Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, we is a plural, first-person pronoun.
In Modern English, it is a singular, neuter, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, you is the second-person pronoun. It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers.
The pronoun who, in English, is an interrogative pronoun and a relative pronoun, used primarily to refer to persons.
In Modern English, they is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject.
West Saxon is the term applied to the two different dialects Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon with West Saxon being one of the four distinct regional dialects of Old English. The three others were Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian. West Saxon was the language of the kingdom of Wessex, and was the basis for successive widely used literary forms of Old English: the Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great's time, and the Late West Saxon of the late 10th and 11th centuries. Due to the Saxons' establishment as a politically dominant force in the Old English period, the West Saxon dialects became the strongest dialects in Old English manuscript writing.
George Neville was Archbishop of York from 1465 until 1476 and Chancellor of England from 1460 until 1467 and again from 1470 until 1471.
Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.
One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body", the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself.
In Modern English, she is a singular, feminine, third-person pronoun.
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then most closely related to the Low German and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary also shows major influences from French and Latin, plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse. Speakers of English are called Anglophones.
In Modern English, I is the singular, first-person pronoun.
Lexical field theory, or word-field theory, was introduced on March 12, 1931 by the German linguist Jost Trier. He argued that words acquired their meaning through their relationships to other words within the same word-field. An extension of the sense of one word narrows the meaning of neighboring words, with the words in a field fitting neatly together like a mosaic. If a single word undergoes a semantic change, then the whole structure of the lexical field changes. The lexical field is often used in English to describe terms further with use of different words.
Richard of Gravesend was a medieval Bishop of Lincoln.
Events from the year 1476 in Ireland.
David Michael Benjamin Denison is a British linguist whose work focuses on the history of the English language.
Richard Milne Hogg, FBA, FRSE was a Scottish linguist who was well known for his research on Old English, phonology, and English dialects. He received his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University in 1975 under the supervision of Angus McIntosh and John Anderson. He was initially a lecturer in English at the University of Amsterdam from 1969 to 1973, then taught at the University of Lancaster; from 1980 until his death in 2007 he was Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester. He served as dean of the arts faculty at Manchester from 1990 to 1993.
