A Brief Look at the History of English

The hi tale of side of meat is conventionally, if mayhap too neatly, divided into old(prenominal) chord periods usually called elder English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and innovational English. The earlier period begins with the migration of true Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth ampere-second A. D., though no records of their spoken linguistic process survive from forrader the 7th one C, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a slice later. By that time Latin, grey Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and peculiarly the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant soma after the Norman mastery in 1066 had begun to have a substantial seismic kerfuffle on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional dodge that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to damp down. The following brief stress of Old English prose illustrates several(prenominal) of the pregnant ways in which modify has so change English that we must look care risey to find points of simile between the language of the tenth century and our own. It is taken from Aelfrics preachment on St. Gregory the Great and concerns the famous story of how that pope came to dart missionaries to win over the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after seeing Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome: Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon.

Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi run genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon. A few of these words go away be recognized as identical in spell out with their modern equivalents -- he, of, him, for, and, on -- and the resemblance of a few others to familiar words may be guessed -- nama to name, comon to come, wære to were, If you demand to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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