Periods in the History of English

Traditionally, the history of the English language is divided into 3 periods, which were originally suggested by the English scholar Henry Sweet, author of a number of works on the English language and its history. They are Old English, Middle English and Modern English. His division was not arbitrary, of course as he took into consideration both intra- and extralinguistic factors, namely, phonetic and morphological, on the one hand, and sociocultural, on the other. Modern linguists, however, disagree with this division (Arakin, Rastorgueva, Ivanova) accounting for their disagreement by the following considerations. For example, Arakin maintains, that the Old English period needs to be subdivided into 2, the Early Old English period and the Late Old English period, as the changes that had taken place from the beginning till the end of the period were very much pronounced and the language at its earlier stage was a lot different from its final stage. Rastorgueva extends this idea to the other periods and Ivanova, generally satisfied with the extralinguistic factors taken into consideration while dividing English into historical periods, argues whether phonetic and morphological criteria are sufficient for this purpose.

pronounced- very great or noticeable

The table below illustrates the division proposed by Henry Sweet.

Periods	Intralinguistic factors	Extralinguistic factors
1^st period Old English/ OE   700AD - 1100	period of full endings; any vowel can be found in an unstressed ending sin9an (a unstressed) sunu (u unstressed)
2 period Middle English/ ME   1100 - 1500	period of leveled endings; vowels of unstressed endings were leveled under a neutral vowel something like[ə], represented by the letter e. singen (a ® e) sone[su:nə] (u ® e)	1066, the year of Norman conquest   1485, the end of the War of Roses, the decay of feudalism the rise of capitalism
3 period Modern English /MdE   1500 – nowadays   Early MdE:1500 – 1660/1700 Late MdE: 1660/1700 – present day	Period of lost endings   sing son	The rise of the English nation and the national language

As is seen from the table, the division is based on both phonetic and morphological features: weakening and loss of unstressed vowels and weakening and loss of grammatical morphemes. It should be emphasized that the dates are but a mere convention as they cannot be taken literally. They simply signify the fact the by these periods the changes in the language had become so prominent that they could identify a new period in its history.

literally - according to the most basic or original meaning of a word or expression

4 The Role of the Discipline in Training the Teacher of a Foreign Culture

Learning the history of English will enable the student to give answers to a considerable number of practical and theoretical questions. (See Section 1). At the same time, this discipline is not limited to only mere statements of linguistic facts as it is believed to be able to explain them. In studying the history of the English language students are faced with problems concerning the driving forces or causes of language evolution. These causes are believed to be of two kinds, external and internal or extralinguistic and purely linguistic. As for the former, they may include such historic events as social changes, wars, conquests, migrations, cultural contacts and the like. In other words, changes in society or cultural changes are always reflected in the language proving once again the idea that language and culture are inseparable as, on the one hand, language is a part of culture, but, on the other, culture as a whole is transmitted very largely through language. Therefore, a knowledge of cultural backgrounds in the language evolution is essential for the student as a translator of a foreign culture in general.

Note 1 also spelled Sanscrit (Sanskrit samskrta: “prepared, cultivated, purified, refined”), Old Indo-Aryan language, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India. Vedic Sanskrit, based on a dialect of northwestern India, dates from as early as 1800 BC and appears in the text of the Rigveda; it was described and standardized in the important grammar book by Panini, dating from about the 5th century BC. Literary activity in so-called Classical Sanskrit, which is close to but not identical with the language described by Panini, flourished from c. 500 BC to AD 1000 and continued even into modern times. Currently, a form of Sanskrit is used not only as a learned medium of communication among Hindu scholars but also as a language for some original writing. The language, written in the Devanagari script is, in fact, undergoing something of a revival, though it is neither a widespread nor a usual mother tongue. Sanskrit grammar is similar to that of other older Indo-European languages, such as Latin and Greek; it is highly inflected and complex. Sanskrit has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), and eight cases (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, and vocative), although only in the singular of the most common declension does a noun show different forms for each case. Adjectives are inflected to agree with nouns. Verbs are inflected for tense, mode, voice, number, and person.   Note 2 German Junggrammatiker, any of a group of German scholars that arose around 1875; their chief tenet (doctrine) concerning language change was that sound laws have no exceptions. This principle was very controversial because there seemed to be several irregularities in language change not accounted for by the sound laws, such as Grimm's law (q.v.) that had been discovered by that time. In 1875, however, the Danish linguist Karl Verner explained the apparent exceptions to Grimm's law; his formulation of the principle governing those exceptions is known as Verner's law. Subsequently, many other important sound laws were discovered and formulated to account for other apparent exceptions, and, by the end of the 19th century, the hypothesis of the regularity of sound change had been generally accepted.   Note 3 Glossematics is a system of linguistic analysis based on the distribution and interrelationship of glossemes, the smallest meaningful units of a language—e.g., a word, a stem, a grammatical element, a word order, or an intonation. Glossematics is a theory and system of linguistic analysis proposed by the Danish scholar Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and his collaborators, who were strongly influenced by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics has been an important component of European structuralism but has had relatively little influence in the United States, except in relation to stratificational grammar, a grammar originated by American linguist Sydney M. Lamb (American linguist and originator of stratificational grammar, an outgrowth of glossematics theory..Lamb's seminal work, Outline ofStratificational Grammar (1966), describes his theory of the four levels necessary for sentence analysis: the sememic, the lexemic, the morphemic, and the phonemic. These levels are hierarchically related, each “realized” by the elements in the level structurally beneath it.   Note 4 Phonology - study of the sound patterns that occur within languages. Some linguists include phonetics, the study of the production and description of speech sounds, within the study of phonology. Diachronic (historical) phonology examines and constructs theories about the changes and modifications in speech sounds and sound systems over a period of time. For example, it is concerned with the process by which the English words “sea” and “see,” once pronounced with different vowel sounds (as indicated by the spelling), have come to be pronounced alike today. Synchronic (descriptive) phonology investigates sounds at a single stage in the development of a language, to discover the sound patterns that can occur. For example, in English, nt and dm can appear within or at the end of words (“rent,” “admit”) but not at the beginning.   Note 5 Diversification of languages In the structural aspects of language, their pronunciation and grammar, and in vocabulary less closely involved in rapid cultural movement, the processes of linguistic change are best observed by comparing written records of a language over extended periods. This is most readily seen by English speakers through setting side by side present-day English texts with 18th-century English, the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible, Shakespearean English, Chaucer's English, and the varieties of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) that survive in written form. Noticeably, as one goes back in time, the effort required in understanding increases, and, while people do not hesitate to speak of “Shakespearean English,” they are more doubtful about Chaucer, and for the most part Old English texts are as unintelligible to a modern English speaker as, for example, texts in German. It is clear that the differences involved include word meanings, grammar, and, so far as this can be reconstructed, pronunciation. Similar evidence, together with what is known of the cultural history of the peoples concerned, makes clear the continuous historical connections linking French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian with the spoken (“vulgar”) Latin of the western Roman Empire. This group constitutes the Romance subfamily of languages and is an example of how, as the result of linguistic change over a wide area, a group of distinct, though historically related, languages comes into being. In the transmission of a language from parent to child, slight deviations in all aspects of language use occur all the time, and as the child's speech contacts widen he confronts a growing range of slight differences in personal speech forms, some of them correlating with social or regional differences within a community, these speech differences themselves being the results of the transmission process. As a consequence, the child's speech comes to differ slightly from that of his parents' generation. In urbanized communities an additional factor is involved: children have been shown to be effectively influenced by the speech habits of their peer groups once they have made contacts with them in and out of school. Such changes, though slight at the time, are progressively cumulative. Since ready intercommunication is a primary purpose of language, as long as a community remains unitary, with strong central direction and a central cultural focus, such changes will not go beyond the limits of intercomprehensibility. But in more scattered communities and in larger language areas, especially when cultural and administrative ties are weakened and broken, these cumulative deviations in the course of generations give rise to wider regional differences. Such differences take the form of dialectal differentiation as long as there is some degree of mutual comprehension but eventually result in the emergence of distinct languages. This is what happened in the history of the colloquial Latin of the western Roman Empire, and it can be assumed that a similar course of events gave rise to the separate Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and some others), though in this family the original unitary language is not known historically but inferred as “Common Germanic” or “Proto-Germanic” and tentatively assigned to early in the 1st millennium BC as the period before separation began. This is how language families have developed. Most but not all of the languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European family, so-called because in addition it includes the classical Indian language Sanskrit and most of the modern languages of northern India and Pakistan. It includes as subfamilies the two families just mentioned, Romance and Germanic, and several others. It is assumed that the subfamilies, and from them the individual languages of the Indo-European family, are ultimately derived from a unitary language spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia (its exact location is still under debate), perhaps 5,000 years ago. This unitary language has itself been referred to as “Indo-European,” “Proto-Indo-European,” the “common parent language,” or the “original language” (Ursprache) of the family. But it must be emphasized that, whatever it may have been like, it was just one language among many and of no special status in itself. It was certainly in no way the original language of mankind or anything like it. It had its own earlier history, of which virtually nothing can be inferred, and it was, of course, very recent in relation to the time span of human language itself. What is really special about such “parent” or “proto-” languages is that they represent the farthest point to which our available techniques and resources enable us to reconstruct the prehistory of our attested and living languages. Similarly constituted families of languages derived from inferred common sources have been established for other parts of the world; for example, Altaic, covering Turkish and several languages of Central Asia, and Bantu, containing many of the languages of central and southern Africa If enough material in the form of written records from past ages were available, it would be possible to group all the world's languages into historically related families. In addition, an answer could perhaps be posited to the question of whether all languages are descended from a single original language or whether languages emerged independently among several groups of early peoples (the rival theories of monogenesis and polygenesis, a controversy more confidently disputed in the 19th century than today). In actual fact, written records, when they are available, go back only a fraction of the time in which human speech has been developed and used, and over much of the globe written records are nonexistent. In addition, there are no other linguistic fossils comparable to the fossils of geological prehistory. This means that the history and prehistory of languages will not be able to go back more than a few thousand years BC.   Note 6 Internal reconstruction The comparative method is used to reconstruct earlier forms of a language by drawing upon the evidence provided by other related languages. It may be supplemented by what is called the method of internal reconstruction. This is based upon the existence of anomalous or irregular patterns of formation and the assumption that they must have developed, usually by sound change, from earlier regular patterns. For example, the existence of such patterns in early Latin as honos: honoris (“honor”: “of honor”) and others in contrast with orator: oratoris (“orator”: “of the orator”) and others might lead to the supposition that honoris developed from an earlier * honosis. In this case, the evidence of other languages shows that *s became r between vowels in an earlier period of Latin. But it would have been possible to reconstruct the earlier intervocalic *s with a fair degree of confidence on the basis of the internal evidence alone.

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B. Self-study

1 Study the following texts and be prepared to discuss it at the following lectrure.

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