22. The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of the Kingdom of England by the troops of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy on 14 October 1066

The English language that is spoken today is the direct result of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. Modern English is vastly different from that spoken by the English prior to the Conquest, both in its word-hoard and its grammar.

The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. One only has to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

23. Grimms law

Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 11HYPERLINK "st_millennium_BC%221st%20millennium%20BC"st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As it is presently formulated, Grimm's Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift[1]:

Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.

Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.

Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced fricatives; ultimately, in most Germanic languages these voiced fricatives become voiced stops.

Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered in linguistics; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historical linguistic research.

24. Effect of the scandinav invansion

By the end of the Old English period English underwent a strong influence of Scandinavian due to the Scandinavian conquest of the British Isles. Scandinavians belonged to the same group of peoples as Englishmen and their languages had much in common. As the result of this conquest there are about 700 borrowings from Scandinavian into English.

Scandinavians and Englishmen had the same way of life, their cultural level was the same, they had much in common in their literature therefore there were many words in these languages which were almost identical, e.g.However there were also many words in the two languages which were different, and some of them were borrowed into English, such nouns as: bull, cake, egg, kid, knife, skirt, window etc, such adjectives as: flat, ill, happy, low, odd, ugly, wrong, such verbs as : call, die, guess, get, give, scream and many others.

Even some pronouns and connective words were borrowed which happens very seldom, such as: same, both, till, fro, though, and pronominal forms with «th»: they, them, their. Scandinavian influenced the development of phrasal verbs, which did not exist in Old English, at the same time some prefixed verbs came out of usage, e.g. ofniman, beniman.

25.varners law

Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h (including *hʷ ), when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g

Karl Verner was the first scholar to note the factor governing the distribution of the two outcomes. The original location of stress was often retained in Greek and early Sanskrit, though in Germanic stress eventually became fixed on the initial (root) syllable of all words. The crucial difference between *pātḗr and *bʱrā́tēr was therefore one of second-syllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pitā́ versus bhrā́tā).

26. historical background 11-15cent

Middle English is the name given by historical linguists to the diverse forms of the English language in use between the late 11th century and about 1470, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press into England by William Caxton in the late 1470s.

The transfer of power in 1066 resulted in only limited culture shock. But the top levels of society of English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies were removed. Their replacements spoke Norman French and used Latin for administrative purposes. Thus Norman French came into use as a language of polite discourse and literature, and this fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration.

The new English language did not sound the same as the old: for as well as undergoing changes in vocabulary, the complex system of inflected endings which Old English had was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken Middle English. This change was gradually reflected in its increasingly diverse written forms too. The loss of case-endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages, so cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population. English remained, after all, the language of the vast majority.

27.Survey of Periods of the history

Old English an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.

It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years– from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who occupied and controlled large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.

28. OE vocabulary

The surviving vocabulary of Old English (OE) is relatively small. The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE),contains almost 34,000 different word forms, whereas a modern desk dictionary might contain 80,000.

Much of the vocabulary of Mod. E. derives from OE. Examples include the natural world (earth, sea, wind, fire, water; sun, moon, star); people (man, woman, child, father, mother, brother, daughter); the body (hand, arm, elbow, finger, foot, nose, mouth); and other basic concepts such as food, drink; heaven, hell; friend, neighbour; love, good, evil; hot, cold; after, over, under.

The examples above are all typical of OE words in being one or two syllables in length. Where there are two syllables, the stress is on the first. Initial stress is a characteristic feature of the Germanic languages as a group and remains the most common type of word structure in Mod. E. We have also retained from OE many of the ways of making new words, but at the same time English has borrowed numerous words from other languages, notably French and Latin. Thousands of French words were brought into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066. New words occur especially in fields where Norman influence was strongest, such as Law, Literature and Fashion.

29.Word stress

In English, we do not say each syllable with the same force or strength. We say one syllable very loudly (big, strong, important) and all the other syllables very quietly. stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.

'Primary' and 'secondary' stress are distinguished in some languages. English is commonly believed to have two levels of stress, as in the words cóunterfòil [ˈkaʊntərˌfɔɪl] and còunterintélligence [ˌkaʊntər.ɪnˈtɛlɪdʒəns], and in some treatments has even been described as having four levels, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary, but these treatments often disagree with each other. There are two very important rules about word stress:

One word, one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. So if you hear two stresses, you have heard two words, not one word.)

The stress is always on a vowel.