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OLD ENGLISH - an early form of English, common in the territory of present England and southern Scotland from the middle of the V to the middle of the XII century. The Old English language was a West Germanic language and, therefore, was close to Old Frisian and Old Saxon languages. Compared with modern English, the Old English was morphologically more rich and resembled modern Icelandic, and its orthography more directly reflected the pronunciation. He had five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental (the latter had a special form only in pronouns and adjectives, and in the oldest monuments - and nouns of masculine and neuter gender singular); three numbers: single, dual and multiple; and three kinds: masculine, feminine and average.
Old English did not stand still: this period accounts for 650 years from the resettlement of the Anglo-Saxons to England in the V century before the Norman invasion in 1066, soon after which the language underwent significant changes. During this time, he took on some of the features of the languages with which he interacted, such as Celtic languages and North German dialects spoken by the Scandinavians who settled in northern and eastern England. As a West Germanic language, Old English developed from the Ingveon (North Sea) dialects in the 5th century. Anglo-Saxon literacy was developed after Christianization at the end of the 7th century. The oldest extant text of Old English literature is the Cadmona Anthem, compiled between 658 and 680 years. The Old English period is followed by Middle English (XII – XV century), early New English [en] (late XV - middle of the XVII century) and at the end - New English (after the middle of the XVII century).
The most significant for the formation of Old English were its Germanic features in the vocabulary, sentence construction and grammar, inherited from the Germanic proto-language and shared with closely related languages of continental Europe. Some of these features were characteristic only of the West Germanic languages to which Old English belongs, while some features were inherited from the Pro-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages originated. As in other West German languages of that time, in Old English there was a declension of nouns in five cases. Just as in modern Russian, in Old English, all nouns, even inanimate ones, had a gender, for example, (séo) sunne 'the sun' was feminine, and (se) móna (moon) was male.
Significantly influenced the Old English Latin. As they rooted, a large proportion of the educated and literate population (monks, clergy, etc.) knew Latin, which was then the lingua franca in Europe. Sometimes you can call the approximate dates of the occurrence of individual Latin words in Old English, based on what language changes they have undergone. There were at least three noticeable periods of Latin influence. The first refers to the time preceding the relocation of the Saxons from continental Europe to Britain. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, and Latin became widespread as the language of the church. However, the most powerful layer of Latin borrowings dates back to the time after the Norman invasion of 1066, after which a multitude of French words were entered into the language, as well as directly from Latin. Most of these words from the languages of Oyl themselves ascended directly to the vulgar (less often - classical) Latin, although in the language of the Norman nobility there were Scandinavian borrowings. The Norman Conquest roughly indicates the end of Old English and the onset of the Middle English period. The spelling of Old English compared to modern was closer to pronunciation. However, at the same time, it was less normalized and reflected more dialectal, idiolectic, and other features of the scribe.
The second major source of borrowing in Old English was Scandinavian languages, which appeared in Britain during Viking raids in the 9th and 10th centuries. These were both everyday words and those associated with certain managerial peculiarities of Danelag (a zone controlled by the Vikings, which included extensive possessions along the east coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, which is related to English, since they both originated from the same Pro-German language. When mixing different dialects, the appearance of simplified common languages is quite common, and there is a theory that it was the mixture of Scandinavian and Old English that helped speed up the disappearance of case endings in Old English. A visible confirmation of this is the fact that the simplification of the case endings happened first of all in the north, and later in the south-west - the territory, the least affected by the Vikings.
The number of borrowings from Celtic is much less than even from Latin or Scandinavian languages. Only twelve borrowings are identified as unconditional (although some believe that there are more borrowings). Among all known and supposed Celtic borrowings, the majority are toponyms, especially the names of rivers.
Old English was not dialectically homogeneous. The four main dialects of Old English are Kent (English) Russian, Mercian (English) Russian, and Northumbrian (English) Russian. and West Saxon (Wessex). Each of these dialects is associated with an independent kingdom. Northumbria and Mercia were devastated by the Vikings in the 9th century. Part of Mercia and the whole kingdom of Kent were then merged into Wessex. As a result of the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, the distinction of regional dialects noticeably smoothed out. It cannot be said that they ceased to exist: regional dialects have existed since then and today, as evidenced by the existence of dialects in Middle English and modern English. Nevertheless, a large number of surviving documents of the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, the kingdom of Alfred. Perhaps with the consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardize the language of government in order to facilitate the management of remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, many documents were written in the West Saxon dialect. In addition, Alfred was a lover of his native language and brought many copyists from Mercia to fix texts that had not been written before. The church was also influenced by this, as Alfred began an ambitious program to translate religious texts into his native language. Some texts Alfred himself translated from Latin into English, in particular the treatise of Pope Gregory "Pastoral Care" (Cura pastoralis).
At first, the Old English was written in the runic alphabet (futark), but passed to Latin with some additions: the letter “death” (Ðð, today better known as “ed” - English eth) and the rune-origin letter “thorn” (Þ, þ) - both were used in parallel and interchangeably to denote voiced and deaf variants of interdental consonants, now transmitted by the digraph th; also the runed letter “vinn” [en] (Ƿ, ƿ), denoting the semi-public sound [w]. The Latin letter c in Old English spelling was consistently used to transfer positional sound options [k] (only by the end of the Old English period did the softened version [c] front vowels [e], [i] be pronounced [tʃ], similar to Russian [h]); to indicate the long (“doubled”) sounds [kk] and [ɡɡ], the digraphs cc and cȝ were used, respectively; finally, the letters s and f could transmit, depending on the position in the word, both deaf and ringing variants of the corresponding sounds (that is, [s] and [z], [f] and [v], respectively). In the Middle English period, the letter “Youg” (Ȝ, ȝ) was added - the shape of the letter g (used to mean explosive [ати] and slotted [ɣ] positional phoneme variants / ɡ /, as well as consonant [j]), borrowed from the Irish Latin alphabet. . The symbol for the union and, ond (“and”) and the symbol Ꝥ, ꝥ for the relative pronoun þæt (modern English that) were also used. In addition, the signs of longitude over vowels are used occasionally, abbreviations for the following letters m or n. The stress in Old English most often fell on the first syllable of the root.
King Alfred restored the social order in his kingdom. He placed the royal court above all other courts. During the war years, the old law fell into decay. Grandees arbitrarily embarrassed the people, the judges did not respect the jury. Alfred compiled the first collection of national laws ("The Truth of King Alfred"), ordering to expound in the Anglo-Saxon language the laws of various Saxon kings, selecting the most suitable.
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Jeffrey Chaucer — English poet, "the father of English poetry." Called one of the founders of English national literature and literary English, he was the first to write his compositions not in Latin, but in his native language. His work is called the anticipatory literature of the English Renaissance. The main work of J. Chaucer indicates a poetic collection of short stories "Canterbury Tales" imbued with realism.
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