Древнеанглийский язык: история и происхождение

Earliest historical form of English
the early medieval language of the Anglo Saxons

Old English (Englisċ, ), or Anglo Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo Saxon settlers in the mid 5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid 7th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced for several centuries by Anglo Norman (a type of French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during the subsequent period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo Norman, developing into what is now known as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As the Germanic settlers became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language; and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman conquest. Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo Saxon kingdoms: Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period, Within Old English grammar nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, and word order is much freer. In Old English, this word was derived from Angles (one of the Germanic tribes who settled in parts of Great Britain in the 5th century). During the 9th century, all invading Germanic tribes were referred to as Englisċ. It has been hypothesised that the Angles acquired their name because their land on the coast of Jutland (now mainland Denmark and Schleswig Holstein) resembled a fishhook. Proto Germanic anguz also had the meaning of 'narrow', referring to the shallow waters near the coast. That word ultimately goes back to Proto Indo European h₂enǵʰ , also meaning 'narrow'. Another theory is that the derivation of 'narrow' is the more likely connection to angling (as in fishing), which itself stems from a Proto Indo European (PIE) root meaning bend, angle. The semantic link is the fishing hook, which is curved or bent at an angle. In any case, the Angles may have been called such because they were a fishing people or were originally descended from such, and therefore England would mean 'land of the fishermen', and English would be 'the fishermen's language'.

Just as Modern English is not monolithic, Old English varied according to place. Despite the diversity of language of the Germanic speaking migrants who established Old English in England and southeastern Scotland, it is possible to reconstruct proto Old English as a fairly unitary language. For the most part, the differences between the attested regional dialects of Old English developed within England and southeastern Scotland, rather than on the Mainland of Europe. Although from the tenth century Old English writing from all regions tended to conform to a written standard based on Late West Saxon, in speech Old English continued to exhibit much local and regional variation, which remained in Middle English and to some extent Modern English dialects. The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Mercian and Northumbrian are together referred to as Anglian. In terms of geography the Northumbrian region lay north of the Humber River; the Mercian lay north of the Thames and south of the Humber River; West Saxon lay south and southwest of the Thames; and the smallest, Kentish region lay southeast of the Thames, a small corner of England. The Kentish region, settled by the Jutes from Jutland, has the scantest literary remains. Due to the centralisation of power and the destruction wrought by Viking invasions, there is relatively little written record of the non West Saxon dialects after Alfred's unification. Some Mercian texts continued to be written, however, and the influence of Mercian is apparent in some of the translations produced under Alfred's programme, many of which were produced by Mercian scholars. Other dialects certainly continued to be spoken, as is evidenced by the continued variation between their successors in Middle and Modern English. In fact, what would become the standard forms of Middle English and of Modern English are descended from Mercian rather than West Saxon, while Scots developed from the Northumbrian dialect. It was once claimed that, owing to its position at the heart of the Kingdom of Wessex, the relics of Anglo Saxon accent, idiom and vocabulary were best preserved in the dialect of Somerset. For details of the sound differences between the dialects, see .

Nouns decline for five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental; three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; and two numbers: singular, and plural; and are strong or weak. The instrumental is vestigial and only used with the masculine and neuter singular and often replaced by the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retain separate instrumental forms. There is also sparse early Northumbrian evidence of a sixth case: the locative. The evidence comes from Northumbrian Runic texts (e. g., on rodi "on the Cross"). Adjectives agree with nouns in case, gender, and number, and can be either strong or weak. Pronouns and sometimes participles agree in case, gender, and number. First person and second person personal pronouns occasionally distinguish dual number forms. The definite article sē and its inflections serve as a definite article ("the"), a demonstrative adjective ("that"), and demonstrative pronoun. Other demonstratives are þēs ("this"), and ġeon ("that over there"). These words inflect for case, gender, and number. Adjectives have both strong and weak sets of endings, weak ones being used when a definite or possessive determiner is also present. Verbs conjugate for three persons: first, second, and third; two numbers: singular, plural; two tenses: present, and past; three moods: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative; and are strong (exhibiting ablaut) or weak (exhibiting a dental suffix). Verbs have two infinitive forms: bare and bound; and two participles: present and past. The subjunctive has past and present forms. Finite verbs agree with subjects in person and number. The future tense, passive voice, and other aspects are formed with compounds. Adpositions are mostly before but are often after their object. If the object of an adposition is marked in the dative case, an adposition may conceivably be located anywhere in the sentence. Remnants of the Old English case system in Modern English are in the forms of a few pronouns (such as I/me/mine, she/her, who/whom/whose) and in the possessive ending 's, which derives from the masculine and neuter genitive ending es. The modern English plural ending (e)s derives from the Old English as, but the latter applied only to "strong" masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative cases; different plural endings were used in other instances. Old English nouns had grammatical gender, while modern English has only natural gender. Pronoun usage could reflect either natural or grammatical gender when those conflicted, as in the case of ƿīf, a neuter noun referring to a female person. In Old English's verbal compound constructions are the beginnings of the compound tenses of Modern English. Old English verbs include strong verbs, which form the past tense by altering the root vowel, and weak verbs, which use a suffix such as de. No do support in questions and negatives. Questions were usually formed by inverting subject and finite verb, and negatives by placing ne before the finite verb, regardless of which verb. Multiple negatives can stack up in a sentence intensifying each other (negative concord). Sentences with subordinate clauses of the type "when X, Y" (e. g. "When I got home, I ate dinner") don't use a wh type conjunction, but rather a th type correlative conjunction such as þā, otherwise meaning "then" (e. g. þā X, þā Y in place of "when X, Y"). The wh words are used only as interrogatives and as indefinite pronouns. Similarly, wh forms were not used as relative pronouns. Instead, the indeclinable word þe is used, often preceded by (or replaced by) the appropriate form of the article/demonstrative se.

Like other historical languages, Old English has been used by scholars and enthusiasts of later periods to create texts either imitating Old English literature or deliberately transferring it to a different cultural context. Examples include Alistair Campbell and J. R. R. Tolkien. Ransom Riggs uses several Old English words, such as syndrigast (singular, peculiar), ymbryne (period, cycle), etc., dubbed as "Old Peculiar" ones. Advocates of linguistic purism in English often look to older forms of English, including Old English, as a means of either reviving old words or coining new ones. A number of websites devoted to Modern Paganism and historical reenactment offer reference material and forums promoting the active use of Old English. There is also an Old English version of Wikipedia. However, one investigation found that many Neo Old English texts published online bear little resemblance to the historical language and have many basic grammatical mistakes.