1. 1.3. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid­ 5th C and the mid-12th C.
It is a West Germanic language, and therefore, is closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon.
Old English also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.
It is also closely related to German and Dutch.

2. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Again, the close contact between the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons led to the borrowing of Old Norse words.
For example, many now common lexical items came originally from Old Norse, includes words such as: take, die, wrong, call, and law.
On grammar, the <-s> inflection on third-person present simple singular forms of the verb is a result of Scandinavian influence.

3. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Pronunciation of Old English
Vowels
Old English scripts used seven (7) vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u, y, and æ (called ‘ash’). All these could represent either short or long sounds.
To represent diphthongs, Old English used diagraphs ea, eo, io, and ie. These too could be either short or long.

4. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Consonants
Old English had a set of consonants very similar to Modern English, with some additions/exceptions as shown below:
Old English had the following consonant sounds: b, c, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, Ϸ/ð and x.
The letters:Ϸ/ð were either voiced or voiceless.
In writing, they never used the sounds/letters j, q, and v.
Consonants: w and y were used as vowels.

5. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
[ x ] (as in Scots loch, Welsh bach, German Nacht— or simply Greek χαρά)
There were voiced variants of the letters : f and t. Old English did not use the v; the symbol f represented both the f sound and the v sound.
This is because in old English, f and v were both members of the same phoneme: when this phoneme occurred in the middle of a word before a voiced sound, and was not doubled, it was pronounced v; in all other positions it was pronounced f.

6. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
For example, the f sound was used in fæder ‘father’, fif ‘five’, hæft ‘haft, handle’, and pyffan ‘to puff’, and the v sound was used giefan ‘to give’, seofon ‘seven’, hræfn ‘raven’, and lifde ‘he lived’.
Also, the symbol/sound s was used to represent both s and z. So s sound occurred in sǣ ‘sea’, hūs ‘house’, stanās ‘stones’, west ‘west’, and cyssan ‘to kiss’, and the z sound occurred in nosu ‘nose’, and bosm ‘bosom’.
palatalizationof g: pronounced [j] (NE y, German j) before high front vowel (i, e).

7. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Intervocalic voicing: fricatives were voiced between vowels: wulfvs. wulfas.
There were consonant clusters like cn-, wl-, wr-, hn-, hl-, hr-, hw- which are not common Modern English.
The ng sound (as in modern sing) existed in Old English, but not as a separate phoneme: it was simply a variant of the n phoneme, used before k and g; in such words as singan.
Thus, the n and the g were pronounced separately (as in our word finger, not as in singer).

8. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Doubled consonants were pronounced long. 
There were combinations of sc and cg in words like scip ‘ship’ and ecg ‘edge’.
These have been developed into Modern English sh (as in ship, bishop), and j (as in judge and edge) respectively.
Orthographic ng was pronounced [ng], as in present-day West Midlands.

9. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
The letter k was not normally used. The k sound was represented by c, but where it preceded a front vowel (i or e) in prehistoric English it had developed into a palatal stop instead of a velar one. The palatal stop has become the modern English ch (as in church).
In Old English, every symbol was pronounced; the h was pronounced in niht ‘night’; the c in cnēo ‘knee’, the r in wæter ‘water’, both the n and the g in sang ‘song’, and so on.

10. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
The Grammar of the Old English
Grammar of Old English was almost similar to that of modern German. It had four cases:
Nominative: For those who know English grammar, nominative is used to refer to the subject (doers).
Accusative: This refers to the object (DO)
Dative: This refers to an indirect object(IO)
Genitive: This refers to the possessive form

11. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
In Old English, the above cases were determined by their case – endings.
Hund (dog) Cild (child)
Nominative hund Cild
Accusative hund Cild
Dative Hund (e) Cild (e)
Genitive Hund (es) Cild (es)

12. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Many nouns had the ending –um for the dative plural, and most had –a for the genitive plural; and many masculine nouns had a genitive singular in –es and a nominative and accusative plural in –as.
Old English relied a good deal for its case distinctions on the adjectives, which had preserved more distinctive endings than the nouns, and on the definite article sē ‘the’, which still had a large number of forms for different cases and genders.
Old English had grammatical gender as opposed to natural gender. Gender in ‘Linguistics’ refers to the aspects of masculine, feminine, neuter, and commonness especially when the speaker/writer addresses different items in a sentence construction.

13. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
While neuter means the item/noun referring to non-animate like chair, table, glass, etc., commonness refers to the item/noun that can be shared by both masculine and feminine. For example: friend, teacher, doctor, engineer, principal, etc. 
Old English made great use of its inflectional system, and to a greater extent it still preserved grammatical gender. 
In Old English, all nouns belonged to three grammatical genders namely: Masculine, Feminine and neuter. For instance:

14. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Gender nouns with Masculineconnotation
Se wIfman (The man)
Se mete (The food)
Se mōna (The room)
Se grund (The ground)
Gender nouns with Feminine connotation
Sēohloefdige (The lady)
SēoSunne (The Sun)
Sēoeayl (The shoulder)

15. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Gender nouns with neuter connotation
Ϸættungil (the star)
ϷætSeg (the egg)
Ϸæt Lim (the limb)
Old English was also much more inflected in such a way that a sentence word order varied in respect with gender to denote different meaning. For example:

16. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
i. Segumange seah Ϸa cwēn
(The man saw the woman)
ii. Sēocwēnge seah Ϸone guman
(The woman saw the man)
The use of Gender inflection (Se/Sēo) in the constructions: (i) and (ii) above has altered the meaning in such a way that the construction (iii) below bears meaning similar to that of the word order in (i) above:

17. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
iii. Ϸone gumange seah Sēocwēn
(The man saw the woman)
iv. Ϸa cwēnge seah Se guman
(The woman saw the man)
This was also the case in Latin where ‘word order’ didn’t matter. For example, in Latin –m was inflected to refer to accusative case as in the following constructions:

18. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
v. Paulo amatmaria-m
vi. Maria-mamat Paulo
The meaning for in (v) and (vi) is the same (Paul loves Mary) regardless of the order.
Old English had no indefinite article. When standing before a noun, the numeral ān ‘one’ or the adjective sum‘a certain’ expressed particularity rather than indefiniteness.
The interrogative pronoun existed only in the singular, with minimal variations for gender.

19. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
Comparatives and superlatives were formed by adding the suffixes –ra, and –ost/-est/-ast ‘rare’.
This usually involved no modification of the stem, but a few forms showed i/j mutation: thus, eald/ieldra/ieldest. A few common adjectives formed their comparatives and superlatives on roots differing from those of the positive: thus gōd/bet(e)ra/betst, micel/māra/mǣst, and so on. 
Adverbs were formed from adjectives mainly by adding the suffix –e: thus, hearde adverb <heard adjective.

20. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
The Vocabulary of Old English
To enrich its vocabulary, Old English depended mainly on its own resources, not on borrowing from other languages.
Old English had inherited Proto- Germanic suffix –ipō, which could be added to adjectives to form abstract nouns; hence such modern English pairs as true and truth, foul and filth, merry and mirth, strong and strength, slow and sloth.

21. Linguistic Features of Old English (from 5th through10th c)
However, Old English borrowed a certain number of words from other languages, especially names for the concepts and institutions of Christianity.
The word church (Old English cirica) is derived from the Greek kuriakon and is found in all the Germanic languages.
Most of the words connected with Christianity were from Latin, such as the Old English words apostol ‘apostle’, biscop ‘bishop’, munuc ‘monk’, mynster ‘monastery, cathedral’.
Other words existed were like hell, holy, and Easter.

22. Ending remark…
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