Old English Bulldog The word 'Mastiff' was eventually dropped when describing these smaller Mastiffs, as the Mastiff proper was found too slow for bull-baiting. Eventually, the Greyhound was crossed into the breed, increasing the Mastiff's speed without losing the breed's ferocity. This step reduced the Old English Bulldog's size and weight, with the Greyhound's features seen in specimens of that time. Two other recognized members of the breed can be seen in the 1817 painting "Crib and Rosa", with Rosa exemplifying the form and size of the ideal type of Old English Bulldog, albeit deficient in wrinkles about the head and neck and
Old English forms. Then, as now, dental suffixes indicated the past tense of the weak verbs, as in "work" and "worked". Old English syntax is similar to that of modern English. Some differences are consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, allowing freer word order. Old English was first written in runes, using the futhorc – a rune set derived from the Germanic 24-character elder futhark, extended by five more runes used to represent Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds, and sometimes by several more additional characters. From around the 9th century, the runic system came to be supplanted by a (minuscule)