Old English Words that We Still Use
Old English looks a lot more unfamiliar than it actually is. The spellings are different and pronunciations of words are slightly different, but the words themselves are mostly the same. For example, the word ġīese looks completely unfamiliar to a modern English speaker, but it’s not — that g-with-a-dot-over-it is pronounced like a “y,” so the word is pronounced “yees-eh.” A few vowel shifts later, and it takes its modern form, “yes.” There’s a lot of words like that. Frēondsċiepe (free-ond-sheep-ay) may look completely unfamiliar, but it’s actually “friendship” with some extra syllables. Fyr uses a vowel sound that no longer exists in English, and evolves into “fire.” Wulf becomes “wolf,” hræfn becomes “raven,” cyning becomes “king,” and hwæt becomes “what.” Þe is just “the,” spelled with a thorn instead of a “th,” but it’s pronounced similarly. Hāliġ has a “g” pronounced like a “y” again, so that’s “holy.”
My favorite example is this word:
That first letter isn’t a “p,” it’s a wynn (ƿ), which makes a “w” sound. The fourth letter also isn’t a “p” or an “n” — it’s actually an “r.” So this word transcribes as wætre — water.
There’s also words that still exist, but have changed their meaning somewhat. The word mann in Old English means “human” or “person,” and is gender-neutral. A wer is a male person and a wif or wifman is a female person. Wifman evolved into “woman” and also “wife,” but mann became specifically masculine and wer (cognate with the Latin word vir) fell out of use. It only survives in the word werewolf, literally “man-wolf.” So, if you’ve wondered why “men” or “mankind” is sometimes used to refer to humans in general, that’s why.
There’s plenty of other Old English words that haven’t survived, and also a lot of words that English borrows from Latin or French. Old English grammar differs more from modern English, because it has grammatical gender and noun cases and strong and weak adjectives and stuff like that. But it’s also more consistent than modern English, because it hadn’t been influenced by so many other languages yet. I forget where I heard this, but there’s a joke that “English isn’t one language, it’s three languages in a trenchcoat.” English is basically the Common Tongue, the Westron of today’s world. It intersects and combines itself with so many other languages, absorbing their vocabulary and grammar, until its own grammar becomes an amalgamated mess. I really feel for anyone who has to learn it as a second language, because it’s unlike any other language on the planet. If Frisian is the nearest language to Old English, then there is no language like modern English.
Looking back on Old English, though, it really is the same language, even if it doesn’t seem to be.
