In this section, Prof. Arthur Bahr describes the chief hurdles students face in learning Old English.
One hurdle Old English poses is that, like Latin or German, it uses the endings of nouns and adjectives, so-called “case endings,” to indicate their grammatical function. Modern English has mostly lost its case endings, except in plurals (cat/cats), genitives (cat’s/cats’), and pronouns (she/her; they/them/their; he/him/his); but it has much stricter word order to compensate.
The many inflections of Old English—both case endings and a wider range of verb endings than we have—enable highly flexible word order, especially in poetry, so a reader needs rock-solid control of those endings to make sense of what’s going on. Yet because many of these endings are ambiguous, and the word order is often a jumble, you also need creative problem-solving and flexible thinking. Each sentence is like a puzzle, some easier and some harder. Fortunately, MIT students tend to be quite good at puzzles!
