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com/History of English

The origins of English language

According to the Anglo-Saxon historian everything started with the letter written to the Roman
consul by some Celtic people who had survived the attack from Scots and Picts in the early
decades of the 5th century. The Romans did not want to help them because they were fighting
another wars. The name of the language was for the England which meant land of Anglos and
nowadays is England. Before the Anglo-Saxons invasions, the language spoken by the native
inhabitants of the British Isles belonged to the Celtic family, introduced by a people who had come
to the islands around the middle of the first millennium BC. Many of these settlers were, in turn,
eventually subjugated by the Roman, who arrived in the 43 BC.

OLD ENGLISH (c. 500 - c. 1100)

Old English is the name given to the earliest recorded stage of the English language, up to
approximately 1150AD (when the Middle English period is generally taken to have begun). It
refers to the language as it was used in the long period of time from the coming of Germanic
invaders and settlers to Britain, in the period following the collapse of Roman Britain in the
early fifth century up to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and beyond into the first century of
Norman rule in England. It is thus first and foremost the language of the people normally
referred to by historians as the Anglo-Saxons. In this period of the history of English there a
very little Celtic influence or perhaps it is not surprisingly, given the savage way in which the
Celtics communities were destroyed or pushed back into areas that nowadays we know as
Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and the Scottish borders. Old English was first written in runic
alphabet. This alphabet was used in northern Europe and it has been preserved in 4,000
inscriptions and a few manuscripts.

Early inscription

There are less than 30 clear runic inscriptions in old English, some containing one a single
name.

The Ruthwell Cross, its faces contain panels depicting events in the life of Christ and the early
Church, as well as carvings of birds and beasts, and lines of runes around the edges are
similar to part of the poem of old English the dream of the road.

The Franks caskets is a richly carved whalebone box, illustrating mythological and religious
scenes, not at all of which can be interpreted. The picture shows the panel with adoration of
Magi alongside the Germanic legend of Wayland the Smith.

Middle English

The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new linguistic era in Britain, but it does not actually
identify the boundary between the Old and the Middle English. The chronological boundaries of
the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that has
settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the
early modern English period.) In terms of external history, Middle English is framed at its beginning
by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of
printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation
(from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance. The main influence of
English was French because large of number of merchant and craftsmen crossed the Channel to
take advantage of the commercial opportunities provided by the regime. Doubtless bilingualism
flourished quickly among those who crossed the social divide; as a result, English people learning
French in order to gain advantages from the aristocracy, and baronial staff learning English as a
part of the daily contact with local communities.

THE TRANSITION FROM OLD ENGLISH

A fundamental change in the structure of English took place during the 11th and the 12th centuries,
one without precedent in the history of the language, and without parallel thereafter.
Grammatical relationships in Old English has been expressed chiefly by the use of inflectional
endings. In the Middle English, they came to be expressed (as they are today) chiefly by word
order.

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

There is no doubt that an Early Modern English period needs to be recognized in the history of
English. The jump from the Middle English to the Modern English would be great without it.
Between the time of the Chaucer and the time of Johnson, roughly 1400 to 1800, the language
continues to change in quite noticeable ways, and there are many points of difference with the
Modern usage. By the end of the 18th century, however, very few linguistics remain. The early
modern English period follows the Middle English period towards the end of the fifteenth
century and coincides closely with the Tudor (14851603) and Stuart (1603-1714) dynasties.
The battle of Bosworth (1485) marked the end of the long period of civil war known as the
Wars of the Roses and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII (14851509),
which brought a greater degree of stable centralized government to England. Not long before,
the introduction of the craft of printing in 1476 by William Caxton marked a new departure in
the dissemination of the written word. The end of the period is marked by the religious and
political settlement of the Glorious Revolution (1688), the transition to the Augustan age
during the reign of Queen Anne (170214), and the achievement of political unity within the
British Isles through the Act of Union between England and Scotland (1707).

Is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in
the late 14th century and was completed in roughly 1550.

With some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of
William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern English, or more
specifically, are referred to as using Early Modern English or Elizabethan English. English was
adopted in regions around the world, such as North America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa,
Australia and New Zealand through colonisation by the British Empire.
MODERN ENGLISH

During the 18th century, English loses most noticeable remaining features of structural difference
which distance the Early Modern English period from us. By the end of that century, with but a few
exceptions, the spelling, punctuation, and grammar are very close to what are today. Modern
English has a large number of dialects spoken in diverse countries throughout the world. This
includes American English, Australian English, British English (containing English English, Welsh
English and Scottish English), Canadian English, Caribbean English, Hiberno-English, Indian English,
Pakistani English, Nigerian English, New Zealand English, Philippine English, Singaporean English,
and South African English.

Rules TO BE OBSERVED

In 1774, the year before Jane Austen was born, John walker published his idea for a pronunciation
dictionary of English, written aim of doing for pronunciation what Johnson had done for
vocabulary.
Content words. These words denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes, and ideas
that we can think about like children, anarchism, soar, and purple. Content words are
sometimes called the open class words because we can andregularly do add new words to
these classes, such as bollywood, blog, dis, and
24/7, pronounced twenty-four seven.

Other classes of words do not have clear lexical meanings or obvious concepts associated
with them, including conjunctions such as and, or, and but; prepositions such as in and of;
the articles the and a/an, and pronouns such as it. These kinds of words are called function
words because they specify grammatical relations and have little or no semantic content.
For example, the articles indicate whether a noun is definite or indefinitethe boy or a
boy. The preposition of indicates possession, as in the book of yours, but this word
indicates many other kinds of relations too.
Function words are sometimes called closed class words. It is difficult to think of any
conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns that have recently entered the language. The small
set of personal pronouns such as I, me, mine, he, she, and so on are part of this class.

Bound and Free Morphemes

Our morphological knowledge has two components: knowledge of the individual
morphemes and knowledge of the rules that combine them. One of the things we
know about particular morphemes is whether they can stand alone or whether
they must be attached to a base morpheme.
Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man may constitute words
by themselves. These are free morphemes. Other morphemes like -ish, -ness,
-ly, pre-, trans-, and un- are never words by themselves but are always parts
of words. These affixes are bound morphemes. We know whether each affix
precedes or follows other morphemes. Thus, un-, pre- (premeditate, prejudge),
and bi- (bipolar, bisexual) are prefixes. They occur before other morphemes.
Some morphemes occur only as suffixes, following other morphemes. English
examples of suffix morphemes are -ing (sleeping, eating, running, climbing), -er (singer, performer,
reader), -ist (typist, pianist, novelist, linguist), and -ly
(manly, sickly, friendly), to mention only a few.
Many languages have prefixes and suffixes, but languages may differ in how
they deploy these morphemes. A morpheme that is a prefix in one language may
be a suffix in another and vice versa. In English the plural morphemes -s and
-es are suffixes (boys, lasses).