An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

p. This process, which is called comparative reconstruction, is fraught
with dangers, but all I want to do here is to give you an idea of what is
done.
It is also possible to use comparative reconstruction on more closely
related languages, such as the Germanic group. Below I give some
examples of cognate forms from English, Dutch and German, and along-
side them I give the corresponding French words:
English
Dutch
German
French
father
vader
Vater
père
foot
voet
Fuss
pied
tooth
tand
Zahn
dent
ten
tien
zehn
dix
It will be clear that English and Dutch share much in common, and that
German is not hugely different (although the initial consonant t has
changed to z). Of course the reason for this is that all three are Germanic
languages. French, on the other hand, is a Romance language, deriving
from Latin. Therefore it is much more distantly related. Note that where
English has f French has p, just like the words for ‘father’ above. You
should also be able to work out that there is a further parallel relation-
ship between d and English t.
1.3 The Anglo-Saxon settlement
It is likely that the Anglo-Saxons, or more properly, the English (see
below), came from the area of north-west Germany and Denmark, and
perhaps also the north-east of the Netherlands, the area known today
as Friesland. Indeed Frisian, still spoken by about 300,000 people in this
part of the Netherlands, is the language to which English is most closely
related historically. Despite the story of Hengist and Horsa, when the
English came to Britain they did not settle only in Kent. At much the
same time they also settled along the east coast south of the Humber,
ORIGINS AND SOURCES
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especially in East Anglia. Soon after they spread westwards and
northwards, and by the seventh century the English (as they called them-
selves = Old English angelcynn) had settled in almost all of England and
southern Scotland, the main exceptions being Cornwall and parts of
north-west England.
In other words, these new immigrants to Britain established them-
selves as the dominant group within two centuries. There is more than
one reason why this could happen. It is possible that climatic changes led
to population pressure on the continent, and certainly there were major
movements in population throughout central Europe at the time. Since
Germanic mercenaries had been in the Roman army the Germanic
tribes would have heard about Britain from them as well as others. And
the departure of the Romans seems, as Bede indicates, to have left a
power vacuum, which the English were easily able to exploit.
1.4 The look of Old English
When studying Old English the first thing that has to be done is to
look at its spelling system or orthography. The reason for this will be
immediately apparent, for Old English orthography is rather different
from that in PDE (present-day English). This is despite the fact that
the Anglo-Saxons used basically the same alphabet as we do. The most
obvious difference is that the Anglo-Saxons did not use the following
letters: , and the following were very rare: . On the
other hand, they had several letters which we use either very rarely or
not at all: <æ, 
t
,
e
>. In addition, some Old English letters had a range of
usage different (sometimes very different) from that today. A list of Old
English and PDE correspondences is given below: