It doesn’t take a lot of looking to see that language constantly changes. New slang constantly develops alongside new words for new concepts. In fact, the Oxford word of the year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’, a term that emerged in the last year or two. But how much has it changed from Old English?
Within a single lifetime, it’s hard to notice the full extent of the changes that happen. Younger language speakers might use words and slang that are hard to understand, but their general language is still the same, especially in formal contexts.
English is often considered, even by English speakers, to be a complicated language. I’m taking a course for TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language), and am learning the true extent of this.
But English actually used to be more complicated. Old English would be somewhat difficult for any Modern English speaker to learn and understand, to the point that speakers of some other languages might actually have an easier time learning it.
A Brief History of English
When people think of archaic English, Shakespeare often comes to mind. But Shakespeare actually falls within the timeline of Modern English, like what we’re speaking now.
Looking at any timeline of English (or any language’s history) makes it seem like there are sudden changes. These lines are generally blurred, though, but sometimes an event happens that changes the course of the language quickly in a significant way.
Old English is the point where English first became English as its own language. Beowulf was written in Old English, and is one of the most well-known written works from the time. (But very much not the only one).
A big part of these changes comes in the form of influence from other languages. Old English gave way to Middle English on most timelines around 1100 AD. This happens to line up with the Norman invasion of England. This led to the prominence of French, which began to heavily influence the language, breaking it away from Old English into Middle English. Canterbury Tales is an example of something written in Middle English.
The next big division comes around the 1500s, when European nations began exploring the world. At this point, languages all over the world began to influence English, bringing us closer to where we find ourselves today.
So, what did English look like before all of this influence and change? Well, it looked a lot more complicated. Let’s get into it.
What Old English was Like
I’m going to, as usual, avoid using complicated grammar terminology to make this easier to understand. I’ll try to divide this up clearly into smaller grammar points.
Letters and Pronunciation in Old English
Let’s start with the alphabet. There are some letters prominent in Old English that we no longer use, and vice versa:
- v and j were not used in Old English at all.
- k, q, and z did show up, but not often.
- w is a modern version of an old letter.
- the letter æ, called ‘ash’ was common in Old English
- þ/Þ (thorn) and ð/Ð (eth) both functioned interchangeably as ‘th’
So, if I spelled a modern English word using these letters, for example ‘that’, it would be spelled ‘ðæt’.
On top of this, many letters were pronounced differently or were used for more sounds. F, for example, represented both f and v sounds. S represented both the s and z sounds. G represented the g and y sounds. C was used both for the k sound and the ch sound.
Generally, the combination ‘sc’ is pronounced like the ‘sh’ in Modern English.
Normally, I don’t include pronunciation guides for languages, and I’m not going to include a full one here. But Old English is no longer spoken anywhere and we don’t actually fully know how it was pronounced. We can only make an educated guess as to how it sounded.
Vowel pronunciation is entirely different now from how it used to be, caused by an event called the Great Vowel Shift. We still don’t know the full cause of this shift, but it led to a significant change in vowel pronunciation.
This is a lot, I know, but don’t feel like you need to memorize it. You’re not being tested, after all! This is mostly just to show how much the spelling changed from Modern English.
Sentence Structure
This is where things start to get a little weird. Old English has a lot of different forms for nouns and verbs, forms that don’t exist at all in Modern English. Because of this, it is very clear whether a noun is intended as the subject or object (or one of the many other roles a noun can play in a sentence).
This means that the sentence structure is a lot more loose. In Modern English, we strictly follow the subject-verb-object word order. The thing doing the action comes before the action, followed by the thing receiving the action. Other languages might follow different patterns or change between them, and some are more rigid than others.
Old English generally follows the same pattern as Modern English, but can change to other word orders in specific situations. It’s a lot more loose with sentence structure than Modern English.
There are special forms for each noun to indicate whether they’re functioning as the subject or object of a sentence, making it easier to understand sentences that are out of order.
Nouns in Old English
Nouns in Old English actually have four forms, not counting plurals. I mentioned above that there are forms to indicate the subject and object, but there are two more. Here are all four forms you might see, using the Old English word ‘cyning’ meaning ‘king’:
- Subject of a sentence (cyning)
- Possession of another object (cyninges) (Think of it like saying king’s)
- Direct object (cyning)
- Indirect object (cyninge)
On top of this, we also have the plural form of each (in the same order):
- cyningas
- cyninga
- cyningas
- cyningum
So, with this, each noun has 8 different forms. Compare this to our current 4-ish forms, and you can see how it’s more complicated already. But don’t worry, there’s more!
Nouns are also divided into grammatical genders between masculine, feminine, and neuter, which affects how they are modified to fit these different forms. The example I gave above is a masculine noun.
ALSO, nouns are divided between strong and weak, which again just changes how their forms are created. Weak nouns tend to have a more consistent form.
So after all is said and done, the noun cyning is a strong, masculine noun with 8 separate forms depending on its function and number within a sentence.
Verbs
Somewhat surprisingly, verbs in Old English are grammatically similar to Modern English. One of the biggest differences is the presence of strong and weak verbs (like strong and weak nouns).
Another difference, and one I wish we kept in Modern English, is the presence of a plural ‘you’. (Though we’ve sort of reinvented one with y’all.) There is a special verb form for each possible subject of a sentence as well as number. So I, we, you, you all, he/she/it, and they each have their own verb form. This line gets blurred more if you look at weak verbs, which don’t necessarily change as much between forms.
The only verb form in Old English that isn’t commonly used in Modern English now is the subjunctive. This is a form used for hypothetical situations like wishes, for example, “I wish I were wealthy”.
Pronouns
Pronouns are far more complicated in Old English than in Modern English.
For the sake of efficiency, and to not overwhelm you with information, I’ll avoid listing them out. What I will do is explain all the forms they take.
- Because pronouns are used to take the place of nouns in a sentence, each one has forms aligning with the above noun forms.
- They have forms based on number, including dual forms, used specifically to refer to a group of two people.
- Third-person pronouns also need to cover all 3 grammatical genders.
This means that there are three forms for most pronouns based on number, and four based on their function in a sentence. Plus an additional three for each of those forms in third-person.
For singular pronouns alone, there are 20+ different forms that cover all of these bases. There are only about 8 dual pronouns because there are no third-person dual pronouns. Plural pronouns have about 17 forms.
Guess what? There’s still more!
Words like ‘my’ and ‘mine’ haven’t been covered yet. In this case, only ‘my’ and ‘mine’ are covered in Old English. Other forms like ‘yours’ use the above pronouns.
These pronouns function more like adjectives. This means that there is a version of ‘my’ to cover every grammatical gender and every function in the sentence, making a total of about 12 forms of ‘my’.
Adjectives
I mentioned just above that pronouns like ‘my’ function more like adjectives than pronouns. It would be weird for me not to talk about adjectives, then.
Like the pronouns I mentioned above, adjectives match the form of the noun they modify, meaning they have to adjust for function, gender, and number. There are also strong and weak forms.
All in all, there are about 48 adjective forms, though many of these forms get re-used. For example, the adjective god, meaning good, uses the form ‘god’ about 6 times and ‘godan’ about 14 times. So really, there aren’t 48 separate forms, but 48 separate functions.
Conclusion
I hope this leaves you with a greater appreciation for how much languages can change. Of course, these changes happened over many generations and 1000+ years, but even small changes can do a lot over time. Even now, our language continues to change in new ways that we can’t even fully fathom or keep up with.
My goal, of course, was not to teach you the language. It is not spoken anywhere except maybe among scholars speaking it for fun. Many English scholars spend a lot of time learning the language to translate old texts and explore Old English.
If you’re curious to know more, all of my information comes from A Gentle Introduction to Old English by Murray McGillivray.
On the topic of languages that aren’t spoken anymore, I just finished a three-part series about language death. Here’s part 1 to get you started! If you’re curious to learn more about language, check out all of my articles talking about it!
As always, if there’s something I didn’t explain clearly or you otherwise have questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to comment below or contact me!