- Modern English ( from 1500 AD till present day/ late 15th century to the present)

Before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, the majority of the population of Britain spoke Celtic languages. In Roman
Britain, Latin had been in extensive use as the language of government and the military and probably also in other
functions, especially in urban areas and among the upper echelons of society. However, it is uncertain how much
Latin remained in use in the post-Roman period.
During the course of the next several hundred years, gradually more and more of the territory in the area, later to be
known as England, came under Anglo-Saxon control.

Old English (450 AD- 1150 AD/ Mid 5th century to Mid 11th century)
The Old English (OE) began with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern
Britain. They brought with them dialects closely related to the continental language varieties which would produce
modern German, Dutch and Frisian.
Such Germanic basis for English can be seen in much of our everyday vocabulary – compare heart (OE heorte), come
(OE cuman) and old (OE eald) with German Herz, kommen and alt.
Many grammatical features also date back to this time: irregular verbs such as drink ~ drank ~ drunk (OE drincan ~
dranc ~ (ge)druncen) parallel German trinken ~ trank ~ getrunken. Similarly, many OE pronunciations are preserved
in modern spellings e.g. knight (OE cniht, German Knecht), in which k would have been pronounced and gh sounded
like ch in Scots loch.
OE, also called Anglo-Saxon, was not heavily influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by the native inhabitants of
the British Isles, borrowing only a few words (e.g. brock, tor) associated with local wildlife and geography (but many
place and river names e.g. Dover, Avon). However, Latin, introduced to Britain by the Romans, and reinforced in its
influence by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity during the 7 th century, had a significant impact, pro-
viding both vocabulary (e.g. master, mass, school) and the basis for the writing system.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which began in the late sixth century and was largely complete
by the late seventh century, was an event of huge cultural importance. One of its many areas of impact was the intro -
duction of writing extensive texts in the Roman alphabet on parchment (as opposed to inscribing very short inscrip-
tions on wood, bone, or stone in runic characters). Nearly all of our surviving documentary evidence for Old English
was mediated through the Church, and the impress of the literary culture of Latin Christianity is deep on nearly every -
thing that survives written in Old English.
OE was mostly written using the Latin alphabet, supplemented by a few Germanic runic letters to represent sounds not
found in Latin e.g. þ, which represented the th sounds in thin or this.
In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of English by greater use of a larger
set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with this) by a rather l ess fixed word
order; it also preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.

Middle English (1150 AD-1500 AD/ late 11th century to late 15th century)
After 1066 Conquest, for about 2 centuries the ruling classes and the aristocracy used Norman French, while the
conquered population, out of the court, kept on talking their native Old English (Anglo-Saxon). We still see such
difference between “educated English”, clearly coming from Latin, and colloquial English, clearly having words of
Saxon root; this is also the reason why the English language has got so many synonyms. By 1500, over 40 per cent of
all of the words that English has borrowed from French had made a first appearance in the language, including a very
high proportion of those French words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English.
Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:
- in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical in-
formation. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’) Change was grad-
ual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge:
the grammar of English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old English. By late Middle English the range
of endings and their use among London writers shows instead relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century
language of, for example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare ’s
language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in –en (at least in writing).
- in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and
Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylis-
tic register of those words which survived from Old English.

Up until about the middle of the fourteenth century, our surviving written records for Middle English of any variety
are patchy, and can be characterized as a number of more or less isolated ‘islands’ of usage. From the later fourteenth
century our records become more plentiful, especially for London, as the use of English increased in literary contexts
and in a variety of different technical and official functions. English began more and more to be the default choice for
major (broadly metropolitan) literary writers such as, in the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower
(who still also wrote major poems in French and Latin), and (although his milieu was rather different) William
Langland.
In this same period religious writings in English become more and more common; these include the first complete
English translation of the Bible, the Wycliffite Bible, which emerged from the circle of followers of the reformer John
Wyclif. We also find increasing numbers of scientific and medical texts written in English. By the way, throughout the
Middle Age Latin remained the language used by the Church and the language of learning as well.

THE MANUSCRIPTS
Modern work on the habits of medieval English scribes suggests that their behaviour can be divided into three types:
• scribes who ‘translate’ consistently into their own dialect
• scribes who copy more-or-less precisely, letter-for-letter, from their exempla
• scribes who ‘translate’ only partially, replacing some words or forms with those from their own dialect, but
leaving others unchanged
Since our surviving manuscripts sometimes stand at the end of a long chain of copying, in which successive scribes
may have adopted different approaches, the possible permutations become very complex indeed.
All of this has some important implications for historical lexicographers, including:
• it is only quite rarely, and in very special circumstances, that we can be absolutely certain that the precise reading
we find in a manuscript is authorial.
• but equally, we cannot normally assume that the language of a manuscript precisely reflects the contemporary usage
of its scribe, especially as regards vocabulary: even a consistent ‘translator’ may have left in some words or forms
which he would not have selected in his own day-to-day linguistic usage.
• comparison between different manuscripts of a work often indicates that a particular word is very likely to have
been used by the original author, but various scribes have made their own choices about spelling; the different
spellings adopted may well correspond to different pronunciations, and leave us in doubt about the authorial form.
Thus, dating of words and forms from the Middle English period is often hedged around with uncertainty – not only
do we have only a very partial reflection of actual linguistic use, but we also cannot be certain that we even have a
faithful ‘snapshot’ of a particular moment in time.
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