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Historical background and chronological divisions in the history of English.

The history of the English language covers over 16 centuries. There was a well-known English scholar Henry Sweet, who proposed the division according to the state of the unstressed endings.

1. Old English. The period of full endings, any vowel could be found in an unstressed ending: sinзan, sunu. The OE begins in the 5 century, embracing the years 500 to1100, the time when A-S invaded Britain, where Celts lived. The earliest writings belong to the year 700 AD. The end of the period is closed to the Norman Conquest (1066).

2. Middle English. The period of leveled endings. Vowels of unstressed endings have been leveled under the neutral vowel [ә] (шва), which is represented by [e]: singen, sune. ME dates to 1100-1500 (the introduction of printing, the end of the war of roses, the dec[k]ay of feudalism.

3. Modern English – the period of lost endings: sing, son.

-Early ME (1500- until the age of Shakespeare)

-Late ME.

This division is based on both phonetic and morphological features (weakening and loss of unstressed vowel sounds and grammatical morphemes). The transition from one period to another was very gradual and slow.

 

Languages change through time, they have the development in their grammatical system, spelling, vocabulary, phonetic structure, but the development of language is an interrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformations.

The commonly accepted periodisation divides English history into 3 periods: Old English, Middle English and New English.

Old English begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th century) or with the beginning of writing (7th c.) and ends with the Norman conquest (1066).

ME begins with the Norman conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475). And this is the beginning of the Modern or New English period which lasts to the present day. A lot of subdivisions have been suggested.

Sweet suggested 3 main periods: early, classical and late. Schlauch preferred a division of history by centuries. Strang: into periods of 200 years. But we will study Rastorgueva’s division:

1) pre-written period or Early OE lasted from the 5th to the close of the 7th c. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians). The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there was no written form of English

2) OE or Anglo-Saxon; also written OE from the 8th up to the 11th c. The tribal dialects changed into local or regional dialects, they are;Kentish, Mersian, Nothumbrian and West Saxon. In writing sphere West Saxon had gained the supremacy over the rest, it is connected with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex in political and cultural way.

3) Early ME- lasts from 1066 to 1350.. It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences – Scandinavian and French. There was a high rate of phonetic and grammatical changes. By the end of the period English transformed into an analytical language.

4) Late or Classical ME- from 1350 to 1475- embraces the age of Chaucer ( the greatest English medieval writer). The time of the restoration of English to the position of the state language and it is the time of literary flourishing. . The main dialect used in writing was the mixed dialect of London. It derived from the Southern dialectal group but during the 14th c. it was partially replaced by East Midland traits.

5) Early New English- from the introduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare (from 1475 to 1660). The first book was published in 1475 by William Caxton. It was the time of sweeping changes at all levels: lexical, phonetic,grammatical. The country became economically unified. This period is known as a period of formation of the National English language.

6) Normalisation Period (Age of Correctness or Neo-Classical Period) – from 1660 to1800. It’s the time of the establishment of “norms” of the language that were fixed as rules of correct usage. During the 18th c. literary English differentiated into distinct styles. The 18th c. is called the period of “fixing the pronunciation”. Word usage and grammatical construction were subjected to normalization as well. The formation of new verbal grammatical categories was completed. Syntactical structures were standardized.

7) Late New English or Modern English- from the 19th- till nowadays. English has acquired all the properties of the national language. The local dialects were replaced by Standard English.The “best” form of English is the Received Pronunciation..

 

Old English. Historical background.

Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon,[1] Englisc by its speakers) is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon. It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years[2] – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who occupied and controlled large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.

The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features are shared with the other West Germanic languages with which Old English is grouped, while some other features are traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have derived.

Like other Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, though the instrumental was very rare), which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne and der Mond).

One of the ways the influence of Latin can be seen is that many Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from Anglo-Saxon but using Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service.

The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc or fuþorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced. The "silent" letters in many Modern English words were pronounced in Old English: for example, the c in cniht, the Old English ancestor of the modern knight, was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect, and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author, and even from work to work by the same author. Thus, for example, the word and could be spelt either and or ond.

The second major source of loanwords to Old English was the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, the pronoun they, the verb form are, and hundreds of other words.

Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity just as Modern English is also not monolithic. Within Old English, there was language variation. Thus, it is misleading, for example, to consider Old English as having a single sound system. Rather, there were multiple Old English sound systems. Old English has variation along regional lines as well as variation across different times. For example, the language attested in Wessex during the time of Æthelwold of Winchester, which is named Late West Saxon (or Æthelwoldian Saxon), is considerably different from the language attested in Wessex during the time of Alfred the Great's court, which is named Early West Saxon (or Classical West Saxon or Alfredian Saxon). Furthermore, the difference between Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon is of such a nature that Late West Saxon is not directly descended from Early West Saxon (despite what the similarity in name implies).

The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were successfully defended were then integrated into Wessex.

Old English was first written in runes (futhorc) but shifted to a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. This was replaced by insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as Caroline) replaced the insular.

 

The letter yogh was adapted from Irish ecclesiastical forms of Latin < g > ; the letter ðæt < ð > (called eth or edh in modern English) was an alteration of Latin < d >, and the runic letters thorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and, a character similar to the number seven (< ⁊ >, called a Tironian note), and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt, a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (< ꝥ >). Macrons < ¯ > over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for following m’s or n’s. All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.

 


20.06.2018; 17:27
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