7. Писемні пам'ятки давньо-, середньо- та новоанглійського періодів.

Old English Written Records: The earliest written records of English are inscriptions made in a special runic alphabet. The two best known runic texts are the inscription on the Frank’s Casket and the short passage on the Ruthwell Cross, which was also found in the later manuscripts. Our knowledge of the OE language comes from manuscripts written in Latin letters. The first written English words were the place names and personal names inserted into the Latin texts. Then there appeared Gospels and other religious texts with word-to-word interlinear translations (as in Lindisfarne Gospels). All in all we have 30,000 lines of OE verse from many poets of some three centuries. The names of these poets are unknown except Caedmon and Cunewulf (both Northumbrians).OE is restricted to three subjects:-heroic; -religious;-lyrical. Bede’s HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM (written in Latin in the 8th c.) contains and English fragment of five lines known as “Bede’s Death Song” and a religious poem of nine lines, “Cadmon’s Hymn”. The greatest poem of that time was BEOWULF, an epic of the 7th or 8th c. It was originally composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but has come down to us in a 10th c. BEOWULF is built up of several songs arranged in three chapters. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons. The author is unknown. The style of OE poetry is marked by the wide use of metaphorical phrases or compounds describing the qualities or functions of the thing.

Major written records in ME: The Middle English period can be taken to begin with the Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent conquest of the whole of England. Norman French replaced English as the language of the aristocracy and the church. By the late 11th century the English higher clergy and nobility had been replaced by French. In the Domesday Book (1086), a detailed record of land property in England, proposed by William and carried out in his name, there are virtually no English landlords mentioned — the higher echelons of English society had been rid of the English. The flourishing of literature, which marks the second half of the 14th c. This period of literary florescence is known as the "age of Chaucer", the greatest name in English literature before Shakespeare. His work is «Canterbury Tales», «A Legend of Good Women». John Wyclif (1324—1384), the forerunner of the English Reformation. His most important contribution to English prose was his translation of the BIBLE completed in 1384. The London Dialect of the beginning of the XIV cent. is represented by Adam Devi’s poems; the second half of the cent. by works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 'John Gower and 'John Wicliff.

Modern English records: In the NE period the process of borrowing acquired an uninterrupted character. As a result the English vocabulary was replenished with words from many other world languages. Accordingly the NE period may be called the period of mixed vocabulary. The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press, one of the world’s great technological innovations; introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton's own translation, “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and, even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then translated them into English. Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century.