The Development of Old English. Differences between Old and Modern English

Authors Avatar

        Influences of Old English on Modern English

Old English

Old English (OE), also known as Anglo-Saxon evolved from the Germanic dialects of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisian. The language was influenced by Latin, borrowing many words from it as the Anglo-Saxons had lived within the borders of the Roman Empires prior to invading Britain. The conversion to Christianity in 600 AD also introduced literacy using the Roman alphabet (Graddol et al., 2007, p 40-43).

Influences on Old English

Old English underwent linguistic changes as a result of contact with the Scandinavian invaders’ and their language- Old Norse. The influence of Old Norse simplified the inflections system and many of the vocabulary adopted, remained in our English language today (Graddol, p 59- 63). The English language further evolved during the Norman Conquest when French was established as the language of power and officialdom. The Middle English period saw the assimilation of French into the English vocabulary as well as adoption of rhyme, which is typical of French verse writing (Graddol, p.66-69).

Modern English

The introduction of the printing technology in Britain in the 15th century by Caxton helped moved English from a vernacular language with regional varieties towards standardization and eventually, a national language (Graddol, p85 -87). This was the Modern English (MnE) period where ‘lexical growth took place; existing words were synonymised to provide stylistic variation and syntactical structures standardised’ (Kemmer, 2005).

Join now!

Differences between Old and Modern English 

The transformation of English through times is evident in these differences:

  1. Inflections

OE was a highly inflectional language. It had different systems of case inflections classified according to the gender of a noun and whether it was ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. Four grammatical cases were presented to indicate the subject, direct and indirect object and the possession of a noun. Affixes were attached to the free morphemes to indicate the different cases as well as plural cases (Graddol, p.56-61).

Comparatively, MnE, according to David Crystal, only has two cases for nouns ...

This is a preview of the whole essay