Preface

This book is meant as a study aid for students of English taking extra-mural as well as residence courses of the History of the English Language.

The material is arranged in four parts of which the first three present a theoretical course and the fourth contains Old English and Middle English texts supplemented with the glossary.

The book is by no means complete nor does it purport to offer a new concept of the material comprised.

It is in every respect based on the works of Russian and foreign philologists that are listed in the bibliography at the end of this book.

The author is totally responsible for all errors and deficiencies of the book.

The author

Part I

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General characteristics

1. The history of English as a subject.

2. Britain under the Romans. Celtic tribes.

3. The Anglo-Saxon invasion.

4. Periods of the history of English.

5. The heptarchy.

6. The Scandinavians in Britain.

1. The history of English as a subject

A language can be studied in various aspects: phonetics, grammar, word stock, style as regards the synchronic approach. Diachronically every linguistic fact enters a never ending chain of evolution of the language, which is the subject of the history of the language. The history of the English language shows the ties of English with the Germanic group as well as with languages of other groups, e.g. French and Latin.

Knowledge of the history of English is bound to account for essential features and specific peculiarities of Modem English, e.g.:

NE lord; ← OE hlaford from hlaf-weard (the keeper of the bread) to ME hlāverd to NE. lord.

NE night-knight; ← OE. nyht-knyht to ME night-knight [kniht].

In Early New English h disappeared before t, k disappeared before n. In the Great Vowel Shift [i:] became [ai], and the two words coincided in pronunciation.

The history of English shows that linguistic development is closely connected with or caused by events in the history of the people.

Old English is one of the Germanic group of Indo-European languages. It was spoken and written in England before about 1100 A.D. It is sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon.

There were four distinct dialects of Old English: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West-Saxon. This is known through differences in spelling. After 900 A.D. West-Saxon became widely used as a standard written language, and is sometimes referred to as 'Classic West-Saxon'.

Two stages of the West-Saxon dialect can be distinguished - early West Saxon (eWS), which is the language of the time of King Alfred (c. 900), and late West Saxon (lWS), which is seen in the works of Ælfric (c. 1000). The most important difference is that eWS ie appears in lWS texts as y (e. g., eWS fierd becomes fyrd in lWS). Another is that ea may be spelt e in lWS (e. g., eWS sceap becomes scep in lWS).

Within the Germanic group the family tree looks something like this:

According to Tacitus the West Germanic people were divided into three major tribal groups: Ingvaeones, Istvaeones, Erminones. It is not clear what these groups corresponded to, but they mark out some important geographical distributions that correspond to later dialect groups.