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ЛЕКЦИИ ПО ИСТОРИИ ЯЗЫКА.doc
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The Writing and the Written monuments of oe

The written monuments of OE are divided into two main parts: monuments of runic writing and those of Latin writing. The runic alphabet was widely spread among Germanic peoples, especially in Scandinavia. The runic alphabet was a variety of the Latin alphabet used for writing on wood, stone or other hard materials. It was difficult to write on stone and wood the letters of the Latin alphabet so the letters were changed so that it was easier to carve them on hard materials. There are very few monuments of the runic writing nowadays. Only two of them are well-known: one is the Ruthwell Cross, a religious poem engraved on a tall stone cross near the village of Ruthwell in South-East Scotland. The other is the Runic Casket, made by whalebone, and found in France near the town of Clermont-Ferrant, now in the British museum in London. The Runic text is a poem about whalebone. Both these texts are probably of the 9th century. Later when the Anglo-Saxons came in contact with the culture of the Romans the runic writing came to be more and more seldom used as the Latin writing was used instead. As the OE sound system differed materially from the Latin, the Latin alphabet proved insufficient to denote all OE sounds. To fill this gap Anglo-Saxon scribes borrowed some letters from the Runic alphabet. In other cases a Latin letter was used to denote several sounds. For example the letter 3(a modified form of Latin g) denoted several sounds, and so did the letter c. From the Runic alphabet was taken the letter ƥ, it was taken to denote the sound [θ], which was also denoted by ð and a special rune for the sound [w].

The Three Periods in the History of the English Language

The name «English language» in its widest sense means the language of the English people from their first settlement in Britain to the present time. For the sake of convenience linguists distinguish 3 main stages (periods) in the history of the English language, namely OE, ME, MnE. The English scholar Henry Sweet (1854 - 1912) characterized those stages in his «New English Grammar». He proposed the following division of the history of English according to the state of unstressed endings:

1st period, Old English – the period of full endings. This means that any vowel may be found in an unstressed ending. For example, the word ‘sin3an’ «sing» has the vowel a in its unstressed ending, while the word sunu ‘son’ has the vowel u in a similar position.

2nd period, Middle English – the period of levelled endings. This means that vowels of unstressed endings have been levelled under a neutral vowel (something like [э], represented by the letter e. Thus, Old English sin3an yields Middle English singen, Old English sunu yields Middle English sune (also spelt sone) (все неударные гласные нивелизируются под слабый гласный звук типа [э], в написании «e», например: sune, singen).

3rd period, Modern English – the period of lost endings. This means that the ending is lost altogether. Thus, Middle English singen became Modern English ‘sing’. Middle English sone became Modern English ‘son’. According to Professor B. Illyish the dates of these periods are: OE – 700-1100, ME – 1100-1500, MnE – 1500 up to now. Henry Sweet distinguished Early MnE 1500-1660 and Late MnE – beginning with 1660. Each period of the English language has its own characteristics.

LECTURE 2