Old English comparative overview

This article appeared in Silly Linguistics #3

Follow us on Bluesky for fun and interesting language content https://sillyli.ng/cKyWUs

By Timothy Patrick Snyder

As languages evolve over time, there are subtle changes that happen, causing large ramifications in its history. These changes can be related to historical events, or they just happen as linguistic patterns follow the fashions of the people. As unsurprising as this may sound, English has a long and complicated history, that results in the language spoken today being largely incomprehensible in comparison to its ancestral form.

The development of Old English (OE) to Modern English (ModE) is a continuum, but if one take them out of that continuum and compares them, they appear to be two largely different languages phonetically, lexically, and grammatically. Here we will briefly discuss some of those differences in relation to the morphology.

Before getting into some of the details, something important that has to be acknowledged is that Old English had four major dialects: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Of those, most of the texts come from West Saxon, so that will be whence most of the examples will come.

Nouns

Old English and Modern English nouns differ considerably, and it cannot be more evident than looking at the morphological changes. Modern English nouns have singular and plural, and possessive (or genitive) forms. Old English had five cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental), two numbers (singular and plural, and three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). It should be noted that the instrumental cases gradually fell out of use and merged with the dative during the OE period.

This may seem like a lot of different forms, but nouns follow two general and predictable patterns in addition to this, this is where they are either weak or strong. Strong nouns have more varied forms than weak nouns. Below are examples of masculine strong, than weak nouns.

Strong Example:

Case	boy	boys	Endings
Nom	cniht	cnihtas	–	-as
Acc	cniht	cnihtas	–	-as
Gen	cnihtes	cnihta	-es	-a
Dat	cnihte	cnihtum	-e	-um

Weak Example:

Case	man	men	Endings
Nom	guma	guman	-a	-an
Acc	guman	guman	-an	-an
Gen	guman	gumena	-an	-ena
Dat	guman	gumum	-an	-um

Luckily, many of the weak nouns decline in a similar fashion in masculine and feminine nouns (there are only two major neuter weak nouns). Strong masculine and neuter nouns resemble each other slightly and feminine nouns are a bit different.

This is much more complex than Modern English, which just has only a handful of endings for regular nouns:

boy	boys	–	-s
boy’s	boys’	-’s	-s’

Articles and Pronouns

Modern English articles are divided into definite and indefinite, but they only have a few forms: the and a/an. OE on the other hand has a definite article for each case, each gender in the singular, and combined plural forms, which resembles Modern German in many ways. However, there are no indefinite articles in Old English. The paradigm is as follows:

	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter	All Genders
Nominative	se	seo	þæt	þa
Accusative	þone	þa	þæt	þa
Dative	þam	þære	þam	þæm
Genitive	þæs	þære	þæs	þæra, þara
Instrumental	þy, þon	þære	þy, þon	þæm

All of these forms can also double as third person or relative pronouns. The most common relative pronoun in OE is the particle þe. That particle is sometimes used in conjunction with the article/pronouns above as well.

Personal pronouns in Modern English have subject, object and possessive forms. Old English has, unsurprisingly, various forms, and there are also dual forms in the first and second person. So instead of just a form similar to I (ic) and we (we), there is also a form that translates to we two (wit).

Adjectives and Adverbs

As if the forms above did not vary enough from the Modern English, Old English adjectives had a series of weak and strong endings, and were likewise declined by case, gender, and number. Strong endings were used when the article was used by itself with the noun, and weak endings were if the adjective followed an article or possessive pronoun.

That means that, including the instrumental, there could be as many as 50 endings presented on an adjective paradigm. However, many of the adjective forms match the noun forms and many of them overlap in form, making it more manageable. That also doesn’t even include the comparative and superlative forms! But that is still huge difference in comparison with Modern English which does not any adjective endings.

Adverbs often had no endings, although sometimes an -e could be added to and adjective to indicate an adverb. Adverbs also have comparative and superlative forms.

Verbs

Verbs in Old English are rather complex in comparison to Modern English, but there are some crucial differences. Old English verbs are conjugated according to the person and number of the subject. There are first, second, and third person singular forms, and then plural forms. The past is formed based on if the verb is weak or strong. Weak verbs have an ending similar to the Modern -(e)d ending, which is known as a dental suffix. Strong verbs have a vowel change, and some even seem similar to the ModE “irregular” verbs. The perfect tenses are formed in ModE with the verb to have, which is similar in OE, save that with verbs of motion, the verb wesan.

Modern English expresses the present tense in a simple way, but also in what is known as the progressive and emphatic forms. The progressive uses the verb to be with a verb+ing, and the emphatic uses the verb to do. Old English sometimes used the verb don in a similar way to ModE with to do, but not nearly as regularly. All three of these forms can be used to translate a simple verb found in Old English.

A large difference between ModE and OE is that OE did not have a future tense. When translating Latin texts in the future tense, the present tense, in either indicative or subjunctive, was used. This means that context is the biggest indicator of the future tense in Old English.

Another major difference is how OE uses the subjective, which is substantially more than how often ModE does. This is made all the more clear by the fact that OE had differentiating forms of the subjective.

Conclusions

It can be argued that Old English and Modern English different so much as to be considered foreign languages. I usually compare the differences as being similar to the differences between German and English. Some words and phrases in OE may look very similar to their ModE counterparts, whereas some look very alien in shape and sound. These are the kinds of difference which make learning older languages all the more worthwhile and enriching.

Read more fun and interesting articles about language and linguistics in the Silly Linguistics magazine. Click here for more info https://sillyli.ng/6X3hyA or subscribe below