserves many of the inflections, while English and Afrikaans are languages with almost no inflection at all. Dutch and Frisian are somewhere in between these extremes. The following table shows the various forms of the verb sleep in English, Afrikaans, Dutch and German to illustrate these differences. Only the indicative mood is given here, but note that German still has forms for all persons and numbers in the subjunctive mood; in the other languages there are no special verb forms for the subjunctive at all, or only a few remnants (c.f. if I were you in English).

Note: In the Dutch forms the change from aa into a is just a consequence of the Dutch spelling system and it does not reflect a difference in pronunciation.

Note: Most Afrikaans verbs have no past tense form and the perfect tense is used instead (e.g. ek het geslaap = I slept or I have slept.

These examples show that German has the most complex verb conjugation of these languages. Note that the present tense forms for du and er not only have their own endings, but that the root vowel changes from a to ä as well!

English

English is the most widely spoken of the Western Germanic languages, both in number of native speakers and in geographical distribution. It is the official language of Great Britain and the native language of most of the British (although Welsh is still spoken in Wales, and Scottish Gaelic in parts of Scotland). Together with Irish Gaelic (which is only spoken in some of the westernmost regions of Ireland) it is also an official language in the Republic of Ireland. Outside the British Isles English is the official language in two other European regions, namely Gibraltar (although most inhabitants have Spanish as their native language) and Malta (where the inhabitants speak Maltese among themselves).

As a result of the rise of the British Empire the English language spread to many other countries and it is now the dominant language of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and of Canada (where it is co-official with French). English is also the official language (or widely used as a lingua franca) in many other former British territories, such as India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Zambia. After the demise of the British Empire English remained an important world language due to the rise of the USA as a new world power.

Old English

(Anglo-Saxon)

Old English, the ancestor of Modern English originated from the very similar dialects that were spoken by the Germanic tribes which invaded the Celtic island of Britain as of 449 A.D. Three "tribes" of invaders came in waves and at different periods from then on. The Angles and the Jutes had their origin at the Danish Peninsula, and the Saxons came from what is now northwest Germany. The name English evolved from the name of one of these tribes, the Angles whose homeland was the angular (hence their name) coastal region of what is now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Another of these tribes were the Saxons (after which Saxony in Germany was named), and thus Anglo-Saxons is the common name used for the Germanic tribes who conquered England. Eventually English replaced the Celtic languages that were dominant in Britain before these invasions, and they only survived in the most isolated areas.

Old English was actually a very different language from Modern English; it differs much more from its modern descendant than for instance Ancient Greek differs from modern Greek. Nevertheless, much of the basic vocabulary of Old English is more or less recognizable for modern speakers of the language. Here are a few examples of Old English words that are similar to their modern counterparts (although sometimes their meanings have changed):

It is important to realize that the spelling of Old English differs considerably from the spelling of Modern English. For instance, in cyning the letter c is pronounced as k, the combination sc in scort (also spelled sceort) is pronounced as sh, and the y sounds like the u in French or the ü in German (a vowel not found in Modern English). Furthermore the examples above show that Old English uses the letters æ and þ that are not used in Modern English anymore. Together with a third letter (ð) they later disappeared from the English orthography. The letters þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth ) were borrowed from the Germanic RUNIC script to represent the two consonants that are spelled th in Modern English.

With regard to the runic script it should be noted that it co-existed with the Latin alphabet in England for many centuries after the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Christian religion. Only after England was conquered by the Normans, who brought the French language to this country, did the runes finally give way to the Latin alphabet.

In later centuries the English vocabulary has become vastly different from the vocabularies of other Germanic languages, which is due to the massive borrowing of words from non Germanic sources (mainly Norman French) and changes in the sounds as a result of isolation from the continental Germanic languages. Nevertheless, there are still many similarities in basic vocabulary as shown in the next table, which compares some English words with their cognates in Dutch, Frisian, German (Western Germanic) and in Danish and Icelandic (Northern Germanic). [meister_z Note: A COGNATE is a word from another language other than our own which, due to its spelling or form, seems to be equivalent to one of our own words, and it IS actually the same in meaning. A FALSE COGNATE is one that seems to be like one of ours, but actually is NOT, because it has a different meaning.]

As mentioned before, Celtic languages were spoken in England before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, but there are but few Celtic loan-words in English. Most of the early borrowings are toponyms, like the name of the river Avon (meaning simply river, cf. Welsh afon and Gaelic abhainn). Celtic words in English that are not toponyms are usually words borrowed in later centuries. Examples of these are cromlech from Welsh and whiskey from Scottish Gaelic (uisge beatha = "water of life").

When the Anglo-Saxons came to England they already used some words of Latin origin which the Germanic tribes had borrowed from the Romans, like cealc (chalk, from Latin calx, meaning lime) and win (wine, from Latin vinum), and after they became Christians their language got a few more foreign words from Latin and/or Greek, like apostol (apostle, Lat. apostolus, Gr. apostolos) and munuc (monk, Lat. monachus, Gr. monachos). But usually when the Anglo-Saxons needed a word for something that was new to them, they created a new word rather than borrow a foreign word for it. Examples of these words are tungolcræft (lit. "star-craft") for astronomy, and rimcræft (lit. "number-craft") for arithmetic.

In the late 8th century a series of new Germanic invasions of Britain started, this time from Scandinavia. The pirate raids of the vikings were eventually followed by a full-scale invasion which resulted in the permanent occupation by the Danes of a part of England (the so-called Danelaw in the northeast). The Danelaw was reconquered by the English in the early 10th century, but the Danes renewed their raids and in 1016 Cnut, king of Denmark and Norway, became the ruler of England as well.

As a result of all this the language of the Scandinavian invaders (Old Norse) has influenced Old English, and many common English words are of Scandinavian origin. Examples of these are window (cf. Icelandic vindauga, lit. "wind-eye") and sister (cf. Icelandic systir. Apparently the Scandinavian word replaced, or at least influenced, the related Old English sweostor).

The differences between Old English and Old Norse were not so great as those between Modern English and for instance Modern Danish, and many words were quite alike. In some cases the English and Scandinavian forms of which is etymological the same word, are both still present in Modern English, but used with slightly different meanings. An examples of such a pair is shirt and skirt. English words that begin with sk (which corresponds to English sh) are almost always of Scandinavian origin. Another such word is sky which originally meant cloud and existed in Old English as sceo. The English form sceo has disappeared and the Scandinavian sky has acquired the meaning of Old English heofon, which in turn was narrowed in meaning. Nowadays the modern form heaven is mainly used in a metaphysical sense.

Old English is a typical inflectional language which in this respect can be compared to present-day Icelandic (the most conservative (inflected) of the Germanic languages). The endings of Old English nouns and adjectives depend upon the function of those words in the sentence. The following table shows of the words nama (name), eare (ear) and tunge the various forms in every combination of number (singular or plural) and case (nominative, genitive, accusative and dative case).

Note that as in Modern German, nouns in Old English can be either masculine, neuter or feminine. Nama is masculine, eare neuter and tunge feminine. If a word denotes a living being the gender will often be the same as the sex of this being, but this is not always the case. For instance widuwe (widow) is feminine, but wif (woman or wife) is neuter and wifmann (woman) is masculine!

All three words in the table belong to the so-called weak declension class. There are two more types of declensions, both considerably more difficult than the weak declension (to which belong only a few words that are declined slightly differently from the rest).

In Modern English only a few remnants of declension have remained. To the English word horse can be attached the ending -s to make the plural form horses, and by attaching -'s we can make the genitive form horse's (which is pronounced exactly the same as horses, so strictly speaking Modern English regular nouns have only two forms: the root itself and the root plus -s). Another leftover from the Old English declensional system are the personal pronouns, which usually have two forms (the only exception being you and it). In the nominative case the forms I, he, she, we, they are used, but in the oblique case (into which the old accusative and dative case have merged) the forms me, him, her, us, them are used instead. So, it is still possible to change the word order of the sentence "I hit him" into "Him I hit" without changing the meaning of the sentence. However if we would change the sentence "The dog saw the cat" into "The cat saw the dog" any reader or listener would be inclined to interpret the second version quite differently (unless the context and a strong stress on the word cat would suggest otherwise). The reason is for this is that in Modern English the subject almost always comes before the object, so normally we would assume that the cat (object) was seen by the dog (subject).

In Old English however it would be possible to put the object before the subject without changing the meaning of the sentence, because the case endings would still unambiguously mark the subject and object. As said earlier, only relics of this system exist in Modern English, which largely depends on a more or less fixed word order and the use of prepositions (e.g. the palace of the king rather than the king's palace) as alternatives for the old case system.

Like Old English nouns, Old English verbs have many more forms than in verbs in Modern English. Suffice it to say that the conjugation of verbs in Old English is even more complicated than the declension of nouns. To illustrate this the following table shows the various forms of the verb lufian (to love).

After comparing Old English with Modern English, which has to do with love, loves, loved, loving and the rarely used "biblical" forms lovest, loveth and lovedst, saying that the number of possible verb forms in English has been reduced would be an understatement. Since English is nowadays an important world language it is fortunate for non-native speakers that they only need to learn 3 different endings for the Irregular verbs! In conclusion for this section, Modern English offers a practical and much easier language than most people even imagine. It has evolved into a constantly changing language which may easily absorb vocabulary from other languages, and which has been greatly simplified throughout the centuries, for more than 1200 years. It is an easy language to learn because of its uninflected nature in the modern-day world.

It is generally assumed that the contact between Old English and Old Norse contributed to the disappearance of much of the English inflectional system. The theory amounts to this: Both Old English and Old Norse had an elaborate system of inflections. Also Old English and Old Norse were fairly closely related, so to a certain extent the English and the Scandinavians could communicate with each other, each party using its own language. Old English and Old Norse inflections and the ways they were used were in some cases similar and in other cases different, so it is safe to assume that confusion arose and that endings were mixed up or even neglected, making it more difficult to indicate the grammatical functions of the words by way of inflection. This confusion possibly let to the rise of other ways to indicate those functions, like a fixed word order and the addition of new auxiliary verbs to the language.

In the 11th century England was invaded again, this time by the Normans. The Normans were descendants from Scandinavians (Norman = "North-man") who had settled in the part of France that is now known as Normandy. Although their ancestors of course spoke Norse, they had already adopted the language and culture of their new homeland at that time. So, the Normans spoke French and their language would become the language of the ruling class in England for several centuries.

It is rather obvious that this French form dating to 11th century Normandy differed also from the modern French as it is spoken today. Ironically, though, some borrowings from Old French that still exist in English are not used in Modern French anymore, such as mortgage (Modern French hypothèque), and many others have changed more drastically in French than in English. An example is for instance the Old French warderobe which became wardrobe in Modern English but garderobe in Modern French.

After the conquest of England, Norman French became the language of the aristocracy and the higher clergy while the common people continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. But naturally Anglo-Saxon became heavily influenced by French in the centuries after the invasion; many thousands of French words were borrowed, and English lost even more of its inflectional character.

Eventually the aristocracy became completely anglicized and English emerged again as the language of all the inhabitants of England. But although Modern English is basically still a Germanic language the French influence (and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian influence) has caused it to have a vocabulary that differs in many respects from that of its continental relatives. And due to the insular position many Germanic words in English have become pronounced very differently from their cognates in the other Western Germanic.

A rather unfortunate heritage of the Norman invasion is the chaotic spelling of Modern English, which is partly due to the fact that is actually a mixture of two very different systems, Anglo-Saxon and French. And in some cases scholars made the situation even worse by introducing spellings like island with an s that has never been pronounced (this word originates from Old English iegland and not from Old French isle, which indeed lost its s and became île in Modern French). Another example is the word whore to which the learned men added a w, although this word (originally Scandinavian) has always started with an h in pronunciation (cf. Icelandic hóra and Dutch hoer).

Yet the English spelling does have this one advantage that for instance the word national is easily recognized as a deriviation of nation, even though the first vowel in national is pronounced differently from the one in nation. This would be less obvious in a spelling that better reflects the pronunciation (e.g. national and naytion).

Dutch

Dutch is a Western Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands and in parts of Belgium. In the Netherlands it is the official language and it is spoken in the entire country, but in the province of Frisia it is co-official with Frisian. In Belgium Dutch is spoken in the region of Flanders and in the city of Brussels. Both in Flanders and in Brussels it is recognized as an official language, but in Brussels it is co-official with French, which is the dominant language there (even though the city is entirely surrounded by a Dutch speaking region).

Dutch is also the official language of Surinam (formerly Dutch Guyana), but among themselves the Surinamese usually speak Sranan. In the Netherlands Antilles, an autonomous part of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, Dutch is the official language as well, but here it is not used much either in everyday conversation, and Papiamento and English are used instead. In these islands the local languages (Papiamento in the Leeward Islands and English in the Windward Islands) are also official languages.

Being a Western Germanic language Dutch is closely related to English, and even though English has borrowed a vast amount of words from non Germanic languages, English and Dutch still have a large common vocabulary. A few of these words are shown in the following table which also includes their German counterparts:

Dutch is more closely related to German than to English. Nevertheless, in many cases Dutch and English words of Germanic origin resemble each other more than Dutch and German words do. This is caused by the fact that in the Middle Ages certain consonants in the southern dialects of German (the so-called High German on which modern standard German is based) changed considerably. However, this change did not take place in the North where Low German was spoken (At that time there were not yet distinct Dutch and German languages. Dialects changed gradually as one traveled from one place to another).

It is probably due to the long time that there existed no sharp geographical boundary between German and Dutch that there are few loan-words in Dutch that are clearly of German origin. Undoubtedly German words must have traveled from German to Dutch (and vice versa) in large quantities but during this process they became totally assimilated and unrecognizable as loan-words.

Like most European languages Dutch has borrowed lots of words from Latin, some of these like muur (Lat. murus, Eng. wall) and keizer (Latin Caesar, English emperor) date from Roman times (the Southern Netherlands once were part of the Roman Empire), while others were borrowed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Greek words are not rare either in Dutch, especially the scientific words of Greek origin that are common in most other European languages as well.

French influence has not been as strong in Dutch as is has been in English and it dates from a later period; that is, French words in Dutch are mainly borrowed from Modern French. However, there are numerous French words in Dutch, much more than in German which has generally been a more puristic language. Some French suffixes are even occasionally combined with Germanic roots to form words such as lekkage (leakage) and vrijage (courtship), analogous to purely French words like bagage (luggage) and arbitrage (arbitration). Another example is the French feminine suffix -esse which as -es is freely attached to masculine Dutch words to create feminine equivalents like danseres (female dancer), meesteres (mistress) and lerares (female teacher), even though Dutch already had the suffix -in at its disposal (cf. German Tänzerin, Herrin, Lehrerin).

In the second half of the 20th century Dutch like so many languages has borrowed a large quantity of English words: shit, computer, chip, show, quiz and internet are only a few of them. Those words are freely combined with other words and with affixes to form new words like shitzooi (load of shit), computergestuurd (computer-controlled) and showtje (a little show). It has even become customary to add Dutch verb endings to English words, which results in words like internetten (to work with the Internet), downloaden (to download), upgraden (to upgrade), and even geüpgraded (ge-upgrade-d, the past participle of upgraden).

Dutch words in English are far less numerous. Most of these were borrowed in the 17th century when the United Provinces (a federal republic dominated by Holland and Zealand) became an important maritime power and a center of art and scholarship. The following table lists a few Dutch loan-words in English:

An infamous word in English (and several other languages) that is often attributed to Dutch is apartheid, but this word originates actually from Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch that developed in South Africa and grew gradually into a separate language. The Afrikaans vocabulary is still very similar to that of Dutch (apart from relatively small differences in spelling and pronunciation) but its grammar has changed drastically. As for the word apartheid, it does exist in Dutch but only as a loan-word from its descendant Afrikaans.

There are several words in English denoting African animals, which look very much like Dutch words. Many of these words (or words very similar to them) do indeed exist in Dutch but in this language they are still used to refer to European animals and it would therefore be more accurate to consider these words as being of Afrikaans origin, even though it is impossible to tell when exactly Dutch in South Africa became sufficiently different to be considered a new language. An example of such a word is eland which in English denotes a kind of antelope. In Dutch eland means elk (i.e. the deer species called moose in North America, not the wapiti which is also locally called elk), and the antelope is called elandantilope (lit.: "elk-antelope"). In Afrikaans eland means both eland and elk, but since these animals live in different parts of the world there is not much chance of confusion.

By the way, the words elk and eland are in fact related, they originate from the same word. This is not as you might think simply because English and Dutch have a common ancestor. Eland is actually a loan-word in Dutch that was borrowed from the Lithuanian word for elk, which is elnis. Lithuanian is one of the Baltic languages, like the Germanic languages a branch of the Indo-European language family, and therefore a distant cousin of English and Dutch.

Frisian

Frisian is a Western Germanic language that was once spoken along the North Sea coast from present-day Holland to southern Denmark, but nowadays, apart from a few remnants of its eastern dialects in Northwest Germany, it is only spoken in the Dutch province of Frisia, where it is co-official with Dutch.

Frisian is closely related to Dutch and has been heavily influenced by it. Nevertheless, it is clearly a separate language that some consider to be the closest living relative of English. Whether this is true is debatable. Frisian is certainly much closer related to Dutch and German than it is to Modern English. Still, there are some Frisian words that are more similar to their English than to their Dutch or German cognates.

Here are a few examples of such words:

German

German is a Western Germanic language that is spoken in Germany, Austria, several Swiss cantons, Alsace-Lorraine (France), South Tyrol (Italy), eastern Belgium and in Liechtenstein. There are also German speaking minorities in Romania and southern Denmark. In Luxemburg a dialect of German is spoken that is generally considered a separate language. But German is often used as a written language there along with French, which is the official language. German itself is the official language of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and in the above-mentioned Swiss cantons. It is also officially recognized in South Tyrol and the German speaking parts of Belgium and Denmark.

Once there were also German speaking areas in what is now Poland, the Czech Republic and even in the Russian exclave Kaliningrad (between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic) but after World War II most of the ethnic Germans were deported to present-day Germany.

There are in fact many dialects of German, often so different from the standard language that from a linguistic viewpoint they might be considered separate languages (sometimes with dialects of their own). The main division is between High German (in a more narrow sense the designation for Standard German) and Low German. The latter is spoken in the lowlands of the north and the term Low Saxon is sometimes applied to it when viewed as a separate language (which is also spoken in some eastern regions of the Netherlands). Low Saxon has recently been granted some official recognition in both the Netherlands and Germany, but its use as a written language is hampered by the lack of a widely accepted standard orthography and the existence of many dialects (which form an almost continuous spectrum between Standard Dutch and Standard German).

The High German dialects are those forms of German in which the so-called Second Sound Shift took place, resulting in the change of certain consonants. The following table illustrates this sound shift by comparing words from English, Dutch and Frisian with their equivalents in High German.

Two important dialects of High German are Bavarian and Swiss German. These tongues are almost completely unintelligable for a speaker of Standard German. To illustrate this I shall give a few examples of Bavarian words here.

The fact that the part of Europe that is now called Germany has been a collection of many more or less independant bishoprics, counties, duchies, electorates and free towns has had a profound influence on the development (or rather the lack of it) of a standard language. In Britain the standard language grew out of the dialect of London, in France it was the dialect of Paris, but Germany did never have one dominant cultural centre. Standard German can be considered the creation of Martin Luther who naturally used his own dialect (he hailed from Thuringia) for his German translation of the Bible. As a result of the invention of the art of printing and the spread of Protestantism this dialect gradually became the norm, first for the written and later for the spoken language as well, even in German speaking areas that remained Roman Catholic. But even today there are regional differences of the "Standard" Language. For example, a potato is called Kartoffel in Berlin and Erdapfel in Vienna.

Prior to World War II German was usually written in a variant of the Latin script dating from the 14th century, the so-called Gothic style. From this script came the German sz ligature ß which is in certain cases used for ss. A curious phenomenon in written German is that all nouns start with a capital letter.

Papiamento

Papiamento (also called Papiamentu) is spoken in the three Leeward Islands of the Netherlands Antilles (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) where it is co-official with Dutch. Papiamento is a creole language that is mainly based on Spanish, but it has also been influenced by Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and other languages. The following table shows a few examples of Papiamento's heterogenous vocabulary:

The RUNIC SCRIPT

Rune	Transliteration	Name1	Meaning of the name
	r	fehu	cattle (cf. German Vieh)
	u	uruz	urochs
	th	þurisaz2	giant (demon)
	a	ansuz	Asa (Odin)
	r	raiðo	cart, journey
	k	kaunan (kenaz)	torch, light
	g	gebo	gift
	w	wunjo	fortune (glory)
	h	hagalaz	hail
	n	nauðir	need
	i	isan	ice
	j	jeran	year, harvest
	æ	eiwaz	yew (cf. ivy)
	p	perþo	pear, vessel
	z	algiz4	elk, safety
	s	sowulo	sun
	t	tiwaz	Tyr
	b	berkanan	birch
	e	ehwaz	horse (cf. Latin equus)
	m	manz	mankind
	l	laukaz (laguz)	leek (sea)
	i	ingwaz (inguz)	Ing (ng)
	d	dagaz (þagaz)	day
	o	oþalan (othila)	estate, property

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