6.Three period of the history of the English language.

The commonly accepted, traditional Periodisation divides English history into three periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and New English (NE). the following Periodisation of English history is based on the conventional three periods; it subdivides the history of the English language into seven periods differing in linguistic situation and the nature of linguistic changes.

The first period, which may be termed Early Old English, lasts from the West Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, that is from the 5th to the close of the 7th c. It is the stage of the tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders, which were gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongues. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English.

The second historical period extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th. The English language of that time is referred to as Old English. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. Towards the end of the period the differences between the dialects grew and their relative position altered. They were probably equal as a medium of oral communication, while in the sphere of writing one of the dialects, West Saxon, had gained supremacy over the other dialects. The language of this period is usually described synchronically and is treated as a more or less stable system.

The third period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, 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. The dialectal division of present-day English owes its origin to this period of history. 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.

The fourth period – from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th – embraces the age of Chaucer, the greatest English medieval writer and forerunner of the English Renaissance. We may call it Late or Classical Middle English. It was the time of the restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language and the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect used in writing and literature was the mixed dialect of London. The literary authority of other dialects was gradually overshadowed by the prestige of the London written language.

The fifth 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. It was a time of great historical consequence: under the growing capitalist system the country became economically and politically unified. Caxton’s English of the printed books was a sort of bridge between the London literary English of the ME period and the language of the Literary Renaissance. This period was also a time of sweeping changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The growth of the vocabulary was a natural reflection of the progress of culture in the new, bourgeois society.  

The sixth 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”, in the history of literature – the “neoclassical” age. It is essential that during the 18th c. literary English differentiated into distinct styles, which is a property of a mature literary language. 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 English language of the 19th and 20th c. represents the seventh period in the history of English. It is called Late New English or Modern English. The classical language of literature was strictly distinguished from the local dialects and the dialects of lower social rank. The dialects were used in oral communication and, as a rule, had no literary tradition. The 20th c. witnessed considerable intermixture of dialects. The local dialects were retreated and displaced by Standard English. The English vocabulary has grown on an unprecedented scale reflecting the rapid progress of technology, science and culture and other multiple changes in all spheres of man’s activity.

7.Old English alphabet and pronunciation The Old English alphabet, like the Modern English alphabet, is based on the Roman letters, but the alphabet is slightly different than the one we use, as you will see if you glance at some of the readings for the course.. The Anglo-Saxons did not use the letters v and j (which were invented later), and q and z were used only very occasionally. They used the letteræ, which we do not use. They also introduced three letters not present in the Roman alphabet, called thorn, eth, andwynn. The last of these (wynn) is represented by a w in modern editions and in this course, so need not be learned at this point. Thorn, which is Þ as a capital and þ as a small letter, and eth, which is Ð and ð, were both developed by Anglo-Saxon scribes to represent a sound that was not present in Latin (and for that reason was not in the Roman alphabet), the sound that Modern English represents with the letters th. To see how the letters of the Old English alphabet appear in a manuscript context, you might like to take a look at one of the most famous manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon England, the Nowell Codex, which contains the poem Beowulf and so is often called the "Beowulf Manuscript." The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. Very few examples of this writing have survived, these being mostly short inscriptions or fragments. The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc was replaced by the Latin alphabet from about the 7th century onwards, although the two continued in parallel for some time. Futhorc influenced the Latin alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ, þ) and wynn (Ƿ, ƿ). The letter eth (Ð, ð) was later devised as a modification of d, and finally yogh (Ȝ, ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g. The ligature Æ (æ), for ae, was adopted as a letter its own right, named æsc ("ash") after a Futhorc rune. In very early Old English Œ (œ), for oe, also appeared as a distinct letter named œðel ("ethel"), again after a rune. Additionally, the ligature w(double-u), for vv, was in use. In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes.^[2] He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) first, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian notaond, ⁊, an insular symbol for and: The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was eclipsed by French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which for reasons of prestige and familiarity kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English, such as in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled differently, sometimes even in the same sentence.  The pronunciation /u/ (normally spelled u) of written o in son, love, come, etc. is due to Norman spelling conventions prohibiting writing of u before v, m, n due to the graphical confusion that would result. (v, u, n were identically written with two minims in Norman handwriting; w was written as two u letters; m was written with three minims, hence mm looked like vun, nvu, uvu, etc.) Similarly, spelling conventions also prohibited final v. Hence the identical spellings of the three different vowel sounds in love, grove and prove are due to ambiguity in the Middle English spelling system, not sound change. 

8. Phonetic changes of old English vowels. OE vowels were symmetric. There were a correlation of long and short vowels. The system of vowels in OE was inherited from Common Germanic and proto-Indo-European languages.  The sources of OE vowels are common IE with some examples:  OE y resulted from palatal mutation from ǔū. E.g. Gth. wulla – OE wyllen.

Some OE vowels both monophthongs and diphthongs do not correspond to Gothic and common Germanic vowels because they resulted in English from mutation and there were in OE several similar vowels from different sources. E.g. Gth. sandjan > OE sendan. Gth. stilan > OE stelan. Gth. bairan > OE beran.

Before nasals there could be in OE interchangeable vowels a and o which renders instability of pronunciation in OE. E.g. OE stan could be met in OE vowel a with another vowel. 

OE diphthons are role new formations only to them correspondent to Gothic diphthongs eo, ea || úi, aú. E.g. Gth.kiusan kaus || OE ceosan ceas ‘choose’. German gradation formular is broken and new diphthongs appeared.

Other OE diphthongs ie, io appeared as a result of assimilation. OE vowels changed considerably in comparison with other Germanic languages. English vocalic system often shifted throughout the history. These shifts took place in stressed vowels and were conditioned by the fact that long vowels do not preserve their quality and English had a strong tendency to adjust vowel pronunciation to that of the neighboring sounds.

Unstressed vowels were reduced due to the strong dynamic stress; beginning from the end of the OE period this reduction is registered but often spelling was traditional.

All OE vowel, including diphthongs, can be either short or long Monophthongs: a æ e i o u y å Diphthongs: ea eo ie io All diphthongs were falling, that is, the main syllabic element was their first component.  ā may occur in any type of syllable. It corresponds to Gth. ai, e.g. stān ‘stone’ (Gth. stains), hātan ‘call’ (Gth. haitan),cnāwan ‘know’. æ has a twofold origin. 1. æ₁ corresponds to Gth. ē. It is found, for example, in the past plural of class IV and class V strong verbs: stælon ‘stole’ (Gth. stēlum), bæron ‘bore’ (Gth. bērum), spræcon ‘spoke’, mæton ‘measured’, and also in other cases , as I dæd‘deep’ (Gth. dēþs). 2. æ₂ is the result of I’mutation of ā, which corresponds to Gth. ai. It is found in a number of class I weak verbs: hælan‘heal’ (Gth. hailjam), dræfan ‘drive’, læfan ‘leave’.  ē is usually the result of i-mutation of ō; it is often found in class I weak verbs: dēman ‘judge’, cēpan ‘keep’. ī may be stable and unstable. Stable ī usually corresponds to Gth. ei (pronounced [ī]). It is found in class I strong verbs, as in wrītan ‘write’, bīdan’bide’, ripan ‘catch’. Unstable ī results from ie and alternates with y, e.g. hī ‘they’ (hīe, hy).  ō usually corresponds to Gth. o, as in ōd ‘good’ (Gth. gōþs); it is found in the past tense of class VI strong verbs: scōc‘shook’, hlōh ‘laughed’.  ū usually corresponds to Gth. ū, e.g., nū ‘now’, hūs ‘house’ (Gth. hūs), and occurs in the infinitive of a few class II strong verbs: lūcan ‘lock’, bū an ‘bend’. y can be stable and unstable. Stable y in most cases results from i-mutation of ū, as in mys ‘mice’, fyr ‘fire’. The short diphthongs ea, eo, io, ie, and the long diphthong īe result from mutation, fracture, and palatalization. The long diphthongs ea and eo corresponds to Gothic diphthongs. Ea usually corresponds to Gth. au. It is found in bēam ‘beam’,dēaþ ‘death’ (Gth. dauþus), and also in the past singular of class II strong verbs, as in cēas ‘chose’ (Gth. kaus), lēac‘locked’ (Gth. lauk). eo usually corresponds to Gth. iu. It is found in the infinitive of class II strong verbs: cēosan ‘choose’ (Gth. kiusan),bēodan ‘offer’ (Gth. biudan). io is in most cases a variant of eo.