Old English Dialects and Written Records

Ruthwell Cross, a religions poem on a tall stone cross near the village of Ruthwell in South-East Scotland.

Runic Casket, made of whalebone, and found in France near the town Clermond-Ferrand, now in the British Muscum in London. The Runic text is a short poem about whalebone(of the 9^th century.)

After the Anglo-Saxon came into contact with the Roman culture the Runic alphabet was superseded by the Latin. Since the very earliest times there were four dialects in OE:

Nourthumbrian (1), spoken by Angles living north of the Humber. Mercian West-Saxon (2), spoken by Angles between the Humber and Thames. The Mercian dialect: Translation of the Psalter (9 ^th c.) and hymns.The Runic texts of the Ruthwell Cross and Frank’s Casket (Runic), translation of the gospels, Caedmon’s Humn and Bede’s Dying Song.

Kentish, the language of the Jutes and Frisians. The West dialect is represented by the works of kind Alfred (lived 849-900), both original compositions of translations of Latin texts, also by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (till 891), works of the abbot Aelfric (10 century) and sermons of Wultstan (early 11^thcentury).: Translations of Psalms L-LXX and old charters.(псалма,

The superiority of the West - Saxon dialect both in quantity and importance of the documents using it contirms its dominating position as the literary language of the period.

The epic poems of the OE period: Beowulf, Genesis, Exodus, Judith, and poems by the monk Gynewulf: Eleng Andreas, Juliana and other were written in Anglian dialect but have been kept in West-Saxon dialect.

All over the country in the Kingdoms of England, all kinds of legal documents were written and copied. At first they were made in Latin, with English names and place names spelt by means of Latin letters, later they were also written in the local dialects.

There is a great variety of prose texts, part of them translations from the Latin. Among the prose works we should first of all note the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (VII-IX centuries), the year book of the events in English history, starting at 787, writtenlater in West- Saxon.

King Alfred’s Orosius is a long text based on the Historia adversus paganos (a History against the Heathens by the Spanish monk Paulus Orosius, 5^th century).

Translation made either by Alfred himself or on his orders is that of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. We mention among Alfred’s translations that of the Pastoral Care by Pope Gregory I.(ab.540-604) and others.

As we know OE scribes used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet. Like any alphabetic writing, OE writing was based on a phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. Some of OE letters indicated two or more sounds, according to their positional variants in the word.