rdmeahte ond his mod ge † ancwuldorfader swa he wundra gehwasdryhten or astealde ....
[Now we must praise the keeper of the heavenly kingdom the might oflord and his mind-wisdom, the work of the wonder-father, as he, of wonders, the eternal lord, first established.] [4] decades later, Latin words were borrowed directly into English where they replaced their Old English translations. Many of the Latin borrowings were words for the church: angel, abbot, cleric, candle, hymn, chalice, mass, noon, nun, priest, temple etc. Among other borrowings were names of clothes, food and words relating to education, such as sock, sack, radish, beet, mussel, lobster, school, notary, grammatical. wave of borrowing happened in the VIII-IX centuries, when Vikings started their attacks on British monasteries and villages. Small-case attack turned into a full-blown conquest. Eventually they got almost all of northern and eastern England under control. In the end there was a treaty between the Viking and British kings in which, among other things, Alfred, the British king recognized that the Danes would stay in England. influence of Scandinavian on English was enormous. Hundreds of words from all parts of speech were borrowed. As a result some of the most common modern English words have Scandinavian origin. For example the pronouns they and them the verb are (a form of be), prepositions like to and many others. The influence of Scandinavian is obvious not only in lexicon, but in grammar as well. For example, the ending -s in the third person singular, present indicative form of verbs (she smiles, he talks) comes from Scandinavian. But far more significant was the influence of the Scandinavian languages ??on the inflectional system of Old English. There were many, many words in common between Old English and the language of the Danes (man, wife, mother, father, summer, winter, smile, stand, ride, spin, set, over, under, and so on). For the purpose of better understanding the speakers of the Old English and Scandinavian languages ??stripped away the inflections and relied upon such cues as word order, to indicate grammatical relationships. This elimination of the inflectional system was a one of the most important steps toward modifying English from a synthetic to the analytic language it is today (although it was the Normanwere a lot of common words in Old English and the Scandinavian languages, but some sound shifts occurred differently in North Germanic and West Germanic. For instance the distinction of combinations sk and sh. The voiceless velar stop k in the sk sound was, in early Old English, palatalizated, and entire cluster was pronounced sh. To indicate this sound, Old English writers used the cluster sc, as in scip (pronounced ship), fisc (fish). borrowing from Scandinavian languages ??was not limited to a few semantic fields. In fact Scandinavian borrowings spread throughout the language: bank, bull, birth, dirt, fellow, kid, leg, foot, sister, flat, loose, skill, want, crave gape, window, get, give, raise, snub, screech, and take all come from Scandinavian. As Otto Jesperson noted, you can not thrive, be ill, or die without Scandinavian words, nor can you even eat bread and eggs. [1] The influence of Scandinavian languages ??on English is enormous. They enriched English but also primed the language for some of the major steps in its future evolutions.
I THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE ENGLISH
Old English had a long history of coexisting with Scandinavian languages. For some period that lasted about a century and a half, England and Normandy even was one kingdom. Old English turned into the language of common people. It was not spoken at the court, and most members of the aristocracy spoke Scandinavian languages ??better than Old English. However charters continued to be written in English and Latin, not French, for example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be updated, in Old English. The Katherine Group texts also prove the idea that Old English was spoken rather widely after the Conquest. The Katherine Group includes the Lives of three virgin martyr saints (St. Katherine, St. Juliana, and St. Margaret), Hali Mei? Had (a discussion of the benefits of virginity), and Sawles Warde (a treatise on the care of the soul). These texts are also associated with Ancrene Wisse (a guide for nuns). a result, Old English was spoken by the lower classes, and rarely written, so its could evolve faster than it would have been if there was some written standard.
It was not until 1204, that English became once again the language of England. But the language now was different from the one that had been spoken a hundred and fifty years before. Here is an example of The Lord s Prayer in Middle English. It is different fro the one in Old English discussed in the previous paragraph. fadir † at ...
