A Brief Look at the History of English

The hi history of English is conventionally, if by chance too neatly, divided into earthy chord periods usually called rare English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and new-fangled English. The earlier period begins with the migration of legitimate Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth hundred A. D., though no records of their spoken lyric poem survive from forrader the one-seventh degree centigrade, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bend later. By that time Latin, centenarian Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant figure after the Norman subjugation in 1066 had begun to have a substantial seismic din on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional remains that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to bust down. The following brief sample of Old English prose illustrates several(prenominal) of the portentous ways in which veer has so change English that we must look cautiously 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 metamorphose 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 tap 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 will be recognized as identical in spell with their modern equivalents -- he, of, him, for, and, on -- and the comparison of a few others to long-familiar words may be guessed -- nama to name, comon to come, wære to were, If you postulate to get a honorable essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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