Influence On The Formation Of Old English

The next influence on the formation of Old English occurred late in the 8th century when the Vikings, specifically the Danes of Scandinavian origin, invaded Britain. By the year 865 they initiated a full-blown attack on the Anglo-Saxons which entailed many on-going battles for the control of Britain. However, as the Viking armies came very near conquering the whole of England, King Alfred the Great held the south and west of England against them and created a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings which established a boundary between their relative territories. The Scandinavian settlement and its native tongue, Old Norse, which is an early North Germanic language, left its mark on Old English, including about 1500 place-names and place-name endings; also many common, fundamental words such as skull, skin, leg, neck, scrap, skill, are, take, together, until, again etc. It is important to note that under the influence of the Danes, the Anglo-Saxon inflections began to fall away and the Old Norse prepositions such as to, with and by became more essential to make implications clear. However, this was to a lesser extent in the areas of Britain that did not have contact with the Vikings. After the Viking invasion of this era, King Alfred attempted to restore the importance of learning, law and religion. It is crucial to note that he believed in educating the people in the English language and not Latin; he himself attempted to translate important works from Latin into English and started the famous “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” which is a historically famous manuscript written in Old English that documented the history of the Anglo-Saxons. By the time of his passing, Alfred had done wonders for the English language and had raised th...

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...ed, word order, as in Modern English, became more important to represent the meaning of words and sentences- thus the word order subject-verb-object slowly became the standard in English. Along with the disappearance of verb inflections came the popularity of prepositions to create meaning for words in sentences. In this time of language transition, another contributing factor to the formation of written English especially, is the fact that scribes began to write down words according to their pronunciation, which had an effect on the way the language was written. Overall, the standard of the English language had fallen and grammatical rules differed from one part of the country to the other; with this geographical variance of the language, there became a need for grammatical rules to establish standardization of the language that would apply to all English speakers.