Word order in old english and modern english

Word order refers to the conventional arrangement of words in a phrase, clause, or sentence.

Compared with many other languages, word order in English is fairly rigid. In particular, the order of subject, verb, and object is relatively inflexible.

Examples and Observations

• «I can’t see the point of Mozart. Of Mozart I can’t see the point. The point of Mozart I can’t see. See I can’t of Mozart the point. Can’t I of Mozart point the see . . . I can’t see the point of Mozart.» (Sebastian Faulks, Engleby. Doubleday, 2007)
• «[A] characteristic of modern English, as of other modern languages, is the use of word-order as a means of grammatical expression. If in an English sentence, such as ‘The wolf ate the lamb,’ we transpose the positions of the nouns, we entirely change the meaning of the sentence; the subject and object are not denoted by any terminations to the words, as they would be in Greek or Latin or in modern German, but by their position before or after the verb.»
  (Logan Pearsall Smith, The English Language, 1912)

Basic Word Order in Modern English

«Assume you wanted to say that a chicken crossed the road in Modern English. And assume you are interested only in stating the facts—no questions asked, no commands, and no passive. You wouldn’t have much of a choice, would you? The most natural way of stating the message would be as in (18a), with the subject (in caps) preceding the verb (in boldface) which, in turn, precedes the object (in italics). For some speakers (18b) would be acceptable, too, but clearly more ‘marked,’ with particular emphasis on the road. Many other speakers would prefer to express such an emphasis by saying something like It’s the road that the chicken crossed, or they would use a passive The road was crossed by the chicken. Other permutations of (18a) would be entirely unacceptable, such as (18c)-(18f).

(18a) THE CHICKEN crossed the road
[Basic, ‘unmarked’ order]
(18b) the road THE CHICKEN crossed
[‘Marked’ order; the road is ‘in relief’]
(18c) THE CHICKEN the road crossed*
(18d) the road crossed THE CHICKEN*
[But note constructions like: Out of the cave came A TIGER.]
(18e) crossed the road THE CHICKEN*
(18f) crossed THE CHICKEN the road*

In this respect, Modern English differs markedly from the majority of the early Indo-European languages, as well as from Old English, especially the very archaic stage of Old English found in the famous epic Beowulf. In these languages, any of the six different orders in (18) would be acceptable . . ..»
(Hans Henrich Hock and Brian D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, 1996)

Word Order in Old English, Middle English, and Modern English

Adverbials

«One way to find out whether a sentence part is a subject or not is to make the sentence into a question. The subject will appear after the first verb:

He told me to add one tablespoon of honey per pound of fruit.
Did he tell me . . .?
We spread a thin layer of fruit on each plate.
Did we spread . . .?

The only constituent that may occur in many different places is an adverbial. Especially one-word adverbials like not, always, and often may occur almost anywhere in the sentence. In order to see if a sentence part is an adverbial or not, see if it is possible to move it in the sentence.»
(Marjolijn Verspoor and Kim Sauter, English Sentence Analysis: An Introductory Course. John Benjamins, 2000)

The Lighter Side of Word Order in Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Burrows: Good doctor morning! Nice year for the time of day!
Dr. Thripshaw: Come in.
Burrows: Can I down sit?​
Dr. Thripshaw: Certainly. Well, then?
Burrows: Well, now, not going to bush the doctor about the beat too long. I’m going to come to point the straight immediately.
Dr. Thripshaw: Good, good.
Burrows: My particular prob, or buglem bear, I’ve had ages. For years, I’ve had it for donkeys.
Dr. Thripshaw: What?
Burrows: I’m up to here with it, I’m sick to death. I can’t take you any longer so I’ve come to see it.
Dr. Thripshaw: Ah, now this is your problem with words.​
Burrows: This is my problem with words. Oh, that seems to have cleared it. «Oh I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.» Yes, that seems to be all right. Thank you very much.​
Dr. Thripshaw: I see. But recently you have been having this problem with your word order.
Burrows: Well, absolutely, and what makes it worse, sometimes at the end of a sentence I’ll come out with the wrong fusebox.
Dr. Thripshaw: Fusebox?
Burrows: And the thing about saying the wrong word is a) I don’t notice it, and b) sometimes orange water given bucket of plaster.
(Michael Palin and John Cleese in episode 36 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1972)

Word Order

We’ve already touched on word order in previous
modules, and noted that
Old English is more flexible in its word order than modern English, but it is still governed by
a set of rules. The most common word order encountered in Old English is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO),
which the same as modern English. For example, examine the sentence: God lufode
Iacob — God loved Jacob.

Here the only thing that distinguishes the subject from the object is the SVO word order. If we put
Iacob before the verb and God after, Iacob would be the subject and God the object because there is
no distinction
between nominative and accusative masculine noun declensions. This shows that during the time Old
English
texts were written
down, the SVO word order was already the norm.

Subject-Object-Verb

While SVO is the most common order for the main
clause, there are common variations on this pattern.
One is putting the object directly after the subject.
This tends to happen
when the object is a pronoun rather than a noun or a noun phrase. So in the sentence below, ‘God loved
him’, the pronoun
hine comes directly after the subject and before the verb. Unlike nominative and accusative
masculine nouns, there
is a clear
distinction between nominative he and accusative hine, so there can be no confusion
about who loved whom.

In addition, if the indirect object is a pronoun and the direct object is not, the indirect
object will usually come first. So you might come across the equivalent of ‘God him soul gave’:

In some cases the object will come before the subject, as in ‘him God sawle geaf‘, but you’ll quickly get
used to
using inflections to overcome the unfamiliar syntax, and context helps a lot. It is unlikely that God
would give a ‘him’ to
‘a soul’, for example.

Verb Before Subject

The placement of the verb before the subject happens most consistently in
clauses introduced by adverbs of time such as ‘þa —
then‘ and ‘nu — now‘, as well
as certain abverbs of place such as ‘þær — there‘ or ‘þider — thither‘. In the sentence
below, ‘they travelled to that monastery and there they died’, the first clause has regular SVO word
order, and the second clause — introduced
by þa — then — has the verb before the subject.

Successive clauses are often introduced with ‘þa‘, so this is a construction you will frequently encounter.
It’s worth remembering that in modern English
we also switch the S-V order around to make questions — ‘Did you go?’, ‘Are you well?’ — something that
also happens in Old English.

Verb in Final Position

The final important word order you’ll come across is one in which the subject comes at the start of the
sentence or clause, and
the verb goes to the end. This is most common in subordinate clauses or introduced by the relative
pronoun ‘þe — that/which/who‘
and by ‘þa — that‘, or by conjunctions, and the verb tends to be pushed to the end or near the
end of the clause. Take the
nice description of grammar in the following sentence ‘Stæfcræft is seo cæg þe ðæra boca andgytt
unlycþ — Wordcraft is the key
which unlocks the meaning of books‘, in which the verb ‘unlock’ gone to the end of the clause
introduced by the relative
pronoun ‘þe‘.

As shown above, while word order in Old English is more flexible, it is still guided by
rules, and the
three word orders outlined here are by far the most common. The trick is to use the inflections to guide
your reading
with the word order being a useful support. These rules are fairly consistently applied in prose. However, in poetry there are different rules and
conventions. These will be explored in more detail in the following two topics.

Return to Basic Syntax

Continue to Prose Style

Old English was the language spoken in what is now England from around the 5th – 11th centuries and is the origin of modern English.

Back then it was called Englisc and the people who spoke were the Anglo-Saxons; Old English is also known as Anglo-Saxon.

Old English is essentially the first recorded version of English and it is the forebear of the language we speak today. Although a modern English speaker would likely have great difficulty in understanding written or spoken Old English, about half the words we use today are derived from Old English.

Who Spoke Old English?

At the beginning of the 5th Century, in what is now England, the local people were speaking Celtic while the government and officialdom spoke Latin, the language of the occupying Roman force.

Britain, however, was coming under increasing attack from raiding parties out of Northern Europe. It was at this point that the Romans left (to defend other parts of the Roman Empire) and the country was essentially undefended.

The raiding parties became more frequent and as they pushed further inland and then began to settle in the country, they pushed the Celtic speakers into the wilds of what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

These raiders and then occupiers were known as Anglo-Saxons. The Angles came from Englaland and spoke Englisc.

The language they used came from back home and it took over completely from Celtic and Latin in much the same way that English settlers several hundred years later settled in North America and Australia bringing their own language with them and just taking a few words from the indigenous peoples and languages.

Writing Old English

Old English was firstly written using Runes. Very few examples survive (only about 200 inscriptions) and they consist mainly of scratched marks on wood, bone or stone.

But then came one of the most important events in the history of English. Towards the end of the 6th Century the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity and when this happened the Church arrived and began to write things down on parchment. Often this was done in Latin (the language of the church) but also, significantly, a great deal was done in Anglo-Saxon but in the Roman alphabet.

Following from this, a number of non-Church texts were written or translated and thus we have such Old English masterpieces as Beowulf – an epic poem of over 3000 lines telling the story of the eponymous hero Beowulf who kills the monster Grendel, becomes King, slays a dragon, is fatally wounded, and dies.

It is arguably the greatest piece of vernacular English and certainly one of the earliest.

So by this time Old English was written using an alphabet which is mostly recognizable to today’s reader. However, some letters of that alphabet have been lost.

• þ = /θ/ as in think
• ð = /ð/ as in then
• æ = /æ/ as in hat

Here is an example of Old English from the opening of Beowulf alongside a modern translation.

So although the alphabet is recognizable, along with some words:

Wé = we
hú = how
Oft = often
hé = he
under = under
him = him
wæs = was
cyning = king

the language is still very different from modern English due to words we no longer use and a very different grammar.

The video here is a reading of the opening of Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon.

Grammar of Old English

The main grammatical differences between Old English and Middle then Modern English are:

• the language is highly inflected; not only verbs but also nouns, adjectives and pronouns are inflected
• there is grammatical gender with nouns and adjectives

Because of the inflection word order was not as strict as it now is and by default it was arranged more like modern German than modern English.

But where does Old English come from?

But of course Old English didn’t just appear out of thin air!

Old English comes from Anglo-Frisian which comes from Ingvaeonic which comes from Proto West-Germanic which comes from Northwest Germanic which comes from Proto-Germanic which comes from Proto Indo-European which is the forebear of pretty well all European languages.

Useful Links

English – the language we teach – a more general history of the English language

Runes vs English – the original English alphabet

The
order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position
of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and
stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints.
Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming independence
of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could
depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus
statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some
secondary parts of the sentence. A peculiar type of word order is
found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause
begins with the subject following the connective, and ends with the
predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed
between them. It also should be noted that objects were often placed
before the predicate or between two parts of the predicate.

Those
were the main tendencies in OE word order.

1. Grammatical categories of the Noun in Old English, Middle English and New English periods.

Grammatical
categories. The use of cases

The
OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. Also, nouns
distinguished three genders, but gender was not a grammatical
category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting for the
division of nouns into morphological classes. The category of number
consisted of two members: singular and plural. The noun had four
cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

The
Nom.
can be defined as the case of the active agent, for it was the case
of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity; the Nom.
could also indicate the subject characterized by a certain quality or
state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of address.

The
Gen.
case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as
attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. case were very
complex and can only be grouped under the headings “Subjective”
and “Objective” Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the
possessive meaning and the meaning of origin. Objective Gen. is
associated with what is termed “partitive meaning” as in sum
hund scipa ‘a
hundred of ships’.

Dat.
was the chief case used with prepositions, e.g. on morзenne
‘in the morning’

The
Acc.
case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. Being the
direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of
the action and other meanings.

Middle
English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more
complex system of inflection
in Old English. The early Modern English words engel
(angel) and name
(name) demonstrate the two patterns:

Some
nouns of the engel
type have a weak -e
in the nominative/accusative singular, both otherwise the same
endings. Often these are the same nouns that had an extra -e
in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English. (These in turn
inherited from Proto-Germanic
ja-stem
and i-stem
nouns.)

The
strong -(e)s plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak
-(e)n form is now rare in the standard language, used only in oxen,
children,
brethren;
and it is slightly less rare in some dialects, used in eyen
for eyes,
shoon
for shoes,
hosen
for hose(s),
kine
for cows,
and been
for bees.

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