1. Linguistic features of the old English period. A comparison of English texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries with those produced in the late twelth or early thirteenth reveals the following differences between Old and Middle English: phonological o Old-English diphthongs become Middle English monophthongs, e.g. on heofonum -> in hevene; o new diphthongs emerge in the Middle English period, e.g. dæg > dai, day; o Initial [h] before consonants disappears in the Middle English period, e.g. hræven -> raven; o [f, v] and [s, z] , which were allophones in the Old-English period, become phonemes; o unstressed vowels in the inflectional endings become [@] .1.1 morphological o the complete Old-English inflectional system is simplified in Middle English; o loss of the strong inflexion of adjectives; o loss of grammatical gender; o emergence of the unified definite article `the.' syntactical o replacement of the case functions by a fixed word order and prepositions. lexical o first borrowing of French loan-words;
o increased emergence of Scandinavian loan-words. graphological o disappearance of Old English writing conventions; 1.2 o increased use of Latin and Anglo-Norman. In general, Old English might be called a synthetic language, which uses inflectional morphemes to express the syntactical relationships. Middle English might be called an analytical language, which uses function words to constitute syntactical relationships. Compare: Old English ealle ealdras þæra sacerda and folces writeras with Middle English alle the prynces of prestis, and scribis of the puple. (The same difference holds more or less between Modern High German and Modern English.) The transition from Middle to Early Modern English is characterized by the following developments: the first phase of the Great Vowel Shift is completed; the unstressed inflectional vowels become mute; the inflectional endings are reduced to {-s, -st, -th}; London English is more and more regarded as the standard variety; huge extension of the vocabulary by borrowing and word-formation.
2. On the origin of the English language. Old English is one of the Germanic group of Indo-European languages. It was spoken, and written, in England before about 1100AD. It is sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon. There were four distinct dialects of Old English: Northumbrian, Mercia, Kentish and West-Saxon. This is known through differences in spelling. After 900AD West-Saxon became widely used as a standard written language, and is sometimes referred to as 'Classic West-Saxon'. Two stages of the West-Saxon dialect can be distinguished - early West Saxon (eWS), which is the language of the time of King Alfred (c. 900), and late West Saxon (lWS), which is seen in the works of Ælfric (c. 1000).
LANGUAGE GROUPS The Celtic languages spread over much of southern and western Europe. Latin came to be the dialect of Rome and its use spread with the growth of the empire. Norman French influenced the English language. The modern Germanic languages derive from different tribal groups.
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EUROPE The language spoken by a particular tribe could change as the result of contact and conquest. Identity of Germanic peoples remains an enigma. Contact between tribal groups led to mutual influence in their language because of: - trade (Pidgin English) - military contact (World Wars)
- conquest (Battle of Hastings) LANGUAGE IN BRITAIN The earliest language spoken in Britain are the Celtic languages. The roman army occupies two-third of Britain and Latin was introduced as the language of the occupying forces. During the 5th century Germanic migrants crossed the North Sea and settled on the east and south coasts of Britain. These migrants are known as Anglo-saxons.
3. Middle English grammatical changes. Noun, pronoun, adjective, verb. Inflectional languages fall into two classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of inflections: endings on the noun and pronoun, the adjective and the verb. Languages that make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic, Old English a synthetic language. In its grammar Old English resembles modern German. Theoretically the noun and adjective are inflected for four cases in the singular and four in the plural, although the forms are not always distinctive, and in addition the adjective has separate forms for each of the three genders. The inflection of the verb is less elaborate than that of the Latin verb, but there are distinctive endings for the different persons, numbers, tenses, and moods. Pronouns in Middle English retain inflection, that is, endings which indicate what their grammatical role is; if you've ever studied Russian, German, Latin or Ancient Greek, this concept will be familiar to you. If not, think of our modern English pronouns: we use "I" for the subject of a sentence ("I hit Arnold"), "me" for the object ("Arnold hit me"), "my" for the possessive, also known as the gentive ("my head hurt"). Middle English is not much different, but preserves a distinction we have lost between the singular and plural of the second person. Nouns: Most nouns form the plural by adding -s or -es, like in modern English. Adjectives: Some have a "weak" form, which adds an -e wehn used with definite articles, demonstratives and pronouns. Most form the comparative and superlative as in modern English; sometimes the vowel is shortened: strong, strenger, strengest and long, lenger, longest. Some are irregular (and remain so in modern English). Adverbs are formed by adding -e, -liche, and –ly. Verbs: In the present tense, regular verbs add -e, -est, eth in the singular and -e(n) in the plural: I bidde thi go forth, thow biddest me, he biddeth yow, they bidden us, etc. In the past tense, many "strong" verbs change stem vowel (as in modern Eng). To be and to go are irregular, as in most languages.
4. The English vocabulary development from old to modern period The English language was first brought to Britain in the fifth century A.D. by settlers from the European mainland. This stage of the language is usually known as Old English (OE). In the following centuries, it was subjected to various influences which made it the language it is today. These can most clearly be seen in the vocabulary of the language, which reflects the influence of a range of other languages. The first of these external influences, and probably the most important, was the Norman conquest of 1066 A.D., which led to large numbers of French words being imported into English. Words were also borrowed from Latin, the language of European scholarship, and their number grew during the Renaissance period in the 16th and 17th centuries. From about this time, through trade and colonisation, words were borrowed from other European languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, and from languages in far-flung places such as Africa, India and the Americas. This process has continued up to the present day, and at the same time words from Englishspeaking areas, especially the United States, have been added to our vocabulary. Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons. Some linguists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Old English was lost by the end of the Middle English period, including a large number of words formed by compounding, e.g. bōchūs ('bookhouse', 'library'), yet we still retain the component parts 'book' and 'house'. Certain categories of words seem to have been especially vulnerable. Many, if not most, of the words in Modern English that are used in polite conversation to describe body parts and bodily functions are of Latin or Greek origin. The words which were used in Old English for these same purposes are now mostly either extinct or considered crude or vulgar, such as arse/ass. Some words became extinct while other near-synonyms of Old English origin replaced them ('limb' survives, yet lið is gone or survives dialectally as lith). Many of these linguistic changes were brought on by the introduction of Old Norse and Norman French words, while others fell away due to the natural processes of language evolution.
