From the end of the pre-historic period and the majority of the early period of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon people use the runic alphabet called futhorc which is derived from the Germanic futhark twenty-four rune set. The futhorc alphabet has an extra five runes that represented the Anglo-Saxon vowel phonemes, which made the futhorc rune set a twenty-nine symbol orthographic system (table 1 and 2). The first twenty-four runes are from the futhark set and the last five runes are the vowel sounds that were added on for Old English. It was used consistently until the 9th century when the Old English Latin alphabet was brought to the Anglo-Saxon by the Irish missionaries. With the rise of Christianity, the new alphabet was practiced more consistently…show more content… Herold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, died at the Battle of Hastings. William the Conqueror, the leader of the invasion, replaced King Herold Godwinson as King of England in 1066 (Hogg, 1992, p.9). When he came to court, he made it so that Norman French would become the language of the general court. This made it so that the Old English nobility and clergy lost their status, and this completely took out all Old English from the court. The Scandinavian ties that King Cnut had created were completely severed, and there was a sudden drop in the Scandinavian influence that did not come back until the Normans left England in 1100 (Hogg, 1992, pp.332-335). Oddly enough, there are incredibly few French loanwords that came from this period in time, one being “castel” which has evolved a bit to become “castle”. This may be because French was not spoken in the general public, but by the new court. However, the little influence that did come to the people came from Norman clergy which replaced the Old English clergy in some areas of England. According to The Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 1: The Beginning to 1066, by 1100 the English Language was starting to be modified to such a drastic degree that it was at this point that Old English gave way to Middle English. Old English diphthongs were disappearing and vowels in unstressed syllables were starting to be dropped (Malone, 1930, p.110). English also started to take the Latin periphrastic form, and becoming a less inflectional language (Kirch, 1959, p.507). These shifts were not caused by the Norman Conquest but they were most likely accelerated by these political changes (Hogg, 1992,
