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 eth is replaced by thorn). In contrast with Modern English orthography, that of Old English was reasonably regular, with a mostly predictable correspondence between letters and phonemes. There were not usually any silent letters—in the word "cniht", for example, both the and were pronounced, unlike the and in the modern "knight". The following table lists the Old English letters and digraphs together with the phonemes they represent, using the same notation as in the Phonology section above. Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives /, and cannot be voiced. Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent