The influence of the Anglo-Saxon language on modern English by Toni Mount

     As an author, I’m fascinated by the English language with all its quirky words, strange spellings and vast vocabulary which gives writers such a wealth of words that we can describe a single mood in so many ways without repeating ourselves. For example, from my window, I can see the day is murky, cheerless, dismal, gloomy, drab, sullen, misty, drizzly, damp, grey, etc. But how has this come about?

If we were to travel back in time to, say, sixth century England, we would hear our forebears, the Anglo-Saxon peoples, speaking a language which sounds nothing like modern English. If we understand German, there may be a few more similarities in the sound of the language but, even so, it’s quite different. They are speaking Old English, a West Germanic language used in England between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The people call their language Aenglisc, [pronounced: Enn-glish] and their home is Aengelcynn or Englaland.

Some interesting words change over time to become quite unrecognisable and hlaf has a fascinating story to tell. The word originally meant ‘loaf’, the ‘h’ sounded softly [and eventually dropped], followed by ‘laaff’, and this is how the Anglo-Saxons referred to bread and also to food in general. Surprisingly, hlaf had other uses too. The head of the household was the hlaf-weard or loaf-warden and anyone who ate the food was a hlaf-aeta. The woman of the house was the hlaefdige or loaf-kneader, using the feminine form and where dige became our modern ‘dough’. Hlaf-weard evolved, losing ‘h’ and ‘f’, running the words together so it sounded like ‘lahrd, then the Scots ‘laird’ and, ultimately, ‘lord’. So that grand title originally meant the guy in charge of the food. Hlaefdige went through similar changes, dropping letters and with ‘g’ pronounced as ‘y’, to become ‘lady’. 

But across the land, the language may have sounded quite different because there were not only the Angles and the Saxons, but Jutes, Frisians, Swedes and maybe other groups from Europe. Also, there were the Roman Britons who had remnants of the Celtic language, spoken before the Romans arrived in 43AD, to which Latin had been added. So people were speaking different languages and using various dialects with many different words for the same thing. And then the Vikings arrived to add to the mix yet they all need to communicate with each other and this aspect led to English evolving in a unique way.

Like its original tongue, Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic languages, Old English had male, female and neuter genders in words and was an inflected language, so words changed according to their position, whether a noun was the subject or the object of a sentence, for example. Latin has six singular and six plural versions of a noun, depending on whether it’s the subject or object, if it’s being spoken to directly, or if it possesses something, is over, under or on something else or moving, etc. But in modern English, a table is a table, whatever position it has in a sentence and it has no gender so that’s irrelevant to any adjective used to describe it. If you’ve studied most other European languages based on Latin, such as French, Spanish or Italian, you’ll know how complicated they can be. Likewise, the Germanic languages are equally tricky. Of course, modern English suffers from quirky, awkward spelling and a few irregular verbs, like ‘to be’ which is a nasty one, but the genders and declensions of nouns are gone. Why did Old English lose most of its inflections?

A lot of unpleasantness is often blamed on the Vikings but it’s because of them that English dropped many of its complications. There came a time when half of England was known as the Danelaw when most of the eastern side of England, north of London and the River Thames – both Celtic words, in case you were wondering – was occupied by the Danes with their own language, laws and customs. They were no longer marauding Vikings but – mostly – peaceful, having settled down to farm the land and trade with their neighbours.

But it’s difficult to do business with people you can’t understand and so a new language began to evolve, incorporating both English and Danish words. The grammar of the two didn’t have a lot in common and genders clashed so frequently – whether a cartwheel was masculine, feminine or neuter, did it really matter when you needed yours mended, urgently? – that they were set aside.

Did you know that whether you’re angry with your husband or give him a hug, whether there is a gale blowing or fog outside, if you give a guest you don’t trust a kick on the leg or toss him out the window, you can’t do any of these things without using Old Danish words adopted into English. (Words of Danish origin are underlined.)

The language we call English today is actually a hybrid with thousands of Danish words, along with Latin from the Church, Norman French from William the Conqueror’s gang, Hindi from the time Britain was big in India and a whole assortment of vocabulary from all over the world.     

Sometimes, both the English and Danish words remain in use but take on slightly different meanings, for example, the Old English scyrte is a short, loose garment worn by men and women or as we say ‘shirt’. But Old Danish has skirt to describe the same item of clothing which we now use for the longer lower half of a garment. 

With modern English having evolved from so many other languages and with Hallowe’en coming up

we mustn’t forget ‘ghastly ghosts’ – the ‘gh’ at the beginning of a word coming from Dutch – no wonder our spelling is so weird – OE ‘wyrd’ meaning ‘destiny’, so that’s odd in itself – and sometimes seems plain silly. One of our strangest quirks is ‘gh’ at the end of a word, as in cough [coff], dough [doh], plough [plow], rough [ruff], daughter [dawter], caught [cawt], etc. Originally, this ‘gh’ was a sound like clearing your throat, as in the Scottish loch but what’s a little variety between friends?

So now you’ve heard something about how our language English has come to be, perhaps you can forgive us our illogical spellings and pronunciation because they all made sense once upon a time.

Toni Mount is the best-selling author of several non-fiction history books which concentrate on the ordinary lives of people from history. Her latest book is How To Survive in Anglo-Saxon England

This edition looks at the place that would be called England, after the Romans left and before the Normans arrived. For convenience she has called this Anglo-Saxon England but it was much more complicate than that. It was a turbulent time, with the arrival of invaders from Europe and a new religion to cope with, yet a time of art and music too - a fascinating place to visit if you are given the chance.

This new book on Anglo-Saxons in the third in her series for Pen & Sword Books, the previous two were on the medieval and Tudor periods and a fourth is in the pipeline for next year. Imagine you’ve been transported back in time and you have to start a new life there. How will you fit in? Where will you live? What will you eat? Where will you shop? Who do go to if you get ill, or if you’re mugged in the
street?

All these questions, and many, many more, will be answered in this series of how-to guides for time travellers. Part self-help guide, part survival guide, these books will be written in a lively, engaging and humorous style, helping the reader to deal with the many problems and new experiences that they will face, and also help them to thrive in their new environment