The best route into OE is to find words which have derivatives in MnE. 80% of ordinary conversation uses words of OE origin. 207 may be found at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Old_English_Swadesh_list Aelfric’s colloquy provides simple conversation vignettes. Although it was devised to teach monks Latin, but we use it to learn Anglo Saxon!
Master: ‘Ic āxie þē, hwæt sprycst þū? Hwæt hæfst þū weorkes?’ ‘I ask you, what say you? What do you have by way of work?’
Monk: ‘Ic eom geanwyrde monuc and ic singe ǣlce dæg seofon tīda mid þām gebrōþrum, and ic eom bysgod on sange ac þēahhwæþere ic wolde betwēnan leornian sprecan on lēden gereorde.’ ‘I am a professed monk and I sing seven times each day with the brothers, and I am occupied with singing but nevertheless I would like in the meantime to learn to speak in the Latin Language.’
Master: ‘Hwæt cunnon þās þīne gefēran?’ ‘What can these friends of yours do?’
Monk: ‘Sume synt yrþlingas, sume scēphyrdas, sume oxanhyrdas, sume ēac swylce huntan, sume fisceras, sume fugeleras, sume cȳpmenn, sume scēwyrhtan, sealteras, bæceras.’‘Some are ploughmen, some are shepherds, some are ox-herds, some are also huntsmen, some are fishermen, some are merchants, some are shoe-makers, salters, [and] bakers.’
The Venerable Bede
The venerable Bede wrote Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum in Latin. Bede would have spoken Northumbrian, but very little of it has survived. The Lord’s Prayer is an exception.
Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum. Si thin nama gehalgod. To becume thin rice. Geworthe thin willa. On erthon swa swa on heofenum. Urne gedaeghlican half syle us to daeg. And forgyf us ure gyltas. Swa swa we forgyfth urum gyltendum. And ne gelaed thu us on costnunge. Ac alys us of yfele.
West Saxon then became the official language of England and oral histories and writing in other dialects were than translated into it, so that 90% of the surviving Old English is in West Saxon. Alfred himself back-translated Bede’s “history” from Latin into ‘englisc’ – West Saxon. As it is a geography lesson, it is one of the easiest pieces of Old English with which to start. Use the Czech online version of Bosworth Toller to look up the verbs.
OE Syntax
PIE has been reconstructed as having eight noun cases. Sanskrit and Lithuanian retain eight cases. Ancient Greek and Latin retained six cases. Slavic languages have six, while some still “construct” a seventh, vocative, but in Russian only has the “fossil” gospodin. German retains four cases. Icelandic is similarly conservative of the Old Danish four cases. The lost cases are instrumental, locative, vocative. Modern English (MnE) nouns have two cases. Dutch, Danish and Swedish are similar to MnE. Schwyzertütsch has three cases – no genitive.
Grammatical gender in PIE was neuter, male, female; this continues in German. Swedish and Dutch have common and neuter. Common is usually animate, but Swedish barn, djur are inanimate. Adjectives agreed on case, number, gender and had to carry “strength”.
Pronouns in MnE have reduced dramatically. The modern “the” replaces 17 forms of the demonstrative pronoun developed in later Old English. Peter Baker’s cheat sheet starts with se, þone. MnE pronouns retain three cases, though low dialects may reduce to two or one. The dual pronoun wit, unc has disappeared. þu was found risky in Norman times, because it could be a lover, an animal or a thief, so only “you” remained, for both singular and plural. “One” has mostly disappeared, so “you” has to be used, sometimes creating confusion. Recently “they” has been extended to singular, non-gendered use.
OE Verbs had a weak conjugation and seven strong conjugations. Modern English has only five morphologies: present and past active verb, two participles, and a third person -s ending. The default past has an -ed ending, with about 270 strong (or irregular) pasts, usually learned as pairs by SL speakers.
Modern English uses word order to convey senses previously conveyed by morphology. The most basic rule is S-V-O. In the example “birds eat rodents”, the exchange of S and O is possible, so alteration for poetry is ruled out. Another rule is the indirect object (dat) precedes the direct object (acc), e.g. “I give horses hay”, though this could be a garden-path utterance.
Peter Baker gives a wonderfully interactive web-site people able to spend more than 100 hours on OE https://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/ For the brief introduction here, we will focus on these changes
sound changes: kirk to church and dæg to day.
loan words from Danish: sk-
left-headed stress and alliterative verse