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The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in grammar. While Old English is a heavily inflected language , the use of grammatical endings diminished in Middle English . Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were levelled to -e.
The development from Old English to Middle English is marked particularly by a change from syntheticism (expressing meaning using word-endings) to analyticism (expressing meaning using word order). Old English was a synthetic language, though its inflections already tended to be simpler than those of contemporary continental Germanic languages.
An example of syntactic change in English can be seen in the development from the verb second (V2) word order, which was used before the 15th century, to the modern word order. [3] Like other Germanic languages , Old and Middle English had V2 word order.
This language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre-dating documented Old English or Anglo-Saxon, has also been called Primitive Old English. [11] Early Old English (c. 650–900), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon, Bede, Cynewulf and Aldhelm.
Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English.
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The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.