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5. Periods in the History of the English Language

The historical development of a language is a continius uninterrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformations. The commonly accepted traditional periodization divides English into three periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and New English (NE). OE begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th c.) or with the beginning of writing (7th c.) and ends with the Norman Conquest (1066); ME begins with the Norman conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475), which is the start of Modern English or New English period; the New period lasts to the present day.

Each periods is marked by a set of specific features of phonology, grammar and vocabulary. The English scholar Henry Sweet (1845-1921), author of a number of works on the English langauge and on its history, proposed the following division of the history of English according to the state of unstressed endings:

1st period, Old English – the period of full endings (any vowel may be found in an unstressed ending);

2nd period, Middle English – the period of levelled endings (vowels of unstressed endings have been levelled under a neutral vowel);

3rd period, Middle English – the period of lost endings (endings are lost).

Sweet’s classification is based on both phonetic (weakening and loss of unstresse vowel sounds) and morphological (weakening and loss of grammatical morphemes) features. Anyhow it is considered to be arbitrary by some scholars. It is true that in OE period any vowel could be found in the ending and the majoruty of the parts of speech are connected with the other words in the sentences by means of endings. The period of levelled endings in reality contains the levelled vowel in the ending, but at the same time lots of endings were already list. The period of lost endings – present-day English is not totally devoid of endings, some paradigmatic forms are still made by means of endings, scarce as they are.

Division into chronological periods should take into account external and internal (extra- and intralinguistic) factors. The following periodization of English history is partly based on the conventional three periods; it subdivided the history of the English language into seven periods taking into account differing in extra- and intralinguistuic factors.

Old English Period

The first pre-written or pre-historical period which may be termed Early Old English, lasts from the West Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, that is from the 5th c. to the close 5th c. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians), which are gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongue. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English

The second historical periods extends from the 8th century till the end of the 11th (Old English or Anglo-Saxon). It can also be called Written OE as compared with the pre-written Early OE period. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. Towards the end of the period the differences between the dialects grew and their relative position altered. They were probably equal as a medium of oral communication, while in the sphere of writing one of the dialects, West Saxon, had gained supremacy over the other dialects (Kentish, Mercial and Northumbrian). The prevalence of West Saxon in writing is tide up with the rise of kingdom of Wessex to cultural and political prominence.

In general Old English was a typical Old Germanic language, with a purely Germanic vocabulary and a few foreign borrowings; it displayed specific peculiarities, owing ti intensive changes which took place in Early Old English. As far as grammar is concerned, OE was an inflected or “synthetic” language with a well-developed system of morphological categories, especially in the noun and adjective, and with an elaborate grouping of all inflected parts of speech into morphological classes.