История английского языка в таблицах (На английском языке). Учебное пособие

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The Old, Middle and New English language data is represented in the form of tables. The book is initiated by the periodisation of the History of the English language which is followed by a Chronology of historical events which are of great assistance to the orientation in the historical field.

Old English suffered great changes during the whole period from the 5th to the 11th century. Anglo-Saxons did not live in isolation from the world - they contacted with other continental tribes, and all these contacts could not but influence the language somehow. More over, the internal development of the English language after the merging of Jutes, Saxons and Angles languages was rather fast, and sometimes it took only half a century to change some form of the language or replace it with another one.

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long and short stems. The original distinction which was important for Old English was obliterated by the lengthening and shortening of vowels that took place in Middle English. As a result, the two varieties if inflection became one;

the genitive singular, the plural of nouns, and the third singular present of verbs, -ed of the preterit and perfect participle, and –en of the perfect participle of certain strong verbs.

Middle English is the name given to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process

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Middle English was one of the five languages current in England. Though never the language of the Roman Catholic Church, which was always Latin, it lost status as a language of courtly life, literature and documentation, being largely supplanted by Anglo-Norman French. It remained, though, the spoken language of the majority, and may be regarded as the only true vernacular language of most English people after about the mid­12th century, with Anglo-Norman becoming, like Latin, a learned tongue of the court. Welsh and Cornish were also used as spoken vernaculars in the far west. English did not cease to be used in the court: it retained a cartulary function (being the language used in royal charters); nor did it disappear as a language of literary production. Even during what has been called the 'lost' period of English literary history, the late 11th to mid-12th century, Old English texts, especially homilies, saints' lives and grammatical texts, continued to be copied, used and adapted by scribes. From the later 12th and 13th century there survive huge amounts of written material of various forms, from lyrics to saints' lives, devotional manuals to histories, encyclopedias to poems of moral discussion and debate. Middle English is more familiar to us as the language of Ricardian Poetry and its followers, the 14th - and 15th century literature cultures clustered around the West Midlands and around London and East Anglia. This includes the works of William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, John Gower, Thomas Malory, William Caxton, and Thomas Hoccleve.

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