Three Periods of the History of English

Though the development of English was slow, gradual and uninterrupted, there is a considerable difference between the language of the 9^th, 13^th and, say, 17^th centuries, in the vocabulary, grammatical systems and phonetic peculiarities. Therefore it is customary to divide the history of English periods: Old English, Middle English and New English.

Early Old English lasts from the Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, i.e. from the 5^th to the close of the 7^th century. The second period of Old English extends from the 8^th c. till the end of the 11^th c.

The Norman Conquest of the 11^th century is regarded as the beginning of the Middle English period. It lasted from the 11^th c. till the 15^th c.

The introduction of printing in the 15^th century is considered the beginning of the New English period. Early New English lasted from the introduction of printing (1475) till the middle of the 17^th c. The period from the mid-17^th c. to the close of the 18^th c. is usually called “the age of normalization and correctness”. The English language of the 19^th and 20^th c. is called Late New English or Modern English.

Unit 13 Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation

Even though the written word came after the spoken word, we must use the written symbols to talk about the sounds of Old English. The Germanic invaders, who wrote seldom and then only for religious or magical purposes, used angular letters called runes. These 20-odd letters, apparently designed to be carved or scratched in wood, may have been derived from a northern Italian source, but we do not know for certain. Except for a few inscriptions, we have no records of the early Germanic runes, since the Germanic invaders really did not adopt a writing system in the fullest sense until Christian missionaries brought the Roman alphabet in the sixth century.

The early scribes who wanted to use the Roman alphabet to represent the interdental sounds [Ѳ, ð] of their language used the Roman letters wherever they seemed to fit. As far as we can tell, they used the following letters:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, _, _, l, m, n, o, p, _, r, s, t, u, _, _, x, y, _.

What of the ‘missing’ letters j, k, q, v, w, z? The Old English scribes probably made occasional use of k and z, which were Greek letters used infrequently in Latin. The letter q was not used at all, and the Modern English letters j and v were variants of Old English i and u. Originally there were no capital letters.

In addition to these twenty letters, the Old English scribes used some other written symbols. One of these was a vowel made up of a and e. It was written œ/ǣ and was called æsc (ash). A second was a consonant, a modified form of the letter d; it was written ð and was called eth. Some linguists believe that it was an Irish letter [Viney, 2008].The letter ʒ originated from an insular form of g and was called yogh. Two consonant letters were taken from the runic alphabet: þ, called thorn, and ƿ, called wynn/wen. Ƿ was used to represent the non-Latin sound of [w], but it looks so much like thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with the more familiar w to eliminate confusion. The letters g was introduced later by French scribes. The modern letter w was developed during the Middle English period from the combination uu, as its name implies.

Seven of these twenty-four letters were used to represent 14 vowel sounds. Long vowels were marked with macrons: ā, ō, ȳ, ī, ǣ, etc. These were not originally used in Old English but are a more modern invention to distinguish between long and short vowels.

No letters were ‘silent’ in Old English (i.e., all were pronounced), and phonetic spelling helps identify and track dialectal differences through time.

The following chart shows the approximate equivalents of Old English and Modern English vowel sounds:

Old English sound	Modern English word with comparable sound	Old English letter used	Old English word with this sound and its modern English meaning
[a:]	father	ā	hām	home
[a], [o]	top	a	land (lond)	land
[e:]	cake	ē	fēdan	feed
[e]	bet	e	settan	set
[i:]	eve	ī	rīdan	ride
[i]	sit	i	sittan	sit
[o:]	port	ō	fōda	food
[o]	hop	o	hoppian	hop
[u:]	rude	ū	mūs	mouse
[u]	put	u	hnutu	nut
[æ:]	man	ǣ	hǣlan	heal
[æ]	back	æ	bæc	back
[y:]	—	ӯ	brӯd	bride
[y]	—	y	fyllan	fill

The letter y represented a sound which we no longer have in English; it is a lip-rounded sound which is heard in the German word fünf. The rest of the vowel sounds had qualities of the vowels generally found in modern Italian, Spanish, and German, the so-called continental vowels.