The History of English

UNIT 10-NARRATIVE 2

This essay will be concerned with the development of the English language from the earliest attestations until today, and also considered the background to the language before the settlement of England by Germanic tribes. English can be subdivided into five periods, the beginning that is the time before the English arrives, the old English period from (600 to 1100), the middle period from (1100 to 1500), the early modern period from (1500 to 1700) and the period of present-day English from 1700 untiltoday.

    The first is when the indo-european speakers arrived on the landmass now called England were probably the Celts, even though, historians do not know exactly the date of their arrival, but they were already on the British Isles several centuries before the birth of Christ. beginning in 55 before Christ, Julius Caesar the Roman Emperor made several attempts to invade Britain, but it was not before fifty after Christ that most of the land was under Roman domination, except for the northern part which remained unconquered. In 410 after Christ the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain leaving chaos, the pits raided from the north and the Scots from Ireland while the Jutes and the Saxons attacked the Eastern coasts throughout the 5th and 6th Century.

    The second period is the old English period, which begins in the middle of the 5th century, with the coming of Germanic tribes to settle in England. When Germanic tribes invaded Britain, these tribes were the Saxons, the angles and the doots. Neertheless, linguistically the Old English period is generally defined as from 600 to 1100. After Christ's due to the strong Germanic and especially the strong Saxon influence in the Old English period with the invasion of England, it became more clear that the Germanic tribes  were separated from their fellows on the Continent, and among those groups there were differents dialects, which are purely geographical variants. For this reason, the Old English was synthetic with numerous gluten aiding tendencies, and it inherited most phonological and morphological properties from Germanic.

    The third period known as the Middle English begins with the conquest of England by Normans. After their success in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the end of this period is marked by the introduction of printing by William Caxton in 1476. The Norman Conquest brought massive changes to England's political and social structures and it had an enormous impact on the English language, after the Norman Conquest England had dramatic changes, such as an almost completed replacement of the English aristocracy, and lost its status and became the language of the lower classes especially among the nobility in literature law and in official documentation. It essentially disappeared as a written language. The year of 1204 marks the turning point when King John nicknamed John lack land lost his English possessions in France.

    The fourth period called the Early Modern Language, begins with the 16th century and is characterised by an expansion in vocabulary by borrowing from classical languages, and by the regularisation of English grammar.The early modern english period coincides with the ascendancy of Henry the eighth's to the throne in 1509. The end of the early modern English period is marked by the completion of the great vowel shift and the beginning of the scientific age at around 1700. English by the end of the Middle English period most of today's syntactic and morphological patterns had been established.

Lastly, the beginning of the present day English started by the end on the reign of Elizabeth I, in 1603, who was the daughter of Henri VIII. In this later period literature had boomed trough the works of Marlowe of Spencer, William Shakespeare, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. by about 1700, the English language differed only slightly from present-day. English is the most important language among the languages of the world. The English influences in the new world is often defined in terms of three concentric circles the inner circle refers to traditional historical and social linguistic origins of English, where it is used as a first or native language. The other circle includes countries colonized by Britain and the United States, where English is spoken as a second language.

Conclusion, Throughout history, English-speaking Britain was the leading colonial nation in the 17th and 18th Century, as well as the leader of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 18th Century; in the late 19th and 20th Century English is the third most commonly spoken language in the world today with upwards of 360 million, first language speakers, a further 375 million for whom English is a second language and many non-native speakers worldwide.  It is the language of international business now. English continues changing and developing, with hundreds of new words arriving every year. But even with all the borrowings from many other languages the heart of the English language remains the Anglo-Saxon of Old English. The grammar of English is also distinctly Germanic.