The Primitive Old English Period (450-700A.D.)

The Primitive Old English Period (450-700A.D.)

About 500 B.C., Britain was invaded by Celtic tribes, who ruled the islands undisputed for about 500 years. In 43 A.D., however, the islands were invaded by Emperor Claudius and Britain became part of the Roman Empire. Britain was totally conquered except for Scotland where the Celtic Scots and non-Indo-European Picts reigned sovereign. When the Roman empire collapsed and the Roman legionaries went home, they left a power vacuum in Britain. The Scots and Picts advanced southwards and the weak Celts could not keep them back. The distressed Celts decided to seek help from three Germanic tribes living in present-day southern Denmark and north-western Germany. This proved to be a fatal mistake: the three Germanic tribes called the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes did not only conquer the Scots, but seeing that the islands were fertile they pushed the weakened Celts to the peripheries of the island (Wales, Cornwall and Ireland) and took the land for themselves. By 600A.D. the victory was complete and Englaland and English was born.

We know very little about the exact nature of Primitive Old English since only a few runic inscriptions have been found dating from this period. We do, however, know some Angles sound changes that took place during the Primitive Old English period. This is because certain sound patterns had changed in Old English by the time extensive written texts are recorded (around 700 A.D.), sounds patterns that remained in the original Western Germanic languages.

I-Umlaut

One such sound change that occurred during this period was the so-called i-umlaut or front mutation. I-umlaut can be seen as a kind of assimilation, whereby a front vowel towards the end of a word affects the vowel of a preceding syllable, raising it. In many cases, the final front vowels were later lost. Because many Germanic inflectional endings, including some noun plural endings and non-finite verb forms, contained front vowels (/i/ and /e/), i-umlaut changes are relatively frequent and explain many rather strange forms in English. Let us take a look at some examples:

The POE word Blod (blood) gave rise to the verb blodjan. > The i-umlaut led to a raising of the vowel in the preceding syllable so that the word changed to bledjan.> The final vowel sound was lost producing bledan. > Later the inflectional ending was lost altogether producing the modern form bleed. This explains the, what at first seems rather strange, sound relationship between the noun blood and the verb bleed.

Another such example is the noun man/men. Why should the plural form have a different vowel sound than the singular form? Again i-umlaut can be used to explain this. The original POE word for man was mann and the plural form was manniz. I-umlaut resulted in a raising of the vowel of the first syllable, and finally a loss of the last syllable: Manniz > menniz > menn. Can you think of any more examples of this phenomenon?

Consonant Changes in Primitive Old English

/k/ → /tʃ/ before front vowel (cild/child)

/g/ → /j/ before front vowel (gieldan/ jieldan (yield))

/sk/ → /ʃ/ in all positions (skall/shall)

/f/ → /v/ between voiced sounds. (This explains modern English patterns such as half/halves)