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The History of the English Language, OLD ENGLISH, MIDDLE ENGLISH, EARLY…
The History of the English Language
Timeline
OLD ENGLISH
Four dialects of the Old English language are known:
Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern Scotland;
Mercian in central England;
Kentish in southeastern England;
West Saxon in southern and southwestern England.
spelling was never fully standardized: the alphabet was used by scribal monks to spell words "phonetically" with the result that each dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently.
King Alfred did attempt to regularize spelling in the 9th century, but by the 11th century continued changes in pronunciation once again exerted their disruptive effects on spelling.
Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first the runic thorn (þ), and later eth (ð).
Another added letter was the ligature ash (æ), used to represent the broad vowel sound now rendered by 'a' in, e.g., the word fast.
A letter wynn was also added, to represent the English w sound, but it looks so much like thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with the more familiar 'w' to eliminate confusion.
around the 7th Century,
a vowel shift
took place in Old English pronunciation (but not the Great Vowel Shift, which happened later) in which
vowels began to be pronounced more to the front of the mouth
.
Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English, including words like water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, b e, of, he, she, you, no, not, etc.
Old English words were inflected
. Over time, most of this was lost and English became the analytic language we recognize today.
Old English words were declined according to case, number and gender.
Old English literature flowered after Augustine’s arrival.
This was especially notable in the north-eastern kingdom of Northumbria, which provided England with its first great poet (Caedmon in the 7th Century), its first great historian (the Venerable Bede in the 7th-8th Century) and its first great scholar (Alcuin of York in the 8th Century).
The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is usually considered to be "Cædmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680.
The most well-known work of literature in Old English was “Beowulf”.
MIDDLE ENGLISH
The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods
(1) Early Middle English, from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use;
(2) the Central Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system,
the loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words
; the period was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect, in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer;
(3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, whichсwas marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and the other northern dialects.
The pronunciation system underwent significant change. Several consonants and vowels altered their values, and new contrastive units of sound (‘phonemes’) emerged.
The Normans gave over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Many of them were related to matters
the eventual disappearance of most of the earlier inflections, and the increasing reliance on alternative means of expression, using word order and prepositional constructions rather than word endings to express meaning relationships.
Among the new kinds of construction were the progressive forms of the verb (as in I am going) and the range of auxiliary verbs (I have seen, I didn’t go, etc.). The infinitive form of a verb starts to be marked by the use of a particle (to go, to jump).
A new form of expressing relationships such as possession appeared, using of (as in the pages of a book).
The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, shows how pronunciation had changed.
‘SUMER IS ICUMEN IN’ (THE OLDEST KNOWN ENGLISH SONG)
Although the earliest surviving writings in the period are only about a century after the latest writings in Old English, Middle English texts feel very much closer to Modern English in their grammar and vocabulary.
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
English becomes the official language of the law courts and replaces Latin as the medium of instruction at most schools.
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
Most language historians mark the beginning of the Early Modern English period with the year 1476, when the printing press was introduced to England by William Caxton.
New means of regularizing established spelling conventions were introduced to show the “right writing” of words, notably word lists appended to teaching manuals such as Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie (1582).
Over half of them are identical with their modern standard spelling, and considerably more if the regular <i>/<j> and <u>/<v> alternations are excluded from the calculation.
A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short vowel sounds were largely unchanged).
The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period.
A notable supporter of the introduction of new words was the humanist and diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot (c.1490–1546). (such words as participate, persist, obtestation) Shakespeare personally coined an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works (critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic…).
William Caxton translation “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”
The “King James Bible” was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and published in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the preceding 70 years.
The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”, was published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604.
The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was “An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”
The Oxford English Dictionary was published.
LATE MODERN ENGLISH
Begins with the Augustan Age
The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.
500-1100
1100-1500
1500-1800
1800+