The chronological divisions in the history of English: the Old English period.

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According to English scientists Henry Sweet the periods of the English development may be classified with the development of English endings: 1.The Period of Full Endings 2.The Period of Levelled Endings in reality contains the levelled vowel in the ending, but at the same time lots of endings were already lost; 3.The Period of Lost Endings. Generally held classification is as follows:1)Early Old English (5^th cent-7^th cent.) 2)Old English or Anglo-Saxon(8^th cent. – 11^th cent.) 3)Early Middle English(1066(Norman Conquest) - middle oh 14^th cent.) 4)Late or classical Middle English (2^nd half of 14^th cent. -15^th cent.) 5)Early New English (1475 (introducing of printing) – 1660(Age of Shakespeare)) 6)The age of normalization&correctness(mid 17^th cent. – end 18^th) 7)New English(from 19^th cent.)

1. The Old English period (449-1066), Early Old English may be taken separately, as the period of pre-written functioning of the language. The formation of kingdoms on the British territory transformed the tribal dialects into regional (local) dialects that took place during the later, Written Old English (or Anglo-Saxon period). Old Englishor Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least 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 closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin. In most respects, including its grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern English. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual) and three grammatical genders(masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number.Nouns came in numerous. Verbs came in nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses, and have no synthetic passive voice (although it did still exist in Gothic). Gender in nouns was grammatical.

From the 9th century, Old English experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages..

The chronological divisions in the history of English: the Middle English period.

In the course of ME many new devices were introduced into the system of spelling. In ME the runic letters passed out of use.Thorn – þ – and the crossed d – đ, ð – were replaced by the digraph th, which retained the same sound value: [Ө] and [ð]; the rune “wynn” was displaced by “double u” – w – ; the ligatures æ and œ fell into disuse. After English regained its prestige as the language of writing. Therefore many innovations in ME spelling reveal an influence of the French scribal tradition. The digraphs ou, ie, and ch which occurred in many French borrowings and were regularly used in Anglo-Norman texts were adopted as new ways of indicating the sounds [u:], [e:], and [t∫]. A wider use of digraphs. (ch, ou, ie, th, d sh-later) digraph wh replaced the OE sequence of letters hw as in OE hwæt, ME what [hwat]. Long sounds were shown by double letters, e.g. ME book [bo:k], though long [e:] could be indicated by ie and ee, and also by e. The letter y came to be used as an equivalent of i and was evidently preferred when i could be confused with the surrounding letters m, n and others. Sometimes, y, as well w, were put at the end of a word, so as to finish the word with a curve, e.g. ME very [veri], my [mi:]; w was interchangeable with u in the digraphs ou, au, e.g. ME doun, down [du:n], and was often preferred finally, e.g. ME how [hu:], now [nu:].

Word Stress in ME and Early NE

In OE stress usually fell on the first root syllable of the word, rarely on its second syllableThe word accent acquired greater positional freedom and began to play a more important role in word derivation. As the loan-words were assimilated, the word stress was moved closer to the beginning of the word. It is known as the “recessive” tendency, e.g. vertu [ver´tju:] became NE virtue [və:t∫ə].In words of three or more syllables the shift of the stress could be caused by the recessive tendency and also by the “rhythmic” tendency. Under it, a secondary stress would arise at a distance of one syllable from the original stress. Stress was not shifted to the prefixes of many verbs borrowe. Corresponding nouns sometimes received the stress on the first syllable: NE ΄present n - pre΄sent v;

Unstressed vowels

In Early ME the pronunciation of unstressed syllables became increasingly indistinct. As compared to OE, which distinguishes five short vowels in unstressed position [e/i], [a] and [o/u], Late ME had only two vowels in unaccented syllables: [ə] and [i], e.g. OE talu – ME tale [΄ta:lə] – NE tale, OE bodiз – ME body [΄bodi] – NE body. The final [ə] disappeared in Late ME though it continued to be spelt as -e. When the ending –e survived only in spelling, it was understood as a means of showing the length of the vowel in the preceding syllable and was added to words which did not have this ending before, e.g. OE stān, rād – ME stone, , new unstressed vowels appeared in borrowed words or developed from stressed ones, as a result of various changes, e.g. the shifting of word stress in ME and NE, vocalization of [r] in such endings as writer, actor, where [er] and [or] became [ə].

Quantitative vowel changes in Early ME

In Later OE and in Early ME vowel length began to depend on phonetic conditions. The earliest of positional quantitative changes was the readjustment of quantity before some consonant clusters:

1) Short vowels were lengthened before two consonants– a sonorant and a plosive; consequently, all vowels occurring in this position remained or became long, e.g. OE wild – ME wild [wi:ld] – NE wild.

2) All other groups of two or more consonants produced the reverse effect: they made the preceding long vowels short, and henceforth all vowels in this position became or remained short, e.g. OE cēpte > ME kepte [΄keptə] – NE kept.

3) Short vowels became long in open syllables, e.g. OE nama > ME name [na:mə] – NE name. In spite of some restrictions no lengthening occurred in polysyllabic words and before some suffixes, OE bodiз > ME body [΄bodi] – NE body.

In Early ME the dialectal differences grew.In some areas OE [y], [y:] developed into [e], [e:], in others they changed to [i], [i:]; in the South-West and in the West Midlands the two vowels were for some time preserved as [y], [y:], but later were moved backward and merged with [u], [u:], e.g

Qualitative vowel changes.

OE possessed a well developed system of diphthongs: falling diphthongs with a closer nucleus and more open glide arranged in two symmetrical sets – long and short: [ea:], [eo:], [ie:] and [ea], [eo], [ie]. Towards the end of the OE period some of the diphthongs merged with monophthongs. As a result of these changes the vowel system lost two sets of diphthongs, long and short. In the meantime anew set of diphthongs developed from some sequences of vowels and consonants due to the vocalization of OE [j] and [γ], that is to their change into vowels. These changes gave rise to two sets of diphthongs: with i-glides and u-glides. The same types of diphthongs appeared also from other sources: the glide -u developed from OE [w] as in OE snāw, which became ME snow [snou], and before [x] and [l] as in Late ME smaul and taughte.

in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information.The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with final –e occurring after a preposition..

in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon.

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