The Way We Were

Languages are constantly changing. For example, when you talk to your friends, you probably use some words that did not exist ten years ago. Even the basic grammar of a language can change.

Over time, these changes accumulate until new languages are born. In this way, the English that is spoken today—known as Present Day English—is descended from a language called Old English, which was spoken approximately a thousand years ago. Since that time, the language has transformed so much that, if you wanted to understand Old English, you would need to study it as a foreign language. This problem focuses on some of the differences between Old English and Present Day English.

Study the table below, which contains some sentences in Old English along with their translations in Present Day English. (The pronunciation of the letters is not important for this problem, but see the end of the problem for pronunciation notes.) Then answer the questions that follow.

A1

Fill in the blank cells from the table below:

A2

Fill in the blanks in these Old English sentences. A blank can be filled in with one word or a sequence of multiple words. For some blanks, there may be more than one solution; you should only give one.

Here are some more Old English sentences:

A3

Below on the left are six Old English sentences which can all be translated into Present Day English by the single sentence We saw you. Match each Old English sentence with the context (on the right) in which it might have been said.

A4

Six distinct words are used to translate the Present Day English word you into Old English. For each of the following sentences, write the correct you word that is missing.

Some more information about Old English

If someone referred to Old English, would you think of the language of Shakespeare, who was active at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, or possibly of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written circa 1385? In the standard historical division of English, Shakespeare's language is actually Early Modern English, while Chaucer was writing late Middle English. English was brought to England from Germany and northern Denmark in the early fifth century, and before the conversion of the English to Christianity, was occasionally written in inscriptions using the Germanic runic alphabet. A small number of English writings in the Latin alphabet appear circa 700, but it is only in the ninth century that we find a substantial body of texts. The Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) period extended to circa 1100, when enough changes to the language had happened that it would be unintelligible to the people who brought the language to England. If Old English would have been incomprehensible to the speakers of the Middle English period, this is even more true for Present Day English speakers.

Additional notes

• For the most part, Latin letters were used to represent similar sounds in Old English. The letter <æ> (which is capitalized as <Æ>) represented a vowel similar to that in Present Day English hat. The symbol <þ>, called thorn, comes from the runic alphabet and was used to represent sounds not found in Latin, the two sounds of <th> in Present Day English this and thigh.
• Word order in Old English was flexible. In your answers for this problem, you should only use the word orders illustrated in the example sentences.