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The periods of development of English language.

The history of the EL

History of the English language is one of the fundamental courses forming the linguistic background of a specialist in philology.

The study of the HEl covers the main events in the historical development of the English language: the history of its phonetic structure and spelling, the evolution of its grammatical system, the growth of its vocabulary.

One more aim of this course is to provide the student of English with a wider philological outlook. The history of the English language shows the place of English in the linguistic world, its similarity to other languages of the same family and its unique, specific features.

The history of the English language will give an answer to many exceptions and irregularities of English grammar and spelling.

The subject mutter of the course is the changing nature of the language through more than 15 hundred years of its existence. It starts with a close view at the beginning of the language, originally the dialects of comparatively small number of related tribes that migrated from the continent onto the British isles…

 

History of the English language is one of the fundamental courses forming the linguistic background of a specialist in philology. It studies the rise and development of English, its structure and peculiarities in the old days, its similarity to other languages of the same family and its unique, specific features.

With adequate tools of investigation we still can trace all the changes within the language as a system. So the aim of the course is the investigation of the development of the system of the English language. We are going to have a close look at the major stages of development of the language, in the influence of various linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the language.

The periods of development of English language.

Traditional periodization divides E into 3 periods: OE, ME, NE. OE begins with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5th c. of our era or with the beginning of writing (7) and ends with Norman Conquest.(1066). ME –with Norman Conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475). So then start NE and lasts to the present day. Some authors called them – early, classixal and late.

Each of the periods is marked by a set of specific features of phonology, grammar and vocabulary, and may be also defined in these terms. Henry Sweet classified them as The Period of Full Endings, the Period of Levelled Endings and the Period of Lost Endings.

T. Rastorguyeva and her seven periods in the development of English. The more detailed classification here will be: The 1st period, which may be termed Early Old English. The language existed in the form of several dialects. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English. The 2ndperiod OE/Anglo-Saxon extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. The language of this period is usually described synchronically and is treated as a more or less stable system. The 3rd period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, Winners brought with them French language; Thus, in England three languages coexisted: English, French (Anglo-Norman) and Latin. and covers the 12th, 13th and half of the 14th c. It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences – Scandinavian and French. Under Norman rule the official language in England was French, or rather its variety called Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman; it was also the dominant language of literature. (from syntactic into analytic). The 4th period – from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th – known the age of Chaucer, Classical ME. It was the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect used in writing and literature was the mixed dialect of London. H. Sweet called this period” leveled endings”, because most of inflections in the nominal system had fallen together. The 5th period is called Early New English, lasted from the introduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare. The first printed book in English was published by William Caxton in 1475. The appearance of a considerable number of printed books contributed to the normalisation of spelling and grammar forms. This period was also a time of sweeping changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The 6th period extends from the mid-17th c. to the close of the 18th c. In the history of the language it is often called “the age of normalization and correctness. The 18th c. has been called the period of “fixing the pronunciation”. The great sound shifts were over and pronunciation was being stabilized. Word usage and grammatical construction were subjected to restriction and normalization. The 7th period in the history of English. It is called Late New English or Modern English. The 20th c. witnessed considerable intermixture of dialects. The local dialects were retreated and displaced by Standard English. The English vocabulary has grown.



The system of writing in Old English was changed with the introduction of Christianity. Before that, the English used the runes. Runes are the 24 letters… they were of specific shape, designed to be cut on the wooden sticks, and only few people knew how to make them and how to interpret them.

The Latin alphabet (23 letters) was carried throughout medieval Europe by the Roman Catholic church… The stress in the Old English was dynamic, and shifted to the first syllable. Originally in common Indo-European the stress was free; the stress in the Old English words was always on the first syllable.

 


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 4422


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