Old English

Old English had many synonyms for oft-used words (there are over thirty words for "king"), likely the outcome of many years of using it to compose poetry. Unlike Modern English poetry, which primarily uses the rhyme, Old English poetry use the poetic device alliteration. Old English is a quite versatile language, allowing for different words to be combined together into new words in an even more intimate nature than the Modern English equivalent, compound words. Often these compounds are different combinations of the same compound elements, adapted for a particular context.

Old English is also markedly different from Modern English in that nouns, verbs, adjectives and articles were inflected for case, number and gender. This meant that Old English had a much freer word order than Modern English (shared by an ancient language still read today - Latin), which is locked into the strict Subject-Verb-Object pattern. The inflectional system was a characteristic inherited from proto-Germanic, from proto-Indo-European and has not survived in Modern English, with some exceptions, notably in pronouns.

This meant there were far fewer prepositions in Old English than in Modern English. Instead Old English words were synthesised with suffixes.

In addition, many consonants of Old English have evolved into other, or different consonants in Modern English, many vowels moved from long to short (Great Vowel Shift) and there were some sounds such as a glottal stop (/./) that are heard in only few dialects of English today.

Old English was also influenced in domestic vocabulary and pronouns by Old Norse (a North Germanic language), due to Viking invasions of England (or Aengleland) several centuries after the Aenglish settlement of Britain (Pridain).

Barber, Charles (1993) The English Language A Historical Introduction Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press