The English language started at around 449 when Germany tribes emanated to England and settled. The English inhabitants who welcomed the Germans had a role to play in the modification of English because they produced some features to the German speakers. Missionaries from Ireland and Rome also impacted the Old English since Latin played a role in the development of the language too. Existing evidence concerning this language preserves on manuscripts, wood, and stone monuments. On the other hand, Middle English is usually considered to have originated at around 1150, and this was immediately after the synthetic character of English started to change. Many points gain consideration at the end of the middle English, and they include the great vowel shift, introduction of printing and the rising to the throne of Henry the seventh. Both the old and middle English have many significant similarities and differences, and the paper seeks to give a comparative commentary on the English.
A look at the Nouns in the Old English, the classification is in three genders, and that is masculine, feminine or neuter, and the assigned happened arbitrarily. There exist four significant grammatical cases in the Old English, and they take Latin forms; Dative, Nominative, Accusative and Genitive (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204). The Nominative applies to the subject, the accusative for direct objects, the genitive expresses possession and dative is to the direct objects. The classification of Old English nouns is in the grammatical genders of masculine, feminine or neuter and they also classify as being either ‘weak’ or ‘strong’. The distinctiveness of the inflectional endings is what determines the classification of choice. For example; for grammatical genders, masculine can be Stan and feminine can be cwen or queen and neuter can be wif or wife (Hiltunen and Risto, pp.60).
On the other hand, the loss of the gender system in the 13th century has had a significant influence in the Middle English thus prompting increased use of the gender-neutral identifier (the) (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204). The gender Classes loss is part of the 16th-century general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes. From the Old English, however, there was an extension of the suffix (-as) to (-es, es) in the Middle English. When it took the plural form, suffix (-an) became (-en) in the Modern English, and it applies in plurals like children, brethren and oxen. The Modern English has lost suffixes (-s) and (-es) since they mostly displaced in the 15th century all over England (Van and Bettelou, pp. 93).
The verbs in Old English had only two tenses, and that is present and past. For an analysis of the future, the present tense was applicable, and the past tense signalled the past participle. Moreover, the verbs in Old English have only three moods. They are the imperative that is applicable when there is the issuance of commands, the indicative that applies when statements of fact made, the subjective which is helpful while making conditional statements and the reported speech (Hiltunen, Risto, pp.60). The Germanic languages divided the verb into two classes of either ‘weak’ or ‘strong’, and in Modern English, it refers to either regular or irregular verbs. The strong verbs’ vowel is modified while the weak verbs require ‘ed’ at the end, but the vowel is unchanged. For example, a weak verb can be walk, walked and a strong verb can be sing, sung, sang (Kroch and Ann, pp.107).
Comparatively, for the verbs in the Middle English, the infinitive form ends in -en or -in. The role of the -in or -en ending is that it can indicate a plural form of a verb. In the past tense, the finish has the possibility of ending with -n, -en, or -ed. In Middle English, -in or -en can be past participle. Some of the comparing words for the old and middle English include the majority of words in Middle English which originated from the Old English. The words were Latin, Anglo-Saxon words and Scandinavians (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204). The words regarding different aspects of culture as law, Christianity, science, medicine, warfare and administration. Some of the law words include defendant, plaintiff, Suit and plea just to name a few. Warfare words include navy, army enemy, peace, siege, lance and besiege. The words concerning Christianity range from the ones that describe the fundamental concepts of Christianity like charity, confession and baptism. Those which connect with the hierarchy of the church like clergy, abbes and chaplain and the ones that refer to places of residence for the church like a cloister, covenant and abbey (Kroch and Ann, pp.107).
Old English adjectives may take the weak or strong form, and one of the critical characteristics that distinguish the Old English language is the application of two sets of declension for modifiers. The strong declension applies with nouns when a definite article is not available and the weak declension aids whenever there is a particular article or a similar word. The decision used in the categorisation of adjectives in the Old English is identical to that of the nouns. It includes nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. The genders are three, i.e., feminine, masculine, and neuter with the facts being either singular or plural (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204).
On the other hand, the declension of the adjectives in Middle English has left only a single trace of -the and the ending -e. The identifier no longer marks for a case or gender and -e comes before plural nouns or when what the adjective represents is a plural noun or pronoun. The -e comes after ‘the’ as possessive pronouns and demonstrative adjectives. In the Middle English alternation of -u/-we in the stem disappears and -e or -we are what replaces it throughout the paradigm (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204).
The personal pronouns in Old English contain first, second and third individual forms. The numbers were either singular, dual or plural and they declined as per standard cases. i.e., nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. In the nominative case, the forms of Old English are (‘I’), (‘you’ singular), (‘he’), (‘it’), (‘we’) and (‘you’ plural). The Old English shows a tendency of exclusive arrangements for practically all individuals, gender and cases and also in conserving addictive to the usual two facts, singular and plural (Quirk and Charles, pp. 204).
Comparatively, Middle English personal pronouns evolved from the ones in Old English. The only exclusion is the third person plural. Also, the nominative form of the feminine third person singular substituted by the demonstrative. Unlike nouns, pronouns that developed during the Old English kept distinct, accusative and nominative forms. The person pronouns also maintained a difference between accusative and dative forms (Van and Bettelou, pp. 93).
The alphabet which applied in writing Old English texts was Latin, and it was Christian missionaries that led to its introduction. Spelling is however fully standardised and sounds, instead of alphabets, apply for spelling phonetically, and the result is that the rendition of the sounds differs. Anglo-Saxon scribes are vital players since they add two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th
sounds and there exists no consistent distinction between them. The nature that non-standardized Anglo-Saxon spelling takes doesn’t offer compensation, and it’s the phonetic spelling which helps in the identification and tracking of the dialectical differences through time. Many Old English words do not include in the Modern English, and the inflectional structure has proved to have been more abundant than its true modern descendant. The sentence structure of the Old English is synthetic language, and this means that inflectional method signalled grammatical structure and word order. Nevertheless, it is an analytic language which makes it more constrained (Van and Bettelou, pp. 93).
As a comparison, the Middle English phonology preserves as a written language. Variations exist in the dialect of Middle English, and they are variant both over time and place. Spelling in the Middle English is not conventional, but it is phonetic. The spelling of words is dependent on how they sound to the person writing the text rather than a formalised system which might not be accurate on the representation of the writer’s dialect as it is pronounced (Hiltunen and Risto, pp.60).
Conclusion
As from above, the Old and Middle English have distinctive features that connect them. There are comparing words that developed from the Old English but are relevant in the Middle English. The nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and the general sounds and spelling of both English have characteristics which define them and give a representation of the values of the English.
Works cited
Hiltunen, Risto. The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb: The evidence from some Old and Early Middle English texts. Vol. 160. Turun yliopisto, 1983.
Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. "The syntax of verb movement in Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact." University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 1.1 (1994): 4.
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A guide to Old English. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
Quirk, Randolph, and Charles Wrenn. An old English grammar. Routledge, 2002.
Van Kemenade, Ans, and Bettelou Los. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006.
