Old English give certain evidence of an influence on syntax. The change to Old English from Old Norse was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character. Old Norse and Old English resembled each other closely like cousins and with some words in common, they roughly understood each other; in time the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged. It is most "important to recognize that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages that only the endings would put obstacles in
Old English grammar Old English had free word order, this is not quite true, as there were conventions for the positioning of subject, object and verb in clause. Old English did not use forms equivalent to "who, when, where" in relative clauses (as in "The man whom I saw") or subordinate clauses ("When I got home, I went to sleep"). Instead, relative clauses used one of the following: Preposition-fronting ("The man with whom I spoke") did not normally occur. Subordinate clauses tended to use correlative conjunctions, e.g. The word order usually distinguished the subordinate clause (with verb-final order) from the main clause (with