The Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes left their homelands in northern Germany, Denmark and northern Holland in the 5th and 6th centuries and crossed the North Sea to Great Britain. Historians are not sure why the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Some sources say that Saxon warriors were invited to come to England to fight the Romans, but there may have been other reasons. They may have migrated because their land often flooded and it was difficult to grow crops, so they were looking for new places to settle down and farm.

The Anglo-Saxons took control of most of Britain, although they never conquered Scotland, Wales or Cornwall. They divided the country into kingdoms, each with its own royal family. The stronger kingdoms often took control of the weaker kingdoms.

By around AD 600 the five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Kent and Anglia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/anglosaxons/invasion/index.shtml

• A high use of inflectional affixes, such as noun suffixes
• The same basic word order as Modern English but with more flexibility in order due to the use of suffixes.
• A closer match between sounds and written symbols than Modern English.
• Writing system included letters that have since been lost.

Inflectional Affixes in Old English

Old English was a synthetic language (synthetic in terms of sticking things together): it relied on inflectional endings (grammatical suffixes) much more than Modern English does. For example, in Modern English we know the subject of a sentence because of its location in the sentence, but in Old English, the subject was marked by an inflectional ending (suffix). Many of the suffixes from Old English have since been lost.

Noun Suffixes in Old English

• Example-Singular: se stan (the stone)
  • Nominative (subject) se stan
  • Genitive (possessive) ðæs stanes
  • Dative (indirect object) ðæm stane
  • Accusative (direct object) ðone stan
  • Instrumental (object of prepositions) ðy stane

• Example-Plural: ða stanas (the stones)
  • Nominative (subject) ða stanas
  • Genitive (possessive) ðara stana
  • Dative (indirect object) ðæm stanum
  • Accusative (direct object) ða stanas
  • Instrumental (object of prepositions) ðæm stanum

Remaining Suffixes in Modern English

Modern English has only three remaining inflectional endings for nouns:

• Plural –s (nominative, dative, accusative, instrumental) the stones
• Possessive –’s (genitive singular) the stone’s
• Plural Possessive –s’ (genitive plural) the stones’

Word Order Changes

Every language has a preferred word order for its major grammatical relations: Subject, Verb, direct Object.
There are six possible word orders:

• SOV (German)
• SVO (English, all versions)
• VSO
• VOS
• OVS
• OSV

As English began to lose its affixes, however, it changed from being a synthetic language to being an analytic language. That is, English changed from relying on inflectional affixes for grammatical meaning to relying on word order and functional words for grammatical meaning. In short, we can say that English gained rigidity in syntactic word order as a way to show the role of each word in a sentence and lost its flexibility because it lost too many affixes.

Writing in Old English

Old English was written with a greater phonetic relationship between its sounds and symbols. As the language changed, the written form also changed, and we have lost some of the symbols.

The table below identifies some of these lost letters.

Activity: Seeing Lost Letters

Here is a sample of an Old English Manuscript that allows you to see some of the lost letters. Begin with the image of an actual Old English manuscript and see if you can identify any of the lost letters as well as some of the letters we stiull use. For help, a modern font transcription has been provided for you below the original.

Highly Phonetic Alphabet

If you try reading the manuscript sample out loud, you need to know that every letter is pronounced in every word. For a pronounciation guide, try the University of Calgary Old English site.

Reading the sample will not only give you an idea of how much this language has changed, but will be a reasonable inpression of how a NNS speaker with some English ability, but still a beginning level, may percieve what they are doing.