A history of the English Language is impossible without discussing Old English, the earliest form of English ever recorded spoken in England and parts of Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. Old English is a fascinating language. It looks completely different than the language variant we now use. It contains different characters, sounds, morphological and syntactic features, and different elements of lexicon. Check out the image below to catch a glimpse of the type of differences we are talking about (and this photo does not even use the Old English thorn symbol).
Origin and History
The beginning of Old English can be traced to the settlement of the Germanic people in Britain in the fifth century, during the co-reign of the emperors Martian and Valentinian. According to the Venerable Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, “these new-comers were from the three most formidable races of Germany, the Saxons, the Angles, and Jutes” (63). Despite the name differentiation, these groups of people were, Charles Barber notes, “closely related in language and culture, and regarded themselves as one people” (103). That is why the word Engle “the Angles” together with the adjective Englisc from which the term English derives etymologically have come in time to designate all these tribes. As the Roman Empire was crumbling, the Germanic tribes fought and/or forged alliances with the locals (the Picts, the Britons, and the Scots), and in the course of the next century they slowly conquered “the territory that would eventually known as England” (Baker 2). Remarkably, within next few centuries, they converted to Christianity and developed a thematically complex literature that was extremely sophisticated and refined for its age. Old English texts abound in heroic poems, homilies, riddles, and multiple interpretations of religious themes in works such as Beowulf, Battle of Maldon, Dream of the Rood, Juliana, The Descent into Hell, and so on.
Phonology
Old English phonology presents many differences compared to Modern English. Its pronunciation was phonetic and much more standardized (in the sense that the correspondence between sound and letter was more solid) than the numerous variations we have today. For example, in Old English the letter a was pronounced generally open and central /ɑ/ as in the nouns /mɑnː/ and /hæɑrpe/ and did not present the differences in pronunciation the words /mæn/ and //härp/ have in ME. Moreover, the Old English alphabet contained, according to Baker, seven simple vowels a, œ, e, i, u, and y, although it could also have contained an eighth, spelled ie (12). However, /y/ was a rounded vowel that was pronounced similarly to the /u/ in the French tu. Each of these vowels had short and long variations that equally influenced the duration of their pronunciation. This duration was important because, as Baker notes, it operated differences in the meanings of the words (12). Similarly to vowels, Old English consonants also are different from ME. For example, the consonant /ʒ/: did not exist, but Old English script uses sixteen consonant-symbols, b, c, d, f, g, h, l, m, n, r, p, s, t, þ, ð, and w (Barber, 109). There was no symbol for the letter v as it was considered an allophone of f: f was pronounced as /v/ when it appeared before a voiced sound and it was not doubled. S/z and þ/ð were also allophones and pronounced differently depending on their position in the word and on their neighboring sounds. The letter c was never pronounced /s/ as in ME word city and could represent either /k/ or /tʃ/. N was pronounced /ŋ/ when it occurred before /k/ or /g/ as in /hriŋg/. The double consonants that appeared in many words (such as in /bidde/)were pronounced twice as long, and h was often much strongly articulated as well. Finally, among other differences, a notable one was the treatment of the letter g, which was used in Old English for multiple phonemes: /g/ when it preceded back vowels as in /gōd/, /j/ before e, i, y as in /gēar/ (year), and /ɣ/ between back vowels in /monegum/. Watch the video below for an understanding how the beginning of Beowulf sounded.
Morphology and Syntax
Old English morphology and syntax presented more similarities to synthetic languages such as Latin or the Romance languages that inherited it than to ME. See Baker’s “Magic Sheet” for a better idea of the morphological changes. Like their ME counterparts, Old English nouns have number, but they also four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative; they have gender: feminine, masculine, and neuter; and they have forms depending whether they are strong, weak or athematic. Barber notes that in the case of the verbs, Old English has inherited from Proto-Germanic only two tenses “present” and “past,” yet it has various markers for “future” as well using auxiliary verbs like willan and adverbial phrases. Verb forms, on the other hand, present a much wider variation with many different forms for indicative and subjunctive, singular and plural, and strong or weak verbs. Like nouns, adjectives and pronouns also present gender, case, and, in the case of adjectives, weak and strong forms and the only parts of speech that are not inflected are adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions. A consequence of this complicated inflectional system is that Old English word order was freer and “there were just a few common word-orders in Old English classes” (Baker 115). Apart from the Subject-Verb order that makes the norm today, in Old English Verb-Subject order was common in clauses introduced by adverbs such as þā, þonne, þanon, þider, and ne or conjunctions such as and/ond or ac (Baker 117). In subordinate clauses and clauses introduced by and/ond or ac sometimes the verb comes indeed after the subject, but very late in the sentence, following other sentence parts (Baker 118). As strange as these differences may sound, they are, nevertheless, marks of many synthetic languages. Old English will suffer many more changes after the Norman Conquest that will transform it in the analytic, easy to study, lingua franca with very few inflections that Modern English is today.
Lexicon
Finally, Old English lexicon was also very different from Modern English vocabulary, but it bore the marks of its time and of the people its speakers came in contact. Its development depended mostly on its own resources inherited from Proto-Indo-European, so the majority of its new words were created by adding prefixes and suffixes to the already existing vocabulary. As Barber suggests, Old English adjectives could derive from nouns by adding suffixes such as –ig, –lēas, and –ful as in blōdig or þancful, and adverbs were formed from adjectives by means of the suffixes such as –e or –lice as in fœste or blindlīce (121). A large number of prefixes, especially the prefixes for- and ge- were added to verbs as in forberstan or gegangan and many words were also formed by compounding; Old English is extremely creative when it comes such compounds in kennings such as hronrade or freothu-webbe. Nevertheless, Old English also borrowed many words from other languages. Celtic, for example, one of the languages still spoken in England throughout the time had some, albeit little, influence on Old English with words such as “brocc (‘badger’) and torr (‘rock’)” (Townend, 80). Latin too had an important influence, especially after the conversion to Christianity (but also before, through language contact, but this contact was not so focused on religious terms) with loans including words like altar, mass, martyr, triumph, wall, etc. (Townend, 91). Old Norse which also provided Old English with loans, but fewer. All these characteristics and loans depict not only various ethnicities that cohabited and developed together, but also the main preoccupations and the ingenuity of the people of the time. Traces from Old English lexicon are still around today. See below an fascinating story of words of Old English etymology that we still use.
Conclusion
Old English might not exist as a spoken language, but that does not make it less fascinating. Its study is more difficult than the study of Latin due to a relatively smaller number of scholars and sources keeping it alive in classrooms or museums. Yet that does not mean that the culture which has generated it is dead. Works of literature such as the ones I mentioned in the beginning of the entry and the remaining lexical or grammatical features from Old English that survive in Modern English will always speak of the very interesting beliefs and values of the group of people that generated or used them.
Works Cited
Baker, Peter S. Introduction to Old English. 3rd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2012.
Barber, Charles. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1099.
Bede, the Venerable. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price and revised by R. E. Latham. Penguin Books, 1990.
Van Gelderen, Elly. A History of the English Language. Revised ed., John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.
Townend, Matthew. “Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French.” The Oxford History of English. Updated ed., edited by Lynda Mugglestone, Oxford University Press, 2012.
LangueBleue 
Thanks for a concise overview. I especially like the brief sketch of word formation in OE.
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