Grammar And Vocabulary Old English

Grammar And Vocabulary Old English

In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than modern English is.  That is, there were more case endings for nouns, more person and number endings for verbs, a more complicated pronoun system, various endings for adjectives, and so on. Present-day English has only two cases for nouns common case and possessive case Adjectives now have no case system at all. On the other hand, we now use a more rigid word order and more structure words (prepositions, auxiliaries, and the like) to express relationships than Old English did.

In vocabulary, most of the Old English words are what we may call native English:  that is, words which have not been borrowed from other languages but which have been a part of English ever since English was a part of Indo-european. Old English did certainly contain borrowed words. We have seen that many borrowings were coming In from Norse. Rather large numbers had been borrowed from Latin, too. Some of these were taken while the Anglo-saxons were still on the Continent (cheese, butter, bishop, kettle, etc . ) But the great majority of Old English words were native English. Now, on the contrary, the majority of words in English are borrowed, and only about 14 percent are native.

Sometime between the years 1000 and 1200 various important changes took place in the structure of English, and Old English became Middle English.

The political event which facilitated these changes was the Norman Conquest. The Normans, as the name shows, came originally from Scandinavia. In the early tenth century they established themselves in northern France, adopted the French language, and developed a vigorous kingdom and a very passable civilization. In the year 1066, led by Duke William, they crossed the Channel and made themselves masters of England. For the next several hundred years, England was ruled by kings whose first language was French.

One might wonder why, after the Norman Conquest, French did not become the national language, replacing English entirely. The reason is that the Conquest was not a national migration, as the earlier Anglo-saxon invasion had been. Great numbers of Normans came to England, but they came as rulers and landlords. French became the language of the court, the language of the nobility, the language of polite society, the language of literature. But it did not replace English as the language of the people. There must always have been hundreds of towns and villages in which French was never heard except when visitors of high station passed through.

But English, though it survived as the national language was profoundly changed after the Norman Conquest. It is in vocabulary that the effects of the Conquest are most obvious French ceased, after a hundred years or so, to be the native language of very many people in England, but it continued and continues still - to be a zealously cultivated second language, the mirror of elegance and civilization. When one spoke English, one introduced not only French ideas and French things but also their French names. This was not only easy but socially useful. To pepper one's conversation with French expressions was to show that one was well-bred elegant, au courant. The last sentence shows that the process is not yet dead. By using au courant instead of, say  abreast of things, the writer indicates that he is no dull clod  who knows only English but an elegant person aware of how  things are done in le haut monde.

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