History of the english language

Old English alphabet


Notes
Long vowels were marked with macrons. These were not written originally used in Old English but are a more modern invention to distinguish between long and short vowels.
The alternate forms of g and w (yogh and wynn/wen respectively) were based on the letters used at the time of writing Old English. Today they can be substituted for g and w in modern writing of Old English.
Yogh originated from an insular form of g and wynn/wen came from a runic letter and was used to represent the non-Latin sound of [w]. The letters g and w were introduced later by French scribes. Yogh came to represent [ç] or [x]

OE Morphology
Old English morphology was that of a typical inflected if somewhat simplified Indo-European language. Parts of speech included noun, pronoun, adjective, numeral and verb; all of which formed their paradigmatic forms by inflections, suffixes, and sound interchange. There were no analytical formations. Nouns in Old English retained only four of the Indo-European 8 cases, adjectives, partly pronouns and numerals agreed with the nouns they modified in number, gender and case. The Old English had two adjective declensions, a strong and a weak. The weak forms were used generally after demonstrative pronouns, and possessive adjectives; the strong were used independently. The comparison of adjectives and adverbs in Germanic differs from that in the Romance languages. Generally, -r and -st endings are added: long, longer, longest.
Free stress became recessive, and precise accent rules became dominant, with the first root syllable carrying the stress. Umlauting, a process of modifying vowel sounds, took place extensively in formation of paradigmatic forms (man - men; f) and word building. A system of strong verbs developed as the result of vowel alternation (ablaut), and a unique way of forming the past tense using dental suffix for weak verbs (ealdian – ealdode- to grow old) was created.