2 Three Phases of the Historical Development 

For each phase of the development, the following points must be made clear:

– Time range

– Features of English

–   Social and historical events that influenced English greatly

Old English (450-1150)

Three questions for discussion:

Who were the earliest inhabitants on the British Isles?

What are included in Germanic tribes?

What does England mean and why was the country called England and the language English?

What is the feature of Old English?

The first peoples known to inhabit the land were Celts.

The Germanic tribes include Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. They were first allies of Celts to fight against Picts and Scots, but then they became new conquerors.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes all have their dialects. The Saxons were numerically superior to the Angles, the latter were influential enough to impose their name on the whole.

Old English are almost monogeneous and entirely Germanic with only a few borrowings from Latin and Scandinavian. It was a highly inflected language, of which nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs had complex systems of endings or vowel changes or both.

 Middle English (1150-1500)

The Norman Conquest and its influence on England

–   A new and larger continental culture was brought to England.

–   It forced on England “The national idea”.

The situation of the simultaneous existence of three languages:

English ----

French -----

Latin -----

Features:

–   A period of great changes, changes more extensive and fundamental than those that had taken place at any time before and since.

–   Steady erosion of the Old English inflectional systems: endings of nouns and adjectives marking distinction of number and case and often of gender lost their distinctive forms.

Modern English (1500 up to the present)

A comparison of three phases