CONTENT

Old English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Middle English . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Early Modern English . . . . . . 

Post / Late Modern English . .

Old 

English 

Germanic tribes began to arrive in the British Isles, Anglo-Saxon dialects form the basis of the language we now call Old English.

       449 

Germanic Tribes                Arrivee

Christian missionaries convert Anglo-Saxons to Catholicism. The missionaries inject hundreds of new Latin words into the English language.

Vikings controlled Eastern England for hundreds of years. They brought almost 2000 new words into the English vocabulary.

I                I                 I

Vikings controlled Eastern England for hundreds of years. They brought almost 2000 new words into the English vocabulary.

Beowulf, one of the most well-known examples of Old English, was written at this time.

The Normans transform England linguistically and for over 300 years French is spoken by the people in power. Thousands of French words entered the English vocabulary.

   I                 I                    I

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

Old English, called Anglo-Saxon, was the language spoken under Alfred the Great and continued to be the common language of England (non-Danelaw) until after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Old English was very resourceful in the formation of words by means of prefixes and suffixes.

  The Old English period is a multi-lingual period – a period with several languages being used simultaneously

FEATURES

DIALECTS OF OLD ENGLISH

Saxons    —    South of the Thames (West Saxon area)

Angles    —    Middle and Northern England (Mercia and Northumbria), including lowland Scotland

Jutes       —    South-East of England (Kent)

The anglo - Saxons traded useful raw materials, such as metal ore, as well as luxury items, such as jewelry.

Wool and metal, and crafted objects, such as jewelry, weapons, glassware, and pottery.

Brooches and glass jar

INVENTIONS

LINGUISTIC VARIATIONS

The most significant feature of Old English is its pronunciation of words differing from the ones that exist today. 

It is an inflected language though not so highly inflected as the classical languages such as Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. 

Its vocabulary with the exception of five hundred loan words consisted of about thirty thousand words inherited from the common Teutonic stock.

To spell words "phonetically" with the result that each dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently and inconsistently, over time, 

VOCABULARY

SPELLING

SELLING

PRONUNCIATION

FAMOUS PEOPLE

Alfred the Great

The First English King

He became famous for defending his kingdom against the Vikings, becoming the only king of his dynasty as a result. 

BEDE

Greatest of all the Anglo-Saxon Scholars

He was an author, teacher, and scholar, and his most famous work called the "Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gave him the title" The Father of English History.  

Caedmon 

The oldest known English Poe

He one night went to sleep and, in the dream, he was asked to sing, at first, he refused, but then he composed a short poem in praise of God as the creator of heaven and earth. 

Cynewulf

Preeminent figures of Christian poetry 

He was a poet. Although there is not much information about him, he composed more poems than Caedmon such as:

* The Fates of the Apostles

* Juliana 

* Elene Christ II

The Middle English Period

(1100-1500)

The Middle English period saw the breakdown of the inflectional system of Old English and the expansion of vocabulary with many borrowings from French and Latin.

       1066 

I                I                 I

King Henry III

The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into English pronunciations.

Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous “Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English.

-  William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” and the anonymous “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. 

"Canterbury Tales" is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.

1362: English becomes the official language in England.

Late 15th century: Second edition of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, by  William Caxton.

     Early Modern English

              1500 - 1800

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century.

Timeline:

1500: the first printing was press established.

1539: English translation of the bible.

1604: the first dictionary.

1655: the great plague.

1700: industry revolution.

1762: Rober Lowth published a short introduction to English Grammar.

Features:

.Products such as tobacco and chocolate were famous.

Events

Inventions

1589: The stocking frame, a mechanical knitting machine used in the textile industry.  It was invented by William Lee.

1667: Tin can telephone, a device that conveyed sounds over an extended wire by mechanical vibrations. It was invented by Robert Hooke.

1714: Patent for an apparatus regarded as the first typewriter granted to Henry Mill.

Linguistic variations

The great vowel shift

"Name"

a_ _ _ e

"narmay" "naym"

The 3rd person singular verb form added "es" to the endings instead of "eth"

Silence of consonants:

"k" in knight

letters "b" and "g" in "lamb" and "hang