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As in Modern English, and peculiar to the Germanic languages, the verbs formed two great classes: weak (regular), and strong (irregular). Like today, Old English had fewer strong verbs, and many of these have over time decayed into weak forms. Then, as now, dental suffixes indicated the past tense of the weak verbs, as in work and worked. [2]
The language that emerged from the dialects they brought to Britain is today known as Old English. There is evidence for Britons moving westward and across the channel to form Brittany, but those who remained in what became England switched to speaking Old English until Celtic languages were no longer extensively spoken there. [10]
Two West Germanic languages in the Anglic group are spoken in Scotland today: Scots, and Scottish English, a dialect of the English language. The Norn language, a North Germanic language, is now extinct. The Northumbrian Old English dialect of the Old English was spoken in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria from the Humber estuary to the Firth ...
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order, and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German.
This group of American English dialects evolved over two hundred years from the older varieties of British English primarily spoken by those who initially settled the area. Given that language is an entity that is constantly changing, [ 3 ] the English varieties of the colonists were quite different from any variety of English spoken today.
Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. The centre of Norsified English was in the Midlands around Lindsey. After 920 CE, when Lindsey was ...
Preservation of Old English /uː/ (the sound of Southern English oo), therefore down and town are "doon" and "toon" in Northumbrian. It also retains the old English pronunciation of [ʊ] when followed by [nd], so "pound" and "found" are "pund" and "fund". eu or ui in words like eneugh, muin and buit, partially corresponds to Scots Vowel 7. The ...
Northumbrian was a dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. Together with Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon, it forms one of the sub-categories of Old English devised and employed by modern scholars. The dialect was spoken from the Humber, now within England, to the Firth of Forth, now within Scotland.