Chronological division in the history of English

OE

• BC 55 Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar.
• 436 Roman withdrawal from Britain complete.
• 449 Settlement of Britain by Germanic invaders begins
• 450-480 Earliest known Old English inscriptions.
• 1066 William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invades and conquers England.

ME

• 1348 English replaces Latin as the language of instruction in most schools.
• 1362 English replaces French as the language of law. English is used in Parliament for the first time.
• c1388 Chaucer starts writing The Canterbury Tales.
• c1400 The Great Vowel Shift begins.
• 1475 William Caxton establishes the first English printing press.
• 1604 Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary, is published.

Early ModE 1500-1800

NE 1800 – present

25.Old English noun.

Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental.

• The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence

• The accusative case indicated the direct object of the sentence
• The genitive case indicated possession,
• The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence,
• The instrumental case indicated an instrument used to achieve something, for example, lifdesweorde, "he lived by the sword", where sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having largely merged with the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate forms for the instrumental.

In Late OE nouns were grouped into classes and types of declensions according to gender instead of stems.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1481