Old English

"Ohthęre sǣde his hlāforde, Ælfrede cyninge": "Ohthere told his lord, King Alfred." A reader today can still pick out his, and cyninge is close to king. But the line comes from a language with many endings that English has since lost.

Old English, which some older books call Anglo-Saxon, came to Britain with Germanic settlers. The monk Bede named them Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Bede, writing in 731, put the first arrivals in 449. Objects found by archaeologists suggest that settlers began to arrive sometime between AD 425 and 450. Their speech formed groups of dialects: Northumbrian in the north, Mercian in the Midlands, West Saxon in most of the south, and Kentish in the southeast. Scholars usually end the Old English period about 1150. Henry Bradley warned that this is only a convenient date, since the language was always changing.

The grammar was more like German than modern English. Nouns had gender that did not follow meaning, so hand was feminine, fot (foot) masculine and wif (woman) neuter. They had four cases, with traces of a fifth, and many patterns of endings, and the one modern adjective glad had eleven forms. Verbs changed in the plural, so "I sing" was ic singe but "we sing" was we singath. Old English borrowed few words. A few Latin words came with the settlers from the Continent, such as street, wine, butter and cheese. More came with Christianity in the 500s and 600s, such as candle, mass, monk and priest. The linguist Philip Durkin counts at least six hundred words borrowed from Latin in Old English. Older counts found fewer than a dozen from the Britons' Celtic languages.

From the 800s, Danish and Norse settlers in the north and east spoke a language close to English. Bradley thought the mixing of the two helped wear away the old endings. English took words such as law, husband, knife, leg, take and sister from them.

In the library, A year in a sentence: entries from the Chronicle shows the language over 350 years. Each entry begins Her, "Here," meaning "in this year," and the early entries use Old English words such as wæs (was), cyning (king) and steorra (star). A voyage to the north: Ohthere and Wulfstan tell King Alfred is an account told to Alfred, preserved in the Old English Orosius, with seafaring words such as steorbord, starboard.