This article is about the ancient language of the continental Saxons. For the Anglo-Saxon language, seeOld English. For the ancient Saxon people who spoke the language, seeSaxons. For all other uses, seeSaxon (disambiguation).
In the earlyMiddle Ages, adialect continuumexisted betweenOld Dutchand Old Saxon, a continuum which has since been interrupted by the simultaneous dissemination of standard languages within each nation and the dissolution of folk dialects. Although they share some features, a number of differences separate Old Saxon,Old English, and Old Dutch. One such difference is the Old Dutch utilization of-aas its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employ-asor-os. However, it seems thatMiddle Dutchtook the Old Saxon a-stem ending from someMiddle Low Germandialects, as modern Dutch includes the plural ending-sadded to certain words. Another difference is the so-called "unified plural": Old Saxon, like Old Frisian and Old English, has one verb form for all three persons in the plural, whereas Old Dutch retained three distinct forms (reduced to two in Middle Dutch).
Old Saxon (or Old Low German) probably evolved primarily fromIngvaeonicdialects in theWest Germanicbranch ofProto-Germanicin the 5th century. However, Old Saxon, even considered as an Ingvaeonic language, is not a pure Ingvaeonic dialect likeOld Frisianand Old English, the latter two sharing some other Ingvaeonic characteristics, which Old Saxon lacked.
Old Saxon naturally evolved into Middle Low German over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, with a great shift fromLatinto Low German writing happening around 1150, so that the development of the language can be traced from that period.
The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known asvowel reduction, which took place in most otherWest Germanic languagesand some Scandinavian dialects such asDanish, reducing all unstressed vowels toschwa. Thus, such Old Saxon words likegisprekan(spoken) ordagō(days' – gen. pl.) becamegesprēkenanddāge.
Old Saxon did not participate in theHigh German consonant shift, and thus preserves stop consonantsp,t,kthat have been shifted inOld High Germanto variousfricativesandaffricates. The Germanic diphthongsai,auconsistently develop into long vowelsē,ō, whereas in Old High German they appear either asei,ouorē,ōdepending on the following consonant.
Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic /j/ after a consonant, e.g.hēliand"savior" (Old High German:heilant,Old English:hǣlend, butGothic:háiljands).Germanic umlaut, when it occurs with shorta, is inconsistent, e.g.hebbeanorhabbian"to have" (Old English:habban). This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjectivekrank(sick, ill) had the comparative formskrenkerandkranker. Apart from thee, however, the umlaut is not marked in writing.
The voiceless spirants/f/,/θ/, and/s/gain voiced allophones ([v],[ð], and[z]) when between vowels. This change is only faithfully reflected in writing for[v](represented with letters such as ⟨ƀ⟩ and ⟨u⟩). The other two allophones continued to be written as before.
Fricatives were devoiced again word-finally. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period,stopsbecame devoiced word-finally as well.
Most consonants could begeminated. Notably, geminated/v/gave/b:/, and geminated/ɣ/probably gave/ɡ:/; Geminated/h/resulted in/x:/.
Germanic*his retained as[x]in these positions and thus merges with devoiced/ɣ/.
The closing diphthongs/ei/and/ou/sometimes occur in texts (especially inGenesis), probably under the influence ofFranconianorHigh German dialects, where they replace Old Saxon developments/ɛː/and/ɔː/(which evolved fromProto-Germanic/ai/and/au/).
The situation for the front opening diphthongs is somewhat unclear in some texts. Words written withioin theHeliand, the most extensive record of Old Saxon writing, are often found written variably withiaor eveniein most other texts, notably the later ones. The diphthong eventually merges into/eː/in almost every Middle Low German dialect.
There also existed 'long' diphthongs/oːu/,/aːu/and/eːu/. These were, however, treated as two-syllable sequences of a long vowel followed by a short one, not proper diphthongs.
Old Saxon nouns were inflected in very different ways following their classes. Here are the endings fordag, "day" an a-stem masculine noun:
CaseSingularPlural
dag'day'm.
Nominative
dag
dagos
Accusative
dag
dagos
Genitive
dages, -as
dago
Dative
dage, -a
dagum, -un
At the end of the Old Saxon period, distinctions between noun classes began to disappear, and endings from one were often transferred to the other declension, and vice versa. This happened to be a large process, and the most common noun classes started to cause the least represented to disappear. As a result, in Middle Low German, only the former weak n-stem and strong a-stem classes remained. These two noun inflection classes started being added to words not only following the historical belonging of this word, but also following the root of the word.
The Old Saxon verb inflection system reflects an intermediate stage between Old English and Old Dutch, and further Old High German. Unlike Old High German and Old Dutch, but similarly to Old English, it did not preserve the three different verb endings in the plural, all featured as-ad(also-iador-iodfollowing the different verb inflection classes). Like Old Dutch, it had only two classes of weak verb, with only a few relic verbs of the third weak class (namely four verbs:libbian,seggian,huggianandhebbian).
This table sums up all seven Old Saxon strong verb classes and the three weak verb classes:
It should be noticed that the third weak verb class includes only four verbs (namelylibbian,seggian,huggianandhebbian); it is a remnant of an older and larger class that was kept in Old High German.
Old Saxon syntax is mostly different from that ofmodern English. Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection – e.g., word order was generally freer. In addition:
Multiple negatives could stack up in a sentence and intensify each other (negative concord), which is not always the case in modern English, modernDutch, or modernGerman.
Sentences with subordinate clauses of the type "when X, Y" (e.g. "When I got home, I ate dinner.") did not use awh-type conjunction, but rather used ath-typecorrelative conjunction(e.g.thô X, thô Yin place of "when X, Y"). Thewh-type conjunctions were used only asinterrogative pronounsandindefinite pronouns.
Similarly,wh-forms were not used asrelative pronouns(as in "the man who saw me" or "the car which I bought"). Instead, an indeclinable wordthewas used, often in conjunction with thedefinite article(which was declined for case, number and gender).
Old Saxon comes down in a number of different manuscripts whose spelling systems sometimes differ markedly. In this section, only the letters used in normalized versions of theHeliandwill be kept, and the sounds modern scholars have traditionally assigned to these letters. Where spelling deviations in other texts may point to significant pronunciation variants, this will be indicated.
In general, the spelling of Old Saxon corresponds quite well to that of the other ancientGermanic languages, such as Old High German orGothic.
candkwere both used for[k]. However, it seems that, as in otherWest-Germanicdialects, when[k]was followed byiore, it had the pronunciation/ts/or/kʲsʲ/.[2]The letterscandxwere preferred for thepalatalisations,kand even sometimeschbeing rather used beforeu,oorafor/k/(kuningfor[kʏnɪŋk]'king', modernköning ; crûci for[kryːtsi] ; forsachistu for[forsakistuː]).
grepresented[ɣ]or its allophone[ɡ]:brengian[brɛŋɡjan]'to bring',seggian[sɛɡɡjan]'to say',wege[wɛɣe]'way' (dative).
gseems, at least in a few dialects, to have had the pronunciation[j]or[ʝ]at the beginning of a word, only when followed byiore. Thus we findgiār[jaːr]'year' and evengēr[jeːr]'year', the latter betraying a strong Old Frisian influence.
hrepresents[h]and its allophone[x]:holt[hɔlt]'wood',naht[naxt]'night' (mod.nacht).
iis used for both the vowels[ɪ]and[iː]and the consonant[j]:ik[ɪk]'I' (mod.ick, ik),iār[jaːr]'year'.
this used to indicate[θ]:thōhtun[θoːxtun]'they thought'.ðis used for[ð], occasionally also writtendh.
urepresented the vowels[ʊ]and[uː], or the consonant[β]~[v], which was denoted sporadically across manuscripts by either ⟨ƀ⟩, ⟨b⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨v⟩, or ⟨f⟩'.[3]
uuwas normally used to represent[w], predating the letterw.
zonly appeared in a few texts due toOld High Germaninfluence.
Only a few texts survive, predominantly baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest ofCharlemagne. The only literary texts preserved areHeliandand fragments of theOld Saxon Genesis. There is also:
