How did ‘old English’ develop into present english?
In: Culture
Old English is the same as Anglo-Saxon, which was an old North Sea Germanic dialect imported into Britain when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes conquered and largely displaced/killed the population of Celtic-Romans known as Britons.
From the 800s onwards it began a transition into Middle English, first with extensive contact (more conquering and displacement) by the near total Viking conquest of Britain, and then, later in 1066 by the Norman conquest of Britain, which brought in French influences. As time went by in this period, complicated word endings and different word forms for different contexts (e.g., thee/thou/you) were dropped which made it easier for people with different language backgrounds to communicate.
By the start of the Modern English period (late 1400s), most of these were dropped except for particular use cases. The plays and poems of Shakespeare are actually considered Modern English (although early modern english), and the “thou” and the like he uses would have actually been recognized as a bit archaic even for his time. But he uses them for particular artistic effect.
The last major change was the great vowel shift, which, over the course of centuries, changed the way every vowel was pronounced in English. English used to pronounce vowels very similarly to other European languages, but shifted to the modern pronunciation. So for instance, the “a” in “cat” would have sounded like the “a” in the Spanish word for cat, “gato”, which is how we now pronounce the letter “o” in “got”. As you can see, vowel pronunciations sort of shifted from one letter to another. When we pronounce vowels in the more common continental European way, it is often because the word was imported from another language after the great vowel shift occurred.
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