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Old English | Anglo-SaxonOld English was an early form of the English Language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons around the mid 5th Century up until around the start of the 12th Century. The term "Anglo-Saxon" is used to describe people that were either from the Germanic tribes of the Angles or the Saxons.
The Angles and the Saxons came across to Britain from some of the Germanic tribes of Eastern Europe, as well as the Jutes and the Frisii, shortly after the departure of the Roman troops that were stationed in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon language was closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon and surprisingly was closer to Modern German or Modern Icelandic than to Modern English. The language absorbed a large portion of it's grammar from Classical Latin with the arrival of Christian Missionaries. Classical Latin during this period of history was referred to as a lingua franca (unifying language), because Latin was the language spoken by scholars and religious leaders and was considered the language of knowledge. As part of the Latin assimilation into Old English many words started to be pronounced phonetically, for example: Knight was pronounced "kniht". Old English was again modified with the introduction of the Vikings into Britain, they brought with them the language Old Norse which added words like: "sky", "window", "give", "take" and the pronoun "they". The language itself is rather complex, being fully inflected and having five grammatical cases. (Normative, Genitive, Accusative, Dative and Instrumental), as well as the cases the language also featured three grammatical numbers (singular, plural and dual), as well as three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). The Anglo-Saxon people lived in a section of Great Britain which is now located between Northern England and Southern Scotland. As seen in the map to the left. |