Пособие включает серию отрывков из произведений поэтов и прозаиков староанглийского и среднеанглийского периодов. Работа над текстами строится следующим образом. Во-первых, студентам предлагается прочитать и перевести текст на новоанглийский и русский языки. Каждый период сопровождается определенными правилами чтения. При этом очень удобно пользоваться глоссарием, представленным в конце пособия. Во-вторых, при работе со староанглийскими текстами студентам предлагается проанализировать глаголы и существительные по грамматическим категориям и морфологическим признакам. Для этого в пособии представлены схема и критерии такого анализа, сопровождаемые конкретными примерами из текстов.

Any language as well as any other social or natural phenomena is never static. Its phonetic and graphical structures are constantly subjected to gradual changes which are caused by external or internal factors. In the 1st case the language is influenced by factors that lie outside the language (extra-linguistic factors) such as social changes, wars, cultural contents, economic tides and so on. For example, during the Norman invasion in 1066 the English language adopted a number of French words. Thus the vocabulary of the English language was replenished and this change was caused by an external factor: the invasion of the Frenchmen on the territory of British Isles. In the 2nd case the language is influenced by purely linguistic factors, that is to say, the driving force lays within the language itself. (For example, findan (OE) – fīnden (ME) - find (MnE)). In OE in the 7th century the vowels found before –nd were lengthened. Just the word findan with the short [i] in the root came to be pronounced as [fi:nden] with a long root vowel. And later in the Modern English period the long vowel [i:] changed into [ai] – find. These changes were not connected with either the events in the history of the nation, they were caused by inner linguistic factors. Thus, defining the subject of the history of the English language we are to say that it’s constituted by the development of the language and driving force of its development. When speaking about the changes in phonetic or grammatical system in English or the changes in the word stock, we are to bear in mind that very few of them are independent. The majority of such changes are interdependent and a change in one of the spheres of the language drives as a rule at the change in another sphere. For

The history of the English language covers roughly 15 centuries, the history of the written period covers 12 centuries. This is, of course, a very long period of time and for the sake of convenience linguists distinguish 3 main stages (periods) in the history of the English language, namely Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and Modern English (MnE). The English scholar Henry Sweet (1854-1912) characterized these stages in his “New English Grammar”. He proposed the following division of the history of English according to the state of the unstressed endings.