Outline of the History of English
Historical Periods of the English Language
General Features of English:
Indo-European family of languages; West
Germanic branch; Low German sub-branch (Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, Luxemburgian,
Frisian, English)
analytic language
flexible function of words
stressed; tendency to antepenultimate stress
historical vowel lenghtening and loss of final -e:
| Old English |
Middle English |
Present Day English |
| nama |
name |
name |
| mete |
mete |
meat |
| nosu |
nose |
nose |
| wicu |
weke |
week |
| duru |
dore |
door |
Old English
- inflectional endings
- freer word order
- compounding and derivation
- formulaic verse
- several noun declensions
- strong and weak adjectives
- strong and weak verbs
- masc., fem., and neuter nouns
- Dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon
Middle English
- French influence
- Scandinavian influence
- loss of inflections
- less free in word order
- loss of grammatical gender
- more phonetic spelling
- final -e pronounced, as well as all consonants
- resurrection of English in 13th and 14th c.
- dialects: Northern, Midland, Southern, Kentish
- supremacy of London dialect (East Midland)
Special characters in Old and Middle English:
- thorn (th)
- eth (th)
- ash (a+e)
- yogh (velar or palatal fricative: y, h, g, z)
- wen/wynn (w)
Modern English
- Great Vowel Shift (1350-1550):
- transition to Modern English
- raising of stressed long vowels and loss of vowel length
- also formation of diphthongs: long i>ai (e.g. mine), long u>au
(e.g. house)
- William Caxton, printing, c. 1474, fixing of spelling
- Renaissance, influx of vocabulary from classical languages, French
and Italian
- American English,
- origin in 17th c. colonial English
- dialects: New England, General American, Southern