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bone, brieg bridge, beorht bright, byrnan burn, ciese cheese, breost chest, betynan close, heretoga commander, bisgu concern, belucan
contain, coc cook, scieppan create, cyrm crry, cuckoo geac, astandan get up, acennan give birth, alecgan give up, abugan give away, awedan go
mad, abugan yield, wage war, anbidian wait , abaedan ward off , ansund whole, amyran wound, awritan write, ahebban raise, awestan ravage,
alysan release, aferran remove, areccean render, ahreddan rescue, anwealda ruler, asecgan say, ahreddan save, asendan send, andgit sense,
assettan set, anfeald simple, asingan sing, anlepe single, ansund sound, arian spare, afylan stain, astandan stand up, abrecan storm, asteccan
stretch out, atteon ateon, awendan translate, asmeagan understand.
2.5 Old English different from Modern English
First of all, Old English was spoken most recently almost a thousand years ago. Languages just do change, gradually and inevitably, over time, a
phenomenon that linguistics has a fairly hard time explaining, and certainly predicting. But there are a couple of factors that affected the English language that
tended to hasten linguistic change in English. In contrast, Icelandic, a language quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so
that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas in school without need for much adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing.
The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a
fairly large number of people who spoke Old Norse, and the arrival over a period
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of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French. This wouldnt have made much of a difference if these people had simply
assimilated to the English-speaking population, but they didnt, they maintained their own languages and probably even insisted on them. Moreover, the groups
who spoke these languages had prestige, whether locally in the Danelaw in the case of the Viking settlers who spoke Old Norse, or nationally in the case of the
Norman conquerors--which meant that there was some pressure for English- speaking people to learn and even to prefer the other languages. Under these
conditions, various kinds of linguistic mixture occurred: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and so on. In other words, English took on sounds, words, and ways of
constructing sentences from these other languages. The second important factor producing rapid language change was the fact
that for approximately two hundred years after the Norman conquest, English was hardly a written language at all, since almost all writing went on either in the
language of the ruling Norman invaders French or in the international language of the church, of diplomacy, and of learning Latin. In fact, for a further hundred
years after that, English was still not a prestigious language, although it was beginning to be a written language again. Writing normally acts as a kind of
brake to language change, since literate people are influenced in their linguistic habits not only by what they hear but by what they read, which is liable to be stuff
from some time ago. Without writing, and exposed to influence from other languages with which it was mixing, English changed rapidly. By the time of
Chaucer end of the 14th century when it was reestablishing itself as a prestige
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language in England, English had adopted hundreds of words from French and quite a few from Old Norse, and had undergone important simplifications in its
system of inflections. Whether as a result of language mixture, or for some other reasons
linguists disagree, there was later a lot of sound changes in the English vowel system. During a period perhaps from about 1450 to about 1750 c.e. the change
called the Great Vowel Shift occurred. It accounts for the quite startling differences in pronunciation between Modern English long vowels and Old
English long vowels--most of the consonants stayed pretty much the same, and so did the short vowels.
So to sum up, Modern English is different from Old English because languages just do change over time, because linguistic change was accelerated
during a period of contact with other languages and the removal of written language from the equation, and because phonological change, especially the
Great Vowel Shift, was added to lexical change all those loan words and syntacticinflectional change.
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3. ANALYSIS OF OLD AND MODERN ENGLISH
3.1 Old English
There are some Old English which is find in the play of Drama Oedipus Rex. We can see Old English on bold words in the sentences
1 Thou Do thou
old man since ‗tisthy privilege to speak for these, say in what case ye stand if of alarm or statisfication with my readness. Oedipus:1
And that, without instruction or advice of our imparting; but of heaven it came
thou
art named, and known, our life‘s establisher. Priest :2
2 Thyself
By the Ismenian hearth oracular and the twin shrines of Pallas. Loe the city
Labours-thyself art witness-over deep already, powerless to uprear her head out of
the abysses of a surge of blood. Priest:2
3 Didst With a fair augury didst thou shape for us our furtune then, like be thy prowess
now Priest:3
Even as thou didst adjure me, so my king, I will reply. I neither murdered him,
nor can point out the murderer. I senator: 10
4 Yea Well, I will have it all to light again. Right well did Phoebus, yea and well may
you insist on this toward the dead. oedipus:5
Do you know from whom you are? Yea, you are ignorant that to your own you
are an enemy, whether on earth, alive, or under it. Tiresias : 15
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