Historical Overview of English: Traditional & Alternative Periods - Prof. Pérez, Apuntes de Historia de la Lengua

¡Descarga Historical Overview of English: Traditional & Alternative Periods - Prof. Pérez y más Apuntes en PDF de Historia de la Lengua solo en Docsity! Unit 1: Period division. Traditional and alternative. 1. Traditional division It is a mixture of political and linguistic reasons. • Old English (OE): it lasted from the 5th century to the 11th century. It is also known as the Anglo-Saxon period. The previous inhabitants were Celtic not English, therefore, the language belonged to Germanic languages. The Anglo-Saxon dominion ended in 1066 with the Battle of Hastings against the French. As the English lost, it began the Norman period, during which they talked French with highly dialectal features. • Middle English (ME): from 12th century until 15th century. It began with the Norman Conquest. The territory was divided in 4 kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and Kent. The first king was William the Conqueror. There was an influence of French to English. The 15th century marked the beginning of the modern period for languages, and it was also called Renaissance. • Modern English • Early Modern English (EME): from 16th century to 17th century. It was related to the Renaissance. • Late Modern English (LME): from 18th century to 19th century. This period was marked by the expansion of the Empire. • Present-day English (PdE): from 20th century until nowadays. There have been attempts to accommodate these periods to linguistic changes. The first one was H. Sweet in 1876. • OE characterised by full inflections (naman, gifan, caru). • ME characterised by levelled inflections (name, given, care). • Modern English, however, lost those inflections (naam, giv, caar). However, these theory has also been criticized as: • Some inflections still exist in Present-day English such as plural, 3s or past. English is not an isolating language (without inflections). • These changes are difficult to be dated. • It is difficult to justify choosing one feature and excluding the others. 2. Alternative division (Blake, 1996) Given that the main source of the history of the English language (HEL) is written language and that written language always subjects to attempts or regularization (standard), we need an alternative division that reflects changes in, and attitudes towards the standard in different periods of the language.