February, 2021. Let’s go back to the year 1021. What was the English language like in 1021?
In 1021, English was in its Late Old English stage. The Charter of Cnut provides an excellent example of the language at this time:
And ic cyðe eoƿ, þæt ic ƿylle beon hold hlaford and unsƿicende to godes gerihtum and to rihtre ƿoroldlage.
And I kithe(make known/couth to) you, that I will be [a] hold(civilised) lord and unswiking(uncheating) to God’s rights(laws) and to [the] rights(laws) worldly.
Other than being largely unintelligible, what do you notice about the language?
To start, English in 1021 had additional letters that were lost over time. The most widely used of those are þ and ð, both of which represent the “th” sound. These letters were lost in writing but remained in the pronunciation. Some of these letters even precede English itself, such as þ, which came from Scandinavian runes. If you ever look at written Icelandic you can still see these fascinating letters in writing.
If you look closely, you can see that English in 1021 had no letter “v”. It did however have the “v” sound. The letter “f” could sound like either an “f” or a “v”, depending on where it was in the word. For example: “fifa” (five) was pronounced “feevah”. This is because the “f” sounded like a “v” in between two vowels, simply because it was less effort to prounounce it that way, and it eventally became a rule of pronunciation.
If you look at any modern English sentence now, how many “v” words can you count? Chances are, a LOT. The reason for this is that in the year 1021, England was still largely Anglo-Saxon, with few outsiders occupying the territory. Only decades later, in 1066, would the Normans invade England, bringing their language, a dialect of Old French, to England and resulting in the mixing of the two languages. English was a purely Germanic language at the time, and the Norman language, which was a Romance language, brought new sounds into English. Many English words were replaced by French equivalents, and this remains so today. The English words themselves were not lost, but simply evolved slightly different meanings. It is because of the Norman influence that English has such a massive vocabulary, with words from many different origins. An example of this is “thoughtful” vs. “pensive”. “Thoughtful” is 100% Anglo-Saxon, whereas “pensive” comes from French “penser” [to think]. They both have similar meanings and both are understood as English words by English speakers. Words like “veracity” are clearly from Norman influence, as the “v” indicates. The true English version would be “truth”.
In 1021 English had fewer words that it does now. It would make new words by combining words, similar to the way German does today. For example, today we use “dictionary”, again a French borrowing, when in 1021 we might have said “word book”, a compound word formed from two pure English words.
So what about French, this language that had such a profound (again a French borrowing!) influence on English? French too has a rich and complicated history, but that is a story for another day.