Three stages, three different languages
People say “old English” for almost anything that sounds antique, but historians of the language separate at least three stages. Each is different enough from the next that a reader of one needs help with the others.
The dates are approximate because language does not change on a single day. Old English runs from the mid-fifth century to about 1150. Middle English covers roughly 1100 to the late fifteenth century. Early Modern English runs from about 1500 to the late seventeenth century, and it is the English of Shakespeare and of the King James Bible of 1611.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon
This is the language of the Anglo-Saxon settlers and of poems such as Beowulf. It looks foreign on the page. Nouns have cases and genders, verbs change form by person and tense, and word order is looser than ours. Writers used extra letters: æ, þ, ð and ƿ. West Saxon became the literary standard, and the late West Saxon form is what dictionaries and classroom texts normally teach.
Most everyday words you would see here have no obvious modern cousin. Others, such as hūs (house) and niht (night), are still recognizable once you know the spelling.
Middle English
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English absorbed a great deal of French vocabulary and lost most of its case endings, helped by contact with Old Norse speakers. Spelling was not standardized, so one writer might spell the same word several ways. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is the best-known work. A modern reader can follow it with a glossary and some patience.
Early Modern English
Here the language is close to ours. Spelling is mostly familiar, but you will meet thou and thee, verb endings such as -eth, and words whose meanings have shifted. When a website offers an “old English translator” that produces “thee” and “thou,” it is almost always producing this stage, not Anglo-Saxon.
The same words, three ways
A few everyday words show the drift. These are standard dictionary spellings, and Middle English spellings varied.
- King: cyning (Old English), kyng (Middle English), king (Early Modern).
- Night: niht, nyght, night.
- House: hūs, hous, house.
Sources and further reading
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