assignment #2 Anglo-saxon Language

Well, the second part of my biography will be postponed because i`m in a hurry of doing other workshops in my blog...it`s not like i have a lot of fans out there xD in fact, i don`t have any XD anyway, today I`m going to talk about OLD ENGLISH or anglo-saxon english.^^

Old English as an early form of the English language that we speak today, it was spoken in the lands that we know today as England and southern scotland (also known as the lowlands), between the 5th and the 12th century, it has Latin, germanic, celtic and viking influences.

The Anglo-saxon language is the early form of english, even though they have several Phonologycal differences:

The sounds marked in parentheses in the chart above are allophones:

[dʒ] is an allophone of /j/ occurring after /n/ and when geminated
[ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ occurring before /k/ and /g/
[v, ð, z] are allophones of /f, θ, s/ respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants
[ç, x] are allophones of /h/ occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively
[ɣ]

As for the simillarities between Old English and The English Language spoken today there are only a fwe pronouns that the centuries left. such as We (wë).

Other similarity is the word order, Subject + verb + object this is a common word order in germanic languages too.

and the last one is the word order in questions, it`s the same that in modern English (are you?), but sometimes, because of the nordic influences this could change to (You are?), this wasn`t a mistake or anything, if you were an Anglo-saxon, you could ask either way and still you're getting a good comunication and understanding^^

The runic Anglo-Saxon alphabet is composed by 34 different runes (futhorcs), which were used as the letters today in the alphabet, in this letters we can find a lot of latin, germanic, viking and celtic influences too, for example the rune Yogh was adopted from Irish and the letter Eth is a form of the latin "D"

Old English is (thanks to God) in the literature, the most known poem is "Beowulf", some people say that Old English is the language in which Shakespiare wrote his works, but it isn`t. that language is a kind of evolution of the Anglo-saxon language.

Now we`re going to talk about this awesome epic poem called Beowulf, wich is written in Old English.

Beowulf is an epic poem from an anonymous author (same in almost all poems of the period), written in between the 8th and the 11th century as the Nowell codex says, and is believed that describes events in what now could be Sweden and Denmark. In the poem there`s a hero of the Geats (a north germanic tribe) who fights three diofferent antagonists; the first one is Grendel and the second is Grendel`s mother as descendants of the Biblical Caine they are feared by all but Beowulf, who wants to slay them, because Grendel was attacking Heorot, Beowulf with a powerfull simte rips off Grendels arm, making him run away to his swamp where he dies. Later Beowulf goes to the swamp in search of Grendel`s mother, after tear her apart, he found Grendel's dead body, and took his head as a trophy. Trophy in hand, Beowulf becomes the King of the nearby lands, and rules over for many years, after those he fights an almighty dragon (the third enemy), in the last battle Beowulf gets mortally wounded and dies after killing the unnamed dragon. later he is buried by his followers.

As one of the most important Anglo-saxon poems, Beowulf has a lot of film adaptions including Grendel Grendel Grendel (1984), Animated Epics: Beowulf (1998), Beowulf (1999), The 13th Warrior (1999), Beowulf & Grendel (2005), Grendel (2007), Beowulf (2007), and Beowulf: Prince of the Geats (2008).