History Of The British the term Anglo-Saxon is used by some historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Britain beginning in the early 5th century and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Saxon era denotes the period of English history between about 550 and 1066.The term is also used for the language, now known as Old English, that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in England (and part of southeastern Scotland) between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century.
The Benedictine monk Bede, writing in the early 8th century, identified the English as the descendants of three Germanic tribes:
- the Angles, who may have come from Angeln (in modern Germany): Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, leaving their former land empty. The name England (Old English: Engla land or Ængla land) originates from this tribe;
- the Saxons, from Lower Saxony (in modern Germany; German: Niedersachsen) and the Low Countries;
- the Jutes, possibly from the Jutland peninsula (in modern Denmark; Danish: Jylland).
Their language, Old English, which derived from Ingvaeonic West Germanic dialects, transformed into Middle English from the 11th century. Old English was divided into four main dialects: Wes Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian and Kentish.
The history of the British Isles has witnessed intermittent periods of competition and cooperation between the people that occupy the various parts of Great Britain, Ireland, and the smaller adjacent islands, which together make up the British Isles, as well as with France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, Scandinavia, etc.
Today, the British Isles contain two sovereign states: the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. There are also three Crown dependencies: Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. The United Kingdom may be further broken down into the four countries of the United Kingdom: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Each of these countries bears its own history, with all but Northern Ireland having been independent states at one point. The History of the formation of the United Kingdom is very complex.
The British monarch was head of state of all of the countries of the British Isles from the Union of the Crowns in 1603 until the enactment of the Republic of Ireland Act in 1949, although the term "British Isles" was not used in 1603. Additionally, since the independence of Ireland, historians of the region often avoid the term British Isles due to the complexity of relations between the peoples of the archipelago (see: Terminology of the British Isles).
Foreign Influences on Old English: Celtic, Latin & Scandinavian.
I. Latin Influence (three main period in Old English)
Influence of the 0 Period: occurred on the continent before Germanic tribes penetrated into England. Borrowing reflect early contact between Germanic tribes and Roman Empire. Influence of the First Period: acquired via the Celts after invading England. Influence of the Second Period: when Roman missionaries introduced Christianity. Can be broken into two periods: early and late. EARLY: 597, St. Augustine sent to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons. The conversion was gradual and lots of churches and monasteries were built.
LATE: Benedictine Reform because of Danish invasions at the end of the 8th century.
How do linguists determine when a Latin word entered the language? 1. Frequency in Old English texts. 2. the character of the word. 3. phonetic form of the word: A. i-umlaut B. palatal diphthongization C. sound changes of vulgar Latin D. breaking
II. Scandinavian Influence
Three main attack periods:
1. The period of the early raids: recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 787 and continuing intermittently until 850.
2. The work of large armies; widespread plundering. In 850, a Danish fleet arrives, captures Canterbury and London, and ravages the countryside. A West Saxon army defeats them, but soon they resume attacks. Short after Alfred's accession to throne, Wessex is attacked. At one point, Alfred has to hide in the marshes. He regathers troops and later attacks and defeats Guthrum and the Danish army. After this defeat, the Danes agree to sign the Treaty of wedmore(878), which defined the line to the east of which the foreigners were to remain. Their designated land was known as the Danelaw.
3. The period of political adjustment and assimilation from 878-1042. Guthrum frequently broke faith, but situations improved under the reign of Alfred's son, Edgar (900-25) and grandson Athelstan (925-39).
Toward the end of the century, new invasions begin. A Viking fleet arrives in 991 and is recorded in the Battle of Maldon. In 994, Olaf became King of Norway and was joined by the Danish King Svein in a new attack on London. Svein succeeds in conquering England, as they can no longer buy him off. In 1014, he seizes the English throne and becomes king, driving off aethelred the unready. The OE period ends with Svein's son, Cnut as King of England.
The blending of the Danish and the English was not so difficult because:
1. The Danish were adaptable,
2. The Danish were not really foreigners, and
3. Many of them accepted Christianity early and readily.
We must infer the relation of the two languages because we don't know much. Their similarity makes it difficult to date many words.
1. OE [sh]>Danish [sk] shirt > skirt
2. Scandinavian had hard pronunciation of [k] and [g]
3. Vowels may be a sign of borrowing [o] OE > [e] Danish
4. We can look to meanings of words.
5. Scandinavian place names.
Words were borrowed gradually. During the first attacks, borrowings were meager and were associated with sea-roving people. Later, after Danelaw, words relate to law and government.
Scandinavian and English coexisted. Which words survived?
Scandinavian and English coexisted. Which words survived?
1. where words coexisted and were similar, the modern word stands for both the OE and the Scandinavian.
2. where there are differences, the OE most often survives.
3. sometimes the Scandinavian word replaces the OE.
4. occasionally, both words survive but with different meaning or use.
5. a native word not in common use was sometimes reinforced by Scandinavian
Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc) or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.
It is a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin, and was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than modern English in most respects, including its grammar. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative,accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, andneuter). First and second person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular; it could typically be replaced by the dative. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number.
Nouns came in numerous declensions (with deep parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Verbs came in nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses (vs. the six "tenses" — really tense/aspect combinations — of Latin), and have no synthetic passive voice (although it did still exist in Gothic).
Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to the natural gender that prevails in modern English. That is, the grammatical gender of a given noun did not necessarily correspond to its natural gender, even for nouns referring to people. For example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, se mōna (the Moon) was masculine, and þat wīf "the woman/wife" was neuter. (Compare German cognates die Sonne, der Mond, das Weib.) Pronominal usage could reflect either natural or grammatical gender, when it conflicted.
From the 9th century, Old English experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.
In the course of the Early Middl Ages, Old English assimilated some aspects of a few languages with which it came in contact, such as the two dialects of Old Norse from the contact with the Norsemen or "Danes" who by the late 9th century controlled large tracts of land in northern and eastern England which came to be known as the Danelaw.
Latin influence
A large percentage of the educated and literate population of the time were competent in Latin, which was the scholarly and diplomatic l of Europe. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latingua francain words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral angles and saxons left continental Europe for Britain. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread. See Latin influence in English : Dark ages for details.
The third and largest single transfer of Latin-based words happened after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when an enormous number of Norman words began to influence the language. Most of these oil language words were themselves derived from old french and ultimately from classical latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English.
One of the ways the influence of Latin can be seen is that many Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from Anglo-Saxon but using Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service.
The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc or fuþorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelled, more or less, as they were pronounced. Often, the Latin alphabet fell short of being able to adequately represent Anglo-Saxon phonetics. Spellings, therefore, can be thought of as best-attempt approximations of how the language actually sounded. The "silent" letters in many Modern English words were pronounced in Old English: for example, the c and h in cniht, the Old English ancestor of the modern knight, were pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling Old English words phonetically using the Latin alphabet was that spelling was extremely variable. A word's spelling could also reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect. Words also endured idiosyncratic spelling choices of individual authors, some of whom varied spellings between works. Thus, for example, the word and could be spelt either and or ond.
Norse influence
The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many places name, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland).
The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed languge, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English.
Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the north and latest in the southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of old norse on the lexicon of the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, the pronoun they, the verb form are, and hundreds of other words.
Celtic influence
Brittonicisms in English Traditionally, and following the Anglo-saxon preference prevalent in the nineteenth century, many maintain that the influence of Brythonic Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Sandinavian. However, a more recent and still minority view is that distinctive Celtic traits can be discerned in syntax from the post-Old English period, such as the regular progressive construction and analytic word order in opposition to the Germanic languages. Why these traits appear to be restricted to syntax and do not include vocabulary is not clear. However many common English words with early attestation in Britain, such as 'dog', 'bird', 'pig', have no apparent cognate in the West Germanic languages, leading some to speculate that their origin lies in the extinct Brythonic dialects of the 'contact' period. Due to the remoteness of the period, etymological attribution in modern dictionaries is generally given simply as 'Old English'.
This text of the Lord’s Prayer is presented in the standardised West Saxon literary dialect.
| Line | Original | Translation |
| [1] | Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum, | Father of ours, thou who art in heavens, |
| [2] | Sī þīn nama ġehālgod. | Be thy name hallowed. |
| [3] | Tōbecume þīn rīċe, | Come thy riche (kingdom), |
| [4] | ġewurþe þīn willa, on eorðan swā swā on heofonum. | Worth (manifest) thy will, on earth as also in heaven. |
| [5] | Ūre ġedæġhwāmlīcan hlāf syle ūs tō dæġ, | Our daily loaf do sell (give) to us today, |
| [6] | and forgyf ūs ūre gyltas, swā swā wē forgyfað ūrum gyltendum. | And forgive us of our guilts as also we forgive our guilters |
| [7] | And ne ġelǣd þū ūs on costnunge, ac ālȳs ūs of yfele. | And do not lead thou us into temptation, but alese (release/deliver) us of (from) evil. |
| [8] | Sōþlīċe. | Soothly. |
