General characteristics of language structure in OE
Old English, like other Old Germanic languages, was much closer in structure to other Indo-European languages than Modern English. A typical peculiarity of language structure in OE was the expression of grammatical categories and relations by means of changing the word form with the help of inflections.
The syntactic structure of OE was determined by two major conditions: the nature of OE morphology and the relations between the spoken and the written forms of the language.
OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech. Accordingly, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple: coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.
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