30. The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of the Kingdom of England by the troops of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy on 14 October 1066

The English language that is spoken today is the direct result of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. Modern English is vastly different from that spoken by the English prior to the Conquest, both in its word-hoard and its grammar.

The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. One only has to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

31/ Oe syntax

The syntactic structure of OE was determined by two major conditions: the nature of OE morphology and the relations between the spoken and the written forms of the language. OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words. It was primarily a spoken language, consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple.

The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. OE noun patterns, adjective and verb patterns had certain specific features which are important to note in view of their later changes. Verb patterns included a great variety of dependant components: nouns and pronouns in oblique cases with or without prepositions, adverbs, infinitives and participles, e.g. brinз þā þīnз ‘bring those things’. The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints

32.Runic inskriptions

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The earliest runic inscriptions date from around A.D. 150. The characters were generally replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianization by around A.D. 700 in central Europe and by around A.D. 1100 in Northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in Northern Europe. Until the early twentieth century runes were used in rural Sweden for decoration purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars. The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD.

No distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time.

The name runes contrasts with Latin or Greek letters. It is attested on a 6th century Alamannic runestaff as runa, and possibly as runo on the 4th century Einang stone. The name is from a root run- (Gothic runa), meaning "secret" or "whisper".

33.declension of nouns

In linguistics, declension is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives, indicating such features as number (typically singular vs. plural), case (subject, object, and so on), gender, and possession. Declension occurs in a great many of the world's languages, but is much less prominent in English. English nouns decline only to distinguish singular from plural (e.g., book vs. books); As detailed below, English was once a highly inflected language, as befitting its Indo-European and especially its Germanic linguistic ancestry, but it became greatly simplified as it evolved. In Modern English, nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical number. (Consider the difference between book and books.) In addition, a small number of English pronouns have distinct nominative and objective forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition.

34. Early ME dialekts

Middle English is the name given by historical linguists to the diverse forms of the English language in use between the late 11th century and about 1470, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press to England by William Caxton in the late 1470s. written Middle English displays a wide variety of scribal (and presumably dialectal) forms.

The Middle English dialects can be divided into five major groups:

South-Western --West Saxon;

South-Eastern-- a continuation of OE Kentish;

East Midland -- in the eastern part of the OE Mercian area;

West Midland--- the western part of the OE Mercian area;

Northern (N), north of the Humber.

In general, southern Middle English dialects tend to be more conservative and northern dialects more progressive. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the West Midland dialect, which is primarily preserved in two major text groups. One of these is early and from the southern part of the West Midland area; the other one is later and from the northern part of the West Midland area. The language variants of the two text groups differ in many respects, the early group having much in common with the South-Western dialect, the later group having more in common with the Northern dialect. Features representing the two forms of the West Midland dialect are separated by a semicolon in the presentation of forms and dialect features below.

35.the pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun (or noun phrase) with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English.

Common types of pronouns found in the world's languages are as follows:

Personal pronouns stand in place of the names of people or things:

Subjective pronouns are used when the person or thing is the subject of the sentence or clause. English example: I like to eat chips, but she does not.

Objective pronouns are used when the person or thing is the object of the sentence or clause. English example: John likes me but not her.

Prepositional pronouns come after a preposition. No distinct forms exist in English; for example: Anna and Maria looked at him.

Disjunctive pronouns are used in isolation or in certain other special grammatical contexts. No distinct forms exist in English; for example: Who does this belong to? Me.

Dummy pronouns are used when grammatical rules require a noun (or pronoun), but none is semantically required. English example: It is raining.

Weak pronouns.

Possessive pronouns are used to indicate possession or ownership.

Demonstrative pronouns distinguish the particular objects or people that are referred to from other possible candidates. English example: I'll take these.

Indefinite pronouns refer to general categories of people or things. English example: Anyone can do that.

Distributive pronouns are used to refer to members of a group separately rather than collectively. English example: To each his own.

Negative pronouns indicate the non-existence of people or things. English example: Nobody thinks that.

Relative pronouns refer back to people or things previously mentioned. English example: People who smoke should quit now

Interrogative pronouns ask which person or thing is meant. English example: Who did that?

36.OE Historical background

Old English an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.

It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years– from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when the language underwent a dramatic transition.

The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its related languages in continental Europe. Some of these features are shared with the other West Germanic languages with which Old English is grouped, while some other features are traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to derive.

Like other Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms.