a social history of english
English as an analytic or synthetic language
Old English is frequently presented as a synthetic language, a language in which grammatical function of clause elements is primarily derived from inflections rather than from word order and prepositions, while Present Day English is said to be the opposite, and analytic language,
A.C. Baugh writes that “Modern English in an analytic, Old English a synthetic language.” Similarly,
Dan McIntyre writes that “The main difference between Old English and Present Day English is that
OE is a synthetic (or inflectional) language whereas PDE is an analytic (or isolating) language.”1
Statements such as these are frequently demonstrated using examples in Present Day English. In
McIntyre 's case the example used is the sentence “Oswyn shot Sigbert”2, which in turn is contrasted with “Sigbert shot Oswyn”, showing how a fixed word order is necessary to mark grammatical function. In a synthetic langauge (which Old English supposedly is), “we would not need to put the words in a particular order.”3 It would be easy here for a reader with no prior knowledge of Old
English text to assume that the word order in said language is more irrelevant, or random, but is this truly the case?
To a certain extent it is. Old English has an extensive system of inflections concerning most word classes, and often it is perfectly possible to rely on these, rather than word order and prepositions, to denote grammatical function. For example, the very first line of Voyages of Ōhthere and Wulfstan reads: “Ōhthere sæde his hlāforde”
Literally “Ōhthere said his lord”. However, the possessive and the noun here are in the dative case, which tells us that “his lord” in this case is the indirect object, and a more meaningful translation would have to be “Ōhthere said to his lord”. Similarly, in a phrase such as “se cyning stilð þone stān” (“the king steals the stone”), we can tell who is doing the stealing and what is being stolen by the
Old English is frequently presented as a synthetic language, a language in which grammatical function of clause elements is primarily derived from inflections rather than from word order and prepositions, while Present Day English is said to be the opposite, and analytic language,
A.C. Baugh writes that “Modern English in an analytic, Old English a synthetic language.” Similarly,
Dan McIntyre writes that “The main difference between Old English and Present Day English is that
OE is a synthetic (or inflectional) language whereas PDE is an analytic (or isolating) language.”1
Statements such as these are frequently demonstrated using examples in Present Day English. In
McIntyre 's case the example used is the sentence “Oswyn shot Sigbert”2, which in turn is contrasted with “Sigbert shot Oswyn”, showing how a fixed word order is necessary to mark grammatical function. In a synthetic langauge (which Old English supposedly is), “we would not need to put the words in a particular order.”3 It would be easy here for a reader with no prior knowledge of Old
English text to assume that the word order in said language is more irrelevant, or random, but is this truly the case?
To a certain extent it is. Old English has an extensive system of inflections concerning most word classes, and often it is perfectly possible to rely on these, rather than word order and prepositions, to denote grammatical function. For example, the very first line of Voyages of Ōhthere and Wulfstan reads: “Ōhthere sæde his hlāforde”
Literally “Ōhthere said his lord”. However, the possessive and the noun here are in the dative case, which tells us that “his lord” in this case is the indirect object, and a more meaningful translation would have to be “Ōhthere said to his lord”. Similarly, in a phrase such as “se cyning stilð þone stān” (“the king steals the stone”), we can tell who is doing the stealing and what is being stolen by the
Bibliography: Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable, 2008, The History of the English Language, Oxon: Routledge. McIntyre, Dan, 2009, History of English, Oxon: Routledge. Baker, Peter S, 2008, Introduction to Old English, Oxford: Blackwell. Quirk, R. & C.L. Wrenn, 2001, An Old English Grammar, London: Routledge. Millar, Robert McColl, 2008, A Companion to the History of the English Language, West Sussex: Blackwell. 8 Millar p. 44