Another factor for similarities between Old English and Old Low German is the influence of church. There is a high correspondence
between Old English and Old Low German terms like Old English god-spell (meaning ‘good news’) and Old Low German godspell (meaning ‘gospel’). Other paradigms for this are Old English boccræft (‘literature’) and its Old Low German cognate bokkraft (‘learnedness’).
Now I would like to compare English and German syntax. In Germanic and probably in West Germanic, too, all forms were characterized by inflectional endings. A paradigm for this would be the declination of the Old English word stan ‘stone’:
Singular Plural Nom. stan stanas
Acc. stan stanas
Gen. stanes stana
Dat. stane stanum
This inflexion system was very important for Old English because it allowed a free word order as it is shown in the following sentences all meaning ‘the man slew the king’:
Se man sloh þone
kyning. (SVO)
þone kyning se man sloh. (OVS)
Se man þone kyning sloh. (SOV)
þone kyning the man sloh. (OSV)
Sloh se man þone kyning. (VSO)
Sloh þone kyning se man. (VOS)
In Modern English only the first two versions would be alright although the second one would probably be misunderstood as ‘the king slew the man’ because today SVO is the only
possible and correct word order. Sentences in which the verb is in first position are nowadays only possible as questions although Modern English questions are build with no other verbs as ‘do’ or ‘have’. However, according to Mitchell it is assumed that "Old English was clearly moving towards the SVO order" and sentences like
þas ealdan guman fundon þa hwitan oxan are usually interpreted as ‘These old man found the white oxen’ and not vice versa which is possible, as the former example has shown. The different Germanic languages have carried out the development towards SVO at different rates. English and the Scandinavian languages have gone the farthest, German less far. The reason for that could be that German did not abolish the case system, which in the earlier languages served to distinguish subjects and objects. So the English sentence: ‘An old woman gave an apple to a little girl’ can be expressed in several ways in German: