Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






The formation of the English language from Old English dialects. The formation of the National Literary English language from the Middle English dialects and changes in Modern.

· People in the US and Great Britain celebrate Columbus Day.

· Columbus thought that the world was flat.

· The King and the Queen of Spain didn’t support his voyage.

· No one lived in the continent before Columbus arrived.

· Columbus knew he had arrived to America.

· After Columbus many other people explored the “New World”.

The formation of the English language from Old English dialects. The formation of the National Literary English language from the Middle English dialects and changes in Modern.

Our knowledge of Old English dialects comes mainly from manuscripts written in Latin characters. British scribes modified the Latin script to suit their needs: they changed the shape of some letters, added new symbols to indicate sounds for which Latin had no equivalents, attached new sound values to Latin letters. The first English words to be written down with the help of Latin characters were personal names and place-names inserted in Latin texts. The evolution of the language in early Old English period(5th-7th c.) is hypothetical. It was the period of transition from PG to written OE.There existed tribal dialects: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians. The records of OE writing are dated in different centures (8th- 11thc.-written Old English period), represent various local dialects (Kentish-from Jutes and Frisians, spoken in the area of Kent and Surrey and in the isle of weigh; West Saxon-rest of England, south of Thames and the Bristol Channel; Mercian-from angles, spoken in Mercia; Nothumbrian-from Angles, spoken from the Humber north to the river Forth), belong to diverse genres and are written in different scripts. The earliest written records of English are inscriptions on hard material made in a special alphabet known as the runes. Formation of English language includes a lot of aspects including dialects, manuscripts, and alphabet.

The earliest samples of Early ME(11th-first half of 14th c.) prose are the new entries made in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The earliest of religious work, the Poema Morale represents the Kentish dialect of the late 12th or the early 13th c. Of the particular interest to the history of the language is Ormulum, a poem composed by the monk Orm on East Midland dialect (derived from OE Mercian dialect). There are some other works of religious character written in the northern dialect(derived from OE northumbrian). In late middle English, known as Classical New English(later 14th-15th c.) and also Chaucer’s literary language is based on the mixed London dialect, as he was the most outstanding figure of this time and is considered to be the founder of the literary language. He wrote his great collections of stories “The Canterbury Tales”. The formation of the National Literary language covers NE period (1475-1660) and is due to the two major external factors: the unification of the country and the progress of culture. Flourishing The development of the national literary English language is inseparable from the flourishing of literature known as the English Literary Renaissance or the Age of Shakespeare. The most notable forerunners of the literary Renaissance were the great English humanist Thomas More (the author of Utopia) and William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible. W. Shakespeare was the chief of the Elizabethan dramatists. His plays were greatly admired in the theatres but less than half of them were printed in his lifetime. Establishment of the written standard. The written standard of English had been established by the end of early NE. The written standard of English arose from the London dialect which was a mixture of South-Western and East Midland dialects. Later the speech of Londoners became even more mixed because of the growing intermixture of the population: the capital attracted newcomers from different regions of the country. The written standard of the early 17th c. was far less stabilized than the literary standards of later ages. The writings of the Renaissance display a wide range of variation at all linguistic levels: in spelling, grammatical forms, word-building devices, etc.



The 18th c. is remarkable for attempts to fix the language. The English writer J. Swift published his first article on language, which was called “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”. In it Swift protested against careless and deliberate contractions and elisions in formal and informal speech and proposed that a body of scholars should be set up in order to fix the correct rules of usage.

Practical task


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1826


<== previous page | next page ==>
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA | English in the Germanic group of languages and in the Indo-European family. The English language in the world.
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.005 sec.)