Langnage And Literature Of The Anglo-Saxons. The language of the German tribes who conquered and peopled Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries was by them called Anglise, Englise (English); but since English has become so widely different from its mother speech, the name Anglo-Saxon has come into use for the old language. This language was a growth on the island of Britain from the collision of many dialects spoken by the invading tribes. The Celts used a very different kind of speech, so that the Celtic affected the Anglo-Saxon as the tongues of the aborigines of America have affected our English; it gave a good many geographical names, and but few other words. The new language was shaped to literary use by ecclesiastics who wrote and spoke Latin, and a large part of the literature is translated or imitated from Latin works. Hence it contains many words from Latin and frequent imitations of Latin idiom, and it attained the power to render Latin with more accuracy and ease than any other Germanic tongue of its time. The Danes also contributed something to it, especially to the Northumbrian dialect.

But it is after all a true Low German speech, closely akin to Frisic, Old Saxon, Dutch, and Platt-Deutsch. The talk in the harbors of Antwerp, Bremen, and Hamburg is said to be often mistaken by English sailors for corrupt English. These Low German tongues are akin to the High German on one side and to the Scandinavian on the other, and these all with the MAeso-Gothic constitute the Teutonic class of languages, which belongs, with the Latin, Greek, Slavic, Sanskrit, and the like, to the Indo-European. The invading tribes had writing of their own in characters called runes, but the literary remains are almost all in an alphabet known as the Anglo-Saxon, the letters of which, except three, are Roman characters, with some fanciful variations. Thorn (p) and wen (p) are runes, and edh (ð) a crossed d. Occasionally k, q, v, z get into the manuscripts, mostly in foreign words, and uu or u for p. The Semi-Saxon has a peculiar character for j (3). The vowels were pronounced nearly as they now are in German: a as in far; d as in fall;

AE as a in glad; (k as a in dare; e as in let; e as in they; i as in dim; i as ee in deem; o as in wholly; 6 as in holy; u as in full; u as oo in fool; y nearly like u in music or the French u; y the same sound prolonged. The consonants were pronounced as in English, except that c was always like k, g as in give, and both letters were distinctly sounded in initial hl, hr, hw, wl, wr, en. The changes to the modern English sounds have most of them occurred since the time of Chaucer, many since Shakespeare. There are many words common to Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, and Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. When we compare the spelling of such words, we find that the Anglo-Saxon retains the original vowels better than the Gothic. It has the old a, AE, while the Gothic has changed to 6 or e; and the old i, while the Gothic has ei. In its consonant system it agrees with the Gothic, and is midway between the old forms of the Greek, or Latin, and High German. Each surd mute of the Greek or Latin is in Anglo-Saxon changed into its cognate aspirate: t to th, Latin tu, A. S. thu, thou; p to ph=f Lat. ped-es, A. S. fet, feet; c to ch=h, Lat. cannab-is, A. S. henep, hemp.

Each sonant mute changes into its cognate surd: d to t, Lat, dent-es, A. S. teth, teeth; b to p, Lat. cannab-is, A. S. henep, hemp; g to c, Lat. eg-o, A. S. ic, I. Each aspirate mute changed to sonant: th to d, Gr. ther, A. S. deor, deer; ph=f to b, Lat. frater, A. S. brother, brother; ch=h to g, Lat.

homo, A. S. guma, man. These changes were complete in the 3d century, and here the Anglo-Saxon has remained, while the High German has shifted in the same way a second time, changing ic, I, to ich; thu, thou, to du; deor, deer, to thier, and the like; so that Anglo-Saxon stands in the same relation to German that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin do to Anglo-Saxon. A marked fact in this speech is the sensitiveness of the vowels to the influence of other letters. A stem a may appear as AE, ea, e, or o, according to the vowel or consonant after it; and so with other letters. In cases where i follows the stem, man changes to men; so fot to fet, feet; gos to ges, geese; mus to mys, mice, and the like. Such changes are called umlaut. Breaking is produced by a consonant, as when c or g changes a to ea: Lat. castrum to ceaster; or I or r changes a preceding i to eo: meolc, milk. - There are inflection endings for five cases, three numbers, and three genders; but the instrumental case is rare, and the dual number is found only in pronouns. The substantive has four declensions distinguished by the endings of the genitive singular - es, e, a, an.

The three first come from old vowel stems, the last from a consonant stem.

First Declension.

Fourth Declension.

The common English endings of the possessive and plural are from the first declension. The -en of oxen is from the fourth. Neuters have no plural sign, and so some English words from them do not yet always use it: sheep, deer, swine, folic, hair, head, hundred, year, and the like. The old feminines were declined somewhat like the Latin first, with a genitive in -e, and we find a few examples of it in Chaucer. Gender is determined by the endings of words; it agrees generally with the German: wif-man, woman, is regularly masculine because it ends in man; wif wife, is neuter; sunne, sun, is feminine; mona, moon, is masculine. Each adjective may be declined in two ways according as it is definite or indefinite, as in German.

An ending -e is found in Chaucer to indicate sometimes the plural, sometimes the definite declension. Comparison in Anglo-Saxon was by endings, -r, -st; not by more and most.

The Personal Pronouns.