5. The Periodization of the History of English

The traditional approach towards the evolution of English divides the history of Eng. into 3 periods:

1. Old English (Henry Sweet called it ‘the period of full endings’)

2. Middle English (H. Sweet called it ‘the period of leveled endings’)

3. Modern English,

And 7 stages: 1)prewritten stage (Early OE) lasts from 5^th to 7^th century. It is a stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders – Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Fresians. 2) Anglo-Saxon English (lasted till the year of the Norman conquest- 1066). The West Saxon dialect dominated all the other dialects (Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian). 3) Early Middle E (12^th -half of the 14^th century). It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and foreign influences. 4) classical Middle E(14^th- 15^th c). It was the time of restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language. It embraces the age of Chaucer- the forerunner of the English Renaissance. 5) Early New Engl. (lasted from the introduction of printing (1475) to the age of Shakespeare(1660). It is characterized by extensive phonetic changes, enrichment of vocabulary, great freedom of gr constructions. 6) the normalization period (‘the age of correctness’) (mid 17^th- 18^th c) witnessed the establishment of the norms that were fixed as rules of correct usage in dictionaries and grammar books 7) 19^th c- till our days. The best form of English was established – the Received Standard – ‘the BBC English’.

6. Extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors.

The evolution of historical development of the lang-e is made up of external and internal factors.

External (extralinguistic) factors: ▪ the spread of the lang-e in geographical and social space; ▪differentiation of the lang-e into functional varieties: geographical variants, dialects, standard and sub-standard forms; ▪contacts with other languages.

Internal (intralinguistic) factors can be general: ▪ the tendencies to improve the lang-e technique or the lang-e apparatus (assimilative and simplifying phonetic changes)

▪the interdependence of changes at different linguistic levels.

And specific: specific factors are confined to a certain group of languages only and may operate over a limited span of time.

7. Establishment of the Spoken Standard

The Written Standard had been fixed and recognized by the beginning of the 17^th c. The next stage in the growth of the national literary language was the development of the Spoken Standard. The dating of this event appears to be more problematic. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that in the 18^th c. the speech of educated people differed from that of common, uneducated people – in pronunciation, in the choice of words and in grammatical constructions. The number of educated people was growing and their way of speaking was regarded as correct. The earliest feasible date for the emergence of the Spoken Standard suggested by historians is the late 17^th c. Some authorities refer it to the end of the 18^th c. The latter date seems to be more realistic, as by that time current usage had been subjected to conscious regulation and had become more uniform. The spoken forms of the language, even when standardized, were never as stable and fixed as the Written Standard. Oral speech changed under the influence of sub-standard forms of the language, more easily than the written forms. Many new features coming from professional jargons, lower social dialects or local dialects first entered the Spoken Standard, and through its medium passed into the language of writing. The literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A "standard" may be defined as "socially accepted variety of a language established by a codified norm of correctness. Today all the English-speaking nations have their own national variants of pronunciation. It is generally accepted that for the "English English" it is RP or "Received Pronunciation". It has long been believed that RP is a social marker, a prestige accent of an Englishman. In the 19^th c. "received" was understood as "accepted in the best society" (of the London area). Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent, often referred to as "King's English". What concerns changes in the Standard, they may be traced in the speech of the younger generation of native RP speakers. Considerable changes are observed in the sound system of the present-day English, which are most remarkable since the well-known Great Vowel Shift. The main changes in vowel quality are: 1) changes according to the stability of articulation (some diphthongs become shorter like pure vowels); 2) changes according to the horizontal and vertical movements of the tongue ([æ] is replaced by [α]); 3) combinative changes (suit: [sju:t]→[su:t]); 4) changes in length (the lengthening of [ı] in big, his, is). The main changes in consonant quality are: voicing and devoicing ([sed]→[set]), loss of [h], initial [wh] (in why, when, etc.), loss of final [ŋ] (sittin'), linking and intrusive [r], combinative changes (issue ['ısju:]→['ısu:]).