Differences between Old and Modern English
The transformation of English through times is evident in these differences:
- 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 and pronouns: common case and the genitive case (2003, p.132). Grammatical genders are also not evident in MnE since inflections are not required to mark gender distinction in a sentence.
- Word Order
The syntax of OE was more flexible than MnE because of the extensive role of inflections in its sentences. The case endings of the words were indicative of their function in the sentences. However as the syllable stress began to fall increasingly on the first syllable of words, the inflected ending syllables became obsolete in the language. Structured word order became very important in Modern English to clearly convey a logical sentence (Graddol, p 61 -62).
In addition, whilst the syntactical structure of OE tends to take on the subject-object-verb (SOV) order as it was written based on a combination of stressed syllabus and alliteration; MnE usually takes on a subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure (Graddol, 56).
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Question (b)
Evident from the differences between Old and Modern English, the language has gone through various phases of change. These changes are shaped by both external and internal factors within and outside Britain. The external influences impacting the changes are invasion, migration, trade and religion. Whilst, the ‘built-in instability of the grammar of English’ as well as ‘the universal tendencies’ are probable internal causes leading to the language evolving (Graddol, p.61).
Change Factors to the Grammatical System
It is interesting to note that English has evolved from a highly inflectional language to an isolating one (Graddol, p.61). The complex morphological system of OE has completely disappeared from MnE and is replaced by a reliance on a structured word order of verbs and nouns in a sentence to convey meanings.
Internal Factors
Over a period of time, the ending syllables became increasingly less stressed in the English speech. The inflected syllables were reduced to an unstressed schwa sound. This change meant that the inflected endings became unnecessary (Graddol, p.61).
Another possible internal factor for this change could be the regularising of the cases by the English speakers who deemed the inflectional system inefficient. Since not all noun cases had distinctive endings, unproductive inflections were eliminated altogether (Graddol, p 61-62).
Influences of Old Norse
It is plausible that the infiltration of the Old Norse was an important external factor to the disappearance of the OE inflectional system. The common Germanic roots meant that both languages were relatively alike with a similar range of inflections though in different forms. It was therefore possible that in order to communicate effectively, the two groups of people –the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons eradicated the inflectional differences by doing away with them completely (Graddol, p 62-63).
In addition, due to the prestige associated with Old Norse because of the Danish monarchy on the throne, there was a large amount of adoption of the Scandinavian lexicon as well as the spelling conventions and grammatical forms into English. Core OE word groups such as the pronouns and auxiliary verbs were replaced. This paved the way to grammatical changes of OE to MnE (Graddol, p.59-60).
Standardization of the Language
An important activity that was seen as a move towards the eventual standardization of English was the written texts produced by the Benedictine monastery at Winchester in the 10th century. In producing these texts in the West Saxon dialect, the language of the Old English period kings, efforts were made to regularize spellings and standardize the written language (http://en.wikipedia.org/). Though standardization only began to take shape in the 15th century with the advent of printing, this effort demonstrated the diversity of the forms of OE at that time due to both the Latin and Old Norse influences (Graddol, p.65, 86).
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Bibliography
Crystal, D. (2004) Rediscover Grammar. Pearson Education: England
Graddol, D.,Leith, D., Swann, J., Rhys, M. & Gillen,J.,ed (2007) Changing English.
Routledge: New York
Kemmer, Suzanne. (2005) A Brief History of English, with Chronology
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/history/ (accessed 8 August 2011)
Wikipedia: West Saxon Dialect (Old English)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Saxon_dialect_(Old_English) (assessed 9 August 2011)