Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxon or Old English (A.S. Englisc) is the ancestor of Modern English. It is a West Germanic Language and like Dutch and Low Saxon (Low German) it did not go through the High German Consonant Shift.

The People

The Saxons were invited to Britain to help fight off the Picts. A large migration of Saxons then moved from modern Northern Germany and Holland to England. The next few centuries they expanded westward constantly and gained more land. The people then became mixed with the Romano-British people already living there.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, Danish Vikings invaded parts of England. The Old Norse influence can still be seen today.

Orthography and Phonology

Runic

Anglo-Saxon Runic alphabet

Early forms of Anglo-Saxon writing was in Runic. It was an expansion of the original 24 rune Fuþark, and had become Fuþorc. Because the language had shifted to include new sounds, the alphabet itself shifted and included several new letters that had not been in the Elder Fuþark. However they did not develop the one Staff system similar to the runic designs in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

When the Latin Alphabet was introduced, Anglo-Saxon added two symbols to the Latin alphabet from Runic, those would be "þ" /θ/ and "ƿ" /w/ from runic, called Thorn and Wynn respectively.

Alphabet

The Old English Alphabet was a Latin based alphabet and included a few extra symbols that modern English speakers would not necessarily recognize. The diagraphs were also quite different than modern spelling and included cg /ʤ/ and c /ʧ/ and sc /ʃ/. The latter two only become those sounds before or after a front unrounded vowels, otherwise they are /k/ and /sk/ respectively. The letter g becomes /j/ next to front vowels. This is how gear becomes year. The common verbal prefix for the past participle is ge- which was pronounced /jə/ and this sound was preserved into Middle English as y- such as in Geoffrey Chaucer.

Old English did not use the letters v and z, because f and s became /v/ and /z/. The letters þ and ð both represented the inter-dental fricative /θ/ (initially and finally) and /ð/ (between vowels). This would mean that that all the fricatives would be voiced between vowels, and voiceless in other cases.

Morphology

Nouns

Gender

There are there Genders in Old English: Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter. These are the same genders in Latin, as well as modern Russian and German. Like most languages which have genders, Nouns which reflecting living things are usually indicated in the Gender of the noun, but a majority is completely random.

Cases

Unlike Modern English, Anglo-Saxon was filled with noun inflections denoting the case of the noun. The only one that survived through the Middle English era was the -'s ending denoting the original Genitive case. The cases were Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, and Dative.

Strong and Weak

Like with Verbs, Anglo-Saxon had many nouns which changed their stems, both in the plural and sometimes during some of the cases of the singular. These are the reasons for irregular nouns in Modern English with stem changes, such as Man-Men (AS Mann-Menn in Nom.). This is often how Anglo-Saxon nouns are categorized.

Example charts

Cases	Dæg 'Day'	Dagas 'Days'
Nominative	dæg	dagas
Genitive	dæges	daga
Dative	dæge	dagum
Acustive	dæg	dagas

Sources and External Links

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/runic.htm#futhorc