Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/412

Rh 392 Transition period. But the division given above, which was, I believe, first proposed by Mr Sweet, represents better the development of the language. The OLD ENGLISH, or Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was highly inflexional, though its inflexions were not so full as those of the older Moeso-Gothic, and considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their classical periods. They corresponded on the whole to those of modern literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms were more distinct ; for example, the German guten answers to three Old English forms, god ne, yodum, yodan ; guterto two yodre, gddra ; liebtenio two, lufodoii and lufeden. Nouns had four cases, Nomina tive, Accusative (not always distinct), Genitive, Dative, the latter used also with prepositions to express locative, instru mental, and most ablative relations ; of a distinct instru mental case only vestiges occur. There were several declensions of nouns, the main division being that known in Teutonic languages generally as strong and weak, a distinction also extending to adjectives in such wise that every adjective assumed either inflexion as determined by associated grammatical forms. The first and second personal pronouns possessed a dual ; the third person had a complete declension of the stem he, instead of being made up as now of the three seen in he, she, they. The verb dis tinguished the subjunctive from the indicative mood, but had only two inflected tenses, present and past, the former also used for the future, the latter for all the shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponded generally to that of German. Thus from King Alfred s additions to his translation of Orosiu.s : Donne ]&amp;gt;y ylcan diCge hi hine to )&amp;gt;aem ade beran wyllaS, bonne todaelalThi his feoh. baet ]&amp;gt;aer to lafe biS sefter Jweni gedrynce and )wem plegan. on fif o6$e syx. hwilum on ma. swa svva faes feos andefn biS. &quot; Then the same day [that] they him to the pile bear will, then divide they his property that there to remainder is, after the drinking and the sports, into five or six, at times into more, according as of the property the value is.&quot; The poetry was distinguished by alliteration, and the abundant use of figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and archaic words never found in prose. Thus in the following lines from Beowulf : Street waes s^an-fah, stg wisode 6 umum aet^sedere. f/uft-byrne scan //eard Aond-locen. Aring-iren scir Song in searwum, ba hie to sele furftum /n hyra ^ry re r/eatwum, ^angan cwomon. 1 The street was stone-variegated, (it) pointed the path To (the) men together ; the war-mailcoat shone, &quot; Hard hand-locked. The ring-iron sheer (bright ring- mail) Sang in their cunning-trappings, as they to hall forth In their horror-accoutrements to go came.&quot; The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few foreign elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives entirely from its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned from the Romans in the German wars had been adopted into the common Teutonic tongue, and are found in English as in the allied dialects. Such were stroete, street (via strata), camp, battle, cdsere, C0esar, mil, mile, pin, punishment ; perhaps cyrice, church, liscop, bishop, Iceden, Latin language, cese, cheese, butor, butter, pipor, pepper, olfend, camel (elephantus), purtd, pound, ynce, inch (uncia), and a few others. The relations of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent those of destroyers ; and with the exception of the proper names of places and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained by the new population, few British 1 Thorpe s Beowulf, I. 645. words found their way into the Old English. Among these are named broc, a badger, brec, breeches, clut, clout, pul, pool, and a few words relating to the employment of field or household menials. Still fewer words seem to have been adopted from the provincial Latin, almost the only certain one being castra, applied to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as ccestre, ceaster, now found in com position as -caster, -chester, -cester. The introduction and gradual adoption of Christianity, brought a new series of Latin words connected with the offices of the church, the accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign produc tions either actually made known, or mentioned in the Scriptures and devotional books. Such were mynster (monasterium), celmesse (eleemosyna), candel (candela), turtle (turtur), fie (ficus), cedar (cedrus). These words, whose number increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are commonly called Latin of the second period, the Latin of the first period including the Latin words brought by the English from Germany, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the provincials or the Welsh, which have not hitherto been separated from them. The Danish invasions of the 8th and 10th centuries resulted in the establishment of extensive Danish and Norwegian popula tions, about the basin of the Humber and its tributaries, and above Morecambe Bay. Although these Scandinavian settlers must have greatly affected the language of their own localities, few traces of their influence are to be found in the literature of the Old English period. As with the greater part of the words adopted from the Celtic, it was not until after the dominion of the Norman had overlaid all preceding conquests, and the new English began to emerge from the ruins of the old, that Danish words in any number made their appearance in books, as equally native with the Anglo-Saxon. The earliest specimens we have of English date to the end of the 7th century, and belong to the Anglian or northern dialect, which, under the political eminence of the early Northumbrian kings from Edwin to Ecgfrifi, aided perhaps by the learning of the scholars of lona, first attained to literary distinction. Of this literature in its original form mere fragments exist, one of the most in teresting of which consists of the verses uttered 1 y Bseda on his deathbed, and preserved in a nearly contemporary MS. : Fore there neid-faerae. naenig uuiurthit thonc-suotturra. than him tharf sic, to ymb-hycggannse. aer his hin-ionq;ie, huaet his gastae. godaes aeththn yflao^ acfter deoth-daege. doemid uueorthae. Before the inevitable journey no one becomes More thought-prudent than he has need, To ponder, ere his hence-going, What, to his ghost, of good or of ill, After death-day, deemed shall be. But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its West-Saxon form, the earliest literary remains of which date to the 9th century, when under the political supremacy of Wessex and the scholarship of King Alfred it became the literary language of the English nation, the classical &quot;Anglo-Saxon.&quot; If our materials were more extensive, it would probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several periods ; as it is, Mr Sweet, who has laboured chiefly in this field, has pointed out considerable differences between the &quot; early West-Saxon &quot; of King Alfred and the later language of the llth century, 2 the earlier language having numerous inflexional and phonetic distinctions which are &quot; levelled &quot; in the later, showing that the tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical stage existed quite z See Mr Sweet s preface to his edition of King Alfred s West-Saxon Version of Gregory s Pastoral Care, Early English Text Society, 1871-2.