The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

And along the line of the Danelaw, in the trading outposts, the great grammar shift began to take place. This is the only case in our history in which the whole structure of the language changes. In Old English, sense is carried by inflection — it worked in the same way that Latin did. The essential thing about it was that word order was much freer than it is today. On the whole, Old English tended already to use the order that we do now: subject, verb, object is the most common. But that wasn’t a hard and fast rule. So if an Angle wanted to say “the dogs killed the cat,” he’d have to have the accusative form of cat, and the verb in the right form, to make his meaning clear, so that the message pointed to the death of the cat and not the dogs. Their sentences came not through word order but by tacking on endings to words, like articles and pronouns and nouns. When English came into contact with the not wholly dissimilar Danish language, a lot of the inflected endings began to lose their distinctive nature. The new grammatical meld tended to happen in the borderland market towns; words followed the trade. Clarity for commerce may have been the chief driving force. Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use “to” or “with.” “I gave the dog to my daughter.” “I cut the meat with my knife.” The order of words became important and prepositions bec...