Universität Rostock
Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik
Proseminar: ”The History of the English Language”
4. Fachsemester

Comparison of Old and Middle English

von: Claudia Rittig

Contents 3

List of abbreviations  3

Introduction  4

I. Old and Middle English in their historical context 4

Old English 4
Middle English 5

II. Comparison of Old and Middle English by means of the text ”The prodigal son” (Luke 15: 22-24)  7

Changes under morphological aspects  8
Comparison under lexical aspects  10
Changes under syntactical aspects 10
Changes under phonological aspects 11

Conclusion  12

Bibliography  12
 

Introduction

As the title may suggest this paper is about a comparison of Old and Middle English. At first I am going to explain the historical circumstances under which the changes took place. After that I am going to compare two texts (with the same plot) from different periods of English under different aspects. For this sentences and words from Old English are going to be analysed and then compared with the Middle counterpart. Unfortunately there is a page limit for this seminar paper so that I cannot go into more depths.

I. Old and Middle English in their historical context

Old English

It can be said that the Old English period began in the fifth century when the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes (who spoke very similar types of the Germanic language) left ”the great North German plain, including the southern part of the Jutland peninsula” to settle in the region that is now known as England. 1 They found the new land already inhabited by Celtic people and started to subjugate them. As a result many of the Celts fled to Wales and Cornwall, some crossed the Channel to Brittany and some intermarried with the Germanic tribes. The Celtic people in the very north of the island, which is present-day Scotland now, were not as much affected as the people in the south. Approximately a century and a half later the Germanic tribes began to think of themselves and their speech as English. The name of a single tribe, the Angles, was now used for a single nation2.

But there was not just one kingdom these peoples lived in: The seven kingdoms of Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria belonged to the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. Kent soon became the cultural centre of these seven kingdoms. By the end of the sixth century king Æðelberht of Kent could obtain supremacy over the other six kingdoms. This supremacy was passed on to Northumbria, then to Mercia and finally to Wessex with king Ecgberht and later his grandson Alfred. After his death in 899 his successors took for themselves the title ‘King of the English’. Due to the slightly different origin of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes four major dialects could develop: Kentish, spoken by the Jutes who settled in Kent, West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian. Mercian and Northumbrian were closer related to each other than Kentish and West Saxon so that they are nowadays sometimes grouped together as Anglian, as it was predominantly spoken by Angles.3

After a period of certain stability, raiders from Scandinavia, the Vikings, arrived. They attacked the eastern coastline of England and finally gained possession of practically the whole eastern part of England. The English called the new people ‘Danes’ though there were Norwegians and later Swedes amongst them. Linguistically they all belonged to the same group of languages, namely North Germanic, which was again related to Old English so that communication between the English and the Vikings was possible. Finally they settled down peacefully beside their English neighbours. Many words in Old English and Old Norse (the language of the Vikings) were the same, but when this was not the case the Scandinavian form has won out, e.g. sister (ON systir, Old English sweostor)4. The Old English period ended around 1150 triggered by the Norman conquest.

Middle English

Middle English is not, as it may seem, a completely new language, but another stage in the development of the English language. This period began with the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066. Of course this historical event changed the whole course of the English language but first one has to understand the origins of the Normans and their country Normandy.

[...]

1 Pyles & Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English Language. p. 97.

2 ibid. p. 96.

3 ibid. p. 101.

4 Pyles & Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English Language. p. 101.