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1. The subject.

The History of the English language. Subject: the English language in its diachronic aspect, which means the language at different stages of its development. The study of the history of the English language in the whole is important to retrace the development of the language from its origins to the modern state and to observe the social and cultural history of the country and native-speakers of the language.

The English language reflects many centuries of development, and it is important to know linguistic history in order to conceive the principal features of present-day English in its phonetic, lexical and grammatical aspects.

The history of the English language shows the place of English in the linguistic world; it reveals its ties and contacts with other related and unrelated tongues. Old English was the language of Anglo-Saxons and it was common for all Germanic tribes not only on the territory of the British Isles, but also on the Continent. Studying the Old English period we study not only the origins of Modern English, but also the origins of some other modern languages, such as German for example, so we can understand better the linguistic and extralinguistic connections between English and other Germanic languages.

2. English as a Germanic language.

All Germanic languages are considered to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic. Strong evidence for the unity of all the Germanic languages can be found in the phenomenon known as the first Germanic sound shift or consonant shift (also called Grimm's law), which set the Germanic subfamily apart from the other members of the Indo-European family.

Germanic languages possess several common features, such as the following:

1. The transformation of the Indo-European verbal system of tense and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite).

2. The presence of a large class of verbs with the dental suffixes (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs (in English care-cared-cared or look-looked-looked; German fragen-fragte-gefragt); the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs (in English lie-lay-lain or ring-rang-rung; German ringen-rang-gerungen).

3. The system of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase (modern English adjectives do not inflect at all, except for the comparative and superlative; this was not the case in Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on the type of determiner they were preceded by).

4. The comparison of adjectives in the Germanic languages follows a parallel pattern, as in English: rich, richer, richest; German reich, reicher, reichst; and Swedish rik, rikare, rikast.

5. The formation of the genitive singular by the addition of -s or -es. Examples: English man, man's; Swedish hund, hunds; German Lehrer, Lehrers or Mann, Mannes.

6. The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law (which continued in German in a second shift known as the High German consonant shift).

7. Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants appear in almost all Germanic languages.

8. The shifting of word stress onto word stems and later on the first syllable of the word (though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them).

9. Another distinctive characteristic shared by the Germanic languages is the umlaut, which is a type of vowel change in the root of a word. It is demonstrated in the pairs foot (singular) – feet (plural) in English; fot (singular) – fötter (plural) in Swedish; and Kampf (singular) – Kämpfe (plural) in German.

10. Another characteristic of Germanic languages is verb second (V2) word order (the rule in some languages that the second component of declarative main clauses is always a verb, while this is not necessarily the case in other types of clauses), which is quite uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature is shared by all modern Germanic languages except modern English (which nevertheless appears to have had V2 earlier in its history) which has more or less replaced the structure with fixed Subject Verb Object word order.

Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages do. We can say that Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is taking into consideration the aspect of analyticity of a language. Some, such as German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, such as English, have moved toward a largely analytic type.

3. Grimm's law.

Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift or the Rask's-Grimm's rule), named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As it is presently formulated, Grimm's Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift:

1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.

2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced fricatives; ultimately, in most Germanic languages these voiced fricatives become voiced stops.

The chain shift can be abstractly represented as:

b^h → b → p → f

d^h → d → t → θ

g^h → g → k → x

g^wh → g^w → k^w → x^w

For example, Latin pater became English father; Latin dent – English tooth; Latin cornu – English horn.

Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value.

The voiced aspirated stops may have first become voiced fricatives before hardening to the voiced unaspirated stops "b", "d", and "g" under certain conditions.

Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered in linguistics; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historical linguistic research. The "law" was discovered by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806 and Rasmus Christian Rask in 1818. It was elaborated (i.e. extended to include standard German) in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, in his book Deutsche Grammatik.

4. Verner's law.

Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h (including *h^w), when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g (and *g^w).

Here is a table illustrating the sound changes according to Verner. In the bottom row, for each pair, the sound on the right represents the sound changed according to Verner's Law.

PIE	*p		*t		*k		*kʷ		*s
Grimm	*f		*θ		*x		*xʷ
Verner	*f	*v	*θ	*ð	*x	*ɣ	*xʷ	*ɣʷ	*s	*z

When Grimm's law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have changed into Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *f, *þ (dental fricative [θ]) and *h (velar fricative [x]), according to Grimm's Law. Indeed, that was known to be the usual development. However, there appeared to be a large set of words in which the agreement of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Baltic, Slavic etc. guaranteed PIE *p, *t or *k, and yet the Germanic reflex was voiced (*b, *d or *g).

5. The origin of the English language.

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate.

The original Old English language was then influenced by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree.

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages (Latin based languages). This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an enormous and varied vocabulary.

6. The Roman conquest.

The history of the English language begins with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5th c. of our era. Prior to the Germanic invasion the British Isles must have been inhabited for at least fifty thousand years.

The earliest inhabitants were the Celts. The Celts came to Britain in three waves and immediately preceded the Teutons. Economically and socially they were a tribal society made up of kinship groups, tribes and clans; they were engaged in agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul.

In the first century B.C. Gaul was conquered by the Romans. Having occupied Gaul Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain, in 55 and 54 B.C. The British Isles had long been known to the Romans as a source of valuable tin ore; Caesar attacked Britain for economic reasons – to obtain tin, pearls and corn, - and also for strategic reasons, since rebels and refugees from Gaul found support among their British kinsmen. Although Caesar failed to subjugate Britain, Roman economic penetration to Britain grew; traders and colonists from Rome came in large numbers to settle in the south-eastern towns. In A.D. 43 Britain was again invaded by Roman legions under Emperor Claudius, and towards the end of the century was made a province of the Roman Em­pire.

There was a network of paved Roman roads connected the towns and military camps. Scores of towns with a mixed population grew along the Roman roads – inhabited by Roman legionaries and civilians and by the native Celts; among the most important trading centers of Roman Britain was London.

The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years; it came to an end in the early 5th c. In A.D. 410, the Roman troops were officially withdrawn to Rome by Constantine. This temporary withdrawal turned out to be final, for the Empire was breaking up due to internal and external causes.

Since the Romans had left the British Isles some time before the invasion of the West Germanic tribes, there could never be any direct contacts between the new arrivals and the Romans on British soil.

7. The Anglo-Saxon conquest.

Reliable evidence of that period is extremely scarce. The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM.

The invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king, Vortigern, as assistants and allies in a local war. Newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts, and other Germanic bands followed. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories.

The Britons fought among themselves and were harried by the Picts and Scots from Scotland. Left to their own resources, they were unable to offer a prolonged resistance to the enemies attacking them on every side. The 5th c. was the age of increased Germanic expansion. About the middle of the century several West Germanic tribes overran Britain and, for the most part, had colonized the island by the end of the century, though the invasions lasted well into the 6th c.

The languages spoken by the inhabitants of Germania were a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which linguists believe developed from a single language spoken some five thousand years ago in an area that has never been identified – perhaps the Caucasus.

The first wave of invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme south-east: Kent and the Isle of Wight. The second wave of immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons, who had been expanding westwards across Frisia to the Rhine and to what is known as Normandy. The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and the most powerful of them was Wessex. Last came the Angles from the lower valley of the Elbe and southern Denmark. They made their landing on the east coast and moved up the rivers to the central part of the island. Angles founded large kingdoms which had absorbed their weaker neighbors: East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.

There was little intermixture between the new­comers and the Celtic aborigines. The invaders pulled down British villages and ruined the Roman British towns. They killed and enslaved the Britons or drove them to the distant parts of the country. The Britons found refuge in the mountainous districts of Cornwall and Wales; some Britons fled to Armorice (later called Small Britanny or Bretagne, in Modern France). Celtic tribes remained intact only in Scotland and Ireland.

The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives so far as language was concerned. After the settlement West Germanic tongues came to be spoken all over Britain with the exception of a few distant regions where Celts were in the majority: Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

8. Periods.

The commonly ac­cepted, traditional periodisation divides English history into three pe­riods: Old English, Middle English and Modern English, with boundaries attached to definite dates and historical events affect­ing the language. Old English begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th c.) and ends with the Nor­man Conquest (1066); Middle English begins with the Norman Conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475), which is the start of the Modern English period; the Modern period lasts to the pres­ent day.

There is another periodisation of English history, it is partly based on the conventional three periods; it subdivides the history of the English language into seven periods differing in linguistic situation and the na­ture of linguistic changes.

The first period – pre-written, Early Old English, from the West Germanic invasion of Britain in the 5th c. till the beginning of writing in the 7th c. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders: Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, which were losing contacts with the related continental tongues.

The second period from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th; it is Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Towards the end of the period the dialects were not very different and unintelligible. One of the dialects, West Saxon, was dominant over the other dialects (Kentish, Mercian and Northum­brian). The prevalence of West Saxon in writing is connected with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex to political and cultural prominence.

Old English had a purely Germanic vocabulary and few foreign borrowings; it displayed specific phonetic pe­culiarities, due to intensive changes which took place in Early Old English. Old English was an inflected or synthetic language with a developed system of morphological categories and with an elaborate grouping of all inflected parts of speech into morphological classes.

The third period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and lasts till the middle of the 14th c. As a result of the feudal system and foreign influences – Scandinavian and French – dialects diverged greatly. Under Norman rule the official language in England was French. Towards the end of the period English began to replace French in writing, as well as in many other spheres.

Early Middle English was a time of great changes. Phonetic and gram­matical changes proceeded at a high rate, unrestricted by written tradi­tion. Grammatical alterations were so drastic that by the end of the period they had transformed English from a highly inflected language into a mainly analytical one.

The fourth period – from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th – includes the age of Chaucer. English became the state and literary language and it was the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect used in writing and literature was the mixed dialect of London. Literary flourishing had a stabilizing effect on language, so that the rate of linguistic changes was slowed down.

The written records of the late 14th and 15th c. show the growth of the English vocabulary and the increasing proportion of French loan-words in English. In the grammatical structure most of the inflections in the nominal system had fallen together. The verb system was expand­ing, as numerous new analytical forms and verbal phrases on the way to becoming analytical forms were used alongside old simple forms.

The fifth period – Early New English – lasted from the in­troduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare; that is from 1475 to 1660. The first printed book in English was published by William Caxton in 1475.

The Early New English period was a time of changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The new, bourgeois society and the wider horizons of man's activity caused the growth of the vocab­ulary. Ex­tensive phonetic changes were transforming the vowel system, which resulted in the growing gap between the written and the spoken forms of the word. The abundance of grammatical units occurring without any apparent regularities produces great freedom of grammatical construction.

The sixth period extends from the mid-17th c. to the close of the 18th c. – neo-classical period. It is the age of normalization and correctness in the history of literature. The norms were fixed as rules and prescriptions of correct usage in the numerous dictionaries and grammar-books published at the time and were spread through education and writing.

In the 18th c. the pronunciation became fixed. The great sound shifts were over and pronunciation was being stabilized. Word usage and grammatical construction were restricted and normalized. The morphological system, particularly the verb system, acquired a stricter pattern. Syntactical struc­tures were standardized.

The English language of the 19th and 20th c represents the seventh period in the history of English – Late Modern English. By the 19th c English had acquired all the properties of a national language, with its functional stratification and recognized standards. The dialects were used in oral communication and had no literary tradition.

In the 19th and 20th c. the English vocabulary has grown due to the rapid progress of technology, science and culture and other changes in all spheres of man's activities. Linguistic changes in phonetics and grammar have been con­fined to alterations in the relative frequency and distribution of linguistic units: some pronunciations and forms have become old-fashioned or even obsolete, while other forms have gained ground, and have been accepted as common usage.

9. Old English phonetic structure as compared to Modern English.

Alphabet.

Old English alphabet used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet.

Old English introduced three letters not present in the Latin alphabet, called thorn, eth, and wynn. Thorn – Þ, þ, and eth – Ð, ð – were both developed by Anglo-Saxon scribes to represent a sound that was not present in Latin, the sound that Modern English represents with the letters th. Wynn is represented by a w.

The Anglo-Saxons did not use the letters v and j (which were invented later), and q and z were used only very occasionally. They used the letter æ, which we do not use in spelling, but only in transcription.

Old English alphabet:

a æ b c d e f з h i l m n o p r s t þ u w x y

Spelling.

Old English writing was based on the phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. But, some letters indicated two or more sounds; there were some rules of reading. For example:

s [s] ras; [z] between vowels – risan;

f [v] between vowels – ofer, drifan; [f] feohtan; fœder;

c [k] cuman, cnawan;

з [g'] зan; [γ] daзas; [j] dæз;

h [x] tahte; [x'] niht;

System of vowels.

Old English had six simple vowels: a, æ, i, o, u, y, and probably a seventh – ie. It also had two diphthongs: ea, eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions. Long vowels are marked with macrons (e.g. ā). Vowel length is significant in Old English because it does make a difference in the meanings of words. For example, Old English is means is while īs means ice, ac means but while āc means oak, and ge means and while gē means you (plural).

Palatal mutation (i-mutation).

I-mutation (German linguists call it Umlaut) is a shift in the quality of a vowel so that it is pronounced with the tongue higher and farther forward than usual. Examples: framian – fremman – frame; dohtor – dehter – daughter.

We can still find the effects of i-mutation in Modern English. The vowels of such plurals as men (sg. man), lice (louse), teeth (tooth) and comparative adjective elder (old) demonstrate i-mutation; also i-mutation accounts for most of the verbs that change their vowels and add a past-tense ending (sell/sold, buy/bought, in which the present has i-mutation but the past does not).

System of consonants.

Most Old English consonants are pronounced as in Modern English, and most of the differences from Modern English are like the following:

Old English scribes wrote the letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth) interchangeably to represent [θ] and [ð], the sounds spelled th in Modern English. Examples: þing 'thing', brōðor 'brother'.

There are no silent consonants. Old English cniht (knight) actually begins with [k], hlāf (loaf) and hring (ring) begin with [h], gnæt (gnat) with [g], and wrīðan (writhe) with [w].

Rhotacism. Proto-Germanic [z] underwent a phonetic modification through the stage of [з] into [r] and thus became a sonorant, which ultimately merged with the [r]. freosan – freas – fruron – gefroren.

Geminantion. In all West Germanic languages, at an early stage of their independent history, most consonants were lengthened after a short vowel before [l]. This is doubling of consonants: fuljan – fyllan (fill).

Loss of consonants in some positions. Nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants; in the process the preceding vowel was probably nasalized and lengthened, fimf – fīf (five). It should be also mentioned the loss of consonants in unstressed final syllables. [j] was regularly dropped in suffixes after producing various changes in the root.

Generally, all letters in Middle English words were pronounced. (Silent letters in Modern English come from pronunciation shifts, which means that pronunciation is no longer closely reflected by the written form because of fixed spelling constraints imposed by the invention of dictionaries and printing.) Therefore 'knight' was pronounced [kniçt] (with a pronounced <k> and the <gh> as the <ch> in German 'Knecht'), not [naɪt] as in Modern English.

In earlier Middle English all written vowels were pronounced. By Chaucer's time, however, the final <e> had become silent in normal speech, but could optionally be pronounced in verse as the meter required (but was normally silent when the next word began with a vowel). Chaucer followed these conventions: -e is silent in 'kowthe' and 'Thanne', but is pronounced in 'straunge', 'ferne', 'ende', etc. (Presumably, the final <y> is partly or completely dropped in 'Caunterbury', so as to make the meter flow.)

An additional rule in speech, and often in poetry as well, was that a non-final unstressed <e> was dropped when adjacent to only a single consonant on either side if there was another short 'e' in an adjoining syllable. Thus, 'every' sounds like "evry" and 'palmeres' like "palmers".

The orthography in Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling was unphonetic and unstable; for example, the word acuity could be spelled either <acuity> or <acuitie>. Further, there were a number of features of spelling that have not been retained:

* The letter <S> had two distinct lowercase forms: <s> as today, and <ſ> (long s). The former was used at the end of a word, and the latter everywhere else, except that double-lowercase-S was variously written <ſſ> or <ſs>. This is similar to the alternation between normal (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.

* <u> and <v> were not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter. Typographically, <v> was used at the start of a word and <u> elsewhere; hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love).

* <i> and <j> were also not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter, hence "ioy" for "joy" and "iust" for "just".

* A silent <e> was often appended to words. The last consonant sometimes was doubled when adding this <e>; hence ſpeake, cowarde, manne (for man), runne (for run).

* The sound /ʌ/ was often written <o> (as in son); hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).

Nothing was standard, however. For example, "Julius Caesar" could be spelled "Julius Cæſar", "Ivlivs Cæſar", "Jvlivs Cæſar", or "Iulius Cæſar" and the word "he" could be found being spelled "he" or "hee" in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays.

10. The Old English writing.

Old English was first written in runes (futhorc) but shifted to a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. This was replaced by insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as Caroline) replaced the insular.

The Insular Hand.

The Insular Hand was the name of the writing system used in England, it was a medieval script system originally used in Ireland, then Great Britain, until spreading to continental Europe in centers under the influence of Celtic Christianity.

Works written in Insular scripts commonly use large initial letters surrounded by red ink dots. Letters following a large initial at the start of a paragraph or section often gradually diminish in size as they are written across a line or a page, until the normal size is reached, which is called a "diminuendo" effect.

Letters with ascenders (b, d, h, l, etc.) are written with triangular or wedge-shaped tops. The bows of letters such as b, d, p, and q are very wide. The script has many unique scribal abbreviations, along with many borrowings from Tironian notes (a system of abbreviated symbolic writing, had been invented by Cicero's scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro).

Old English alphabet used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet.

Old English writing was based on the phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. But, some letters indicated two or more sounds; there were some rules of reading.

Carolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the small literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, pagan and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule throughout the Carolingian Renaissance. The script developed into blackletter and became obsolete, though its revival in the Italian renaissance forms the basis of more recent scripts.

Chancery Standard.

Chancery Standard was a written form of English used by government bureaucracy and for other official purposes from the late 15th century. It is believed to have contributed in a significant way to the development of the English language as spoken and written today. Because of the differing dialects of English spoken and written across the country at the time, the government needed a clear and unambiguous form for use in its official documents. Chancery Standard was developed to meet this need.

The Chancery Standard (CS) was developed during the reign of King Henry V (1413 to 1422) and was largely based on the London and East Midland dialects, for those areas were the political and demographic centers of gravity. However, it used other dialect forms where they made meanings clearer; for example, the northern "they", "their" and "them" (derived from Scandinavian forms) were used rather than the London "hi/they", "hir" and "hem."

By the mid-15th century, CS was used for most official purposes except by the Church (which used Latin) and for some legal purposes (for which French and some Latin were used). It was disseminated around England by bureaucrats on official business, and slowly gained prestige.

CS provided a widely intelligible form of English for the first English printers, from the 1470s onwards.

The orthography in Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling was unphonetic and unstable; for example, the word acuity could be spelled either <acuity> or <acuitie>. Further, there were a number of features of spelling that have not been retained:

* The letter <S> had two distinct lowercase forms: <s> as today, and <ſ> (long s). The former was used at the end of a word, and the latter everywhere else, except that double-lowercase-S was variously written <ſſ> or <ſs>.[2] This is similar to the alternation between normal (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.

* <u> and <v> were not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter. Typographically, <v> was used at the start of a word and <u> elsewhere[3]; hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love).

* <i> and <j> were also not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter, hence "ioy" for "joy" and "iust" for "just".

* A silent <e> was often appended to words. The last consonant sometimes was doubled when adding this <e>; hence ſpeake, cowarde, manne (for man), runne (for run).

* The sound /ʌ/ was often written <o> (as in son); hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).[4]

Nothing was standard, however. For example, "Julius Caesar" could be spelled "Julius Cæſar", "Ivlivs Cæſar", "Jvlivs Cæſar", or "Iulius Cæſar" and the word "he" could be found being spelled "he" or "hee" in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays.

The writing system of M.E. The changes. William the Conqueror changed the whole system of authorities in the country. One of the changes was connected with the writing system. He had French born and took French people to write chronicles or in general any writing acts, because he didn't know the English language or English orthography.

French people made different changes to the writing system. The sound u: turned into ou in writing. Many English words were changed according to the French manner. Couch – ложа (куж). Hus – hous, ut – out. Sometimes instead of ou was ow: ku – kow (cow); dun – down. The sound u: sometimes is written by means of o: cumin – coman – comen; suna – sone – son; lufu – love.

Sound e: turned to ie: th(crossed d)eof – thief; feld – field.

Sound ü turned to u. Crossed d – to th. F – to v between vowels.

C – to ch. First this rule was only for French words, but then is penetrated to such English as tīchen. This affricate has a sounded version, as in French courage (кураж).

The French orthography made one-to-one relationships in the spelling much messier.

The sound [ш] was ended by sh or sch: shep – schep; x – h, gh: light (лихьт), right, might.

Letter с for k in many cases was replaced by the letter k: drincan – drinken; cyning – king; cnawan – knowen.

The O.E. sequences hm, hl, ha cleapan (clean), knutu, hraðor (soon) lost intial h. Sometimes the combination hw would become wh but still hw was used throughout M.E. period. Even today in some dialect pronounce hwat instead of what. Historically more correct form was hwat. When some dialects speaking hwat seem somewhat old. Sometimes hw was also written as qu or guh (близко к hw) that was in Northern dialects. O. E. voiced velar fricative q after l or r became w.

Ex. O. E. morgen became morewhen (tomorrow).

Between a consonant practically sot and a back vowel w was lost.

Ex. Wha (two) became to be pronounced as twa then transformed to two.

Since O.E. times it had been lost in nearly negative constructions regardless of what vowel followed.

Ex. Ne while=> nile, ne what=> not, ne whas=> nas, ne whiste=> niste.

A number of spelling with silent w continued to occur in M. E. ex. Two, sword, answer. In unstressed syllables ch was lost in late M. E. and the most significant. ex. To this is the ex. Of suffix –ly which used to be –lich. Th закрепилась, неударная гласная стала исчезать. Lich- body.

In M.E. lichhouse, lichgate Слово грамматикализировалось (Г. –слово теряет понятийное значение и превращается в грамматийный маркер какого-либо явления). Quiet-quietly граммат. Маркер наречия.

The form E represents a restressing of the I which alone remained in ich который потов превратился в ic after this loss ch исчезает, остается i вследствие великого сдвига гласных. Ic=> ich => I долгое I не может быть безударным, оно стало коротким, затем ch исчезло.

Before a consonant sometimes with syncope of an unstressed vowel in few words: haved->had ; hlᾱford(lord) выпадение звуков и букв. ; hǣfst->hast ǣ в M.E. исчез полностью.

The O.E. ge became I or Y as in iwiss (certain) gewiss-> iwiss. Final inflexion w was gradually lost as was also the final n of the unstressed possessive pronunciation min, win and of the indefinite article before a consonant

Ex. mῙn fǣder->my father.

The loss of n is indirectly responsible for the formation of such words as nickname. In O.E. a nickname was ackename which meant 'an also name'. An ackename where and of indefinite article has attached to itself to a following words. An ackename-> neckname->nickname.

Beginning with v vil, virtue, visit or z zil, zodiac that is why this letters were borrowed with new words. With eventual loss of final e the sounds v, z, Ɵ came to occur also in final position as in give, loose, bath. Редукция последнего звука е, он исчезал как гласный, озвучивал звуки, предметы.

M. E. vowels.

The O. E. long sounds ūōēī remain unchanged although their spelling altered. Fēt=>feet исчез звук ǣ и гласная hūs=>house. The loss of schwa in final syllable. Schwach /нем. слабый/ слабый редуцированный звук. В конце слов в древнем английском была слабая ē, в средние века исчезло окончание и сильное окончание в том числе.

Hēlpan schwa ē меняла произношение слов, с исчезновением склонений она слабеет, затем исчезает. An->en->e->Ə подзвук –>none. Окончания уходят в М. Е. The level final e was gradually lost in the course of 13^th century in Midlands and a little later in the South. But many words continued to be spelled with e even when it was no longer pronounced. Because a word like ride (o. e. ridan) was for a time pronounced with or without final e, other words like bride acquired by analogy and optional inorganic e in both spelling and pronunciation. o. e. brud->m. e. bride->mn. e. braid.

Changes in E.M.E.

Vowels.

Short æ hasn’t changed except occasionally before the nasal sound y as in such words as string which came from M. E. strange, wenge. Next phonetic event was connected with weak r which during M. E. time was dropped out in unstressed position at the end of a word. The scholars in this process started in the North of the country where Scotland is and the process was finished in 15^th century and this had a very serious impact on the morph y noun, adjectives, verbs. This sound disappeared even in the cases when this sound preceded a consonant for ex. In the form of pl. nouns, tables, shines, lived.

o. e. pronunciation [lovæd], [digæd]

hates->hats, tables звук е исчезает

learned – образованный

But this sound was preserved and turned into [i] afterwards in such combinations as says, chairs[ə], ted, bed, houses, watches, judges, wanted, leaded.

[ə] preserved ->[i] in some adjectives: learned[lənid], wicked [wikid], ragged, crocked, rugged, blessed[i].

The spelling, this process had very serious outcomes because the letter e was preserved in writing in the cases where root vowel was long and because of this today we have mute e and in acquired a grammatical meaning usually it shows that the preceding vowel long, it is pronounced as in ‘abc’. This new rule of putting the mute e at the end of a word lead to some other results and namely there were words whcich didn’t have finishing e, by analogy words obey main rule. This word also acquired mute e.

Ex. House doesn’t need any mute e, because it doesn’t influence the pronounciation. But stone having acquired the mute e changed to [stoun] artificial change, same route when the sound [ə] dropped out words as morwe(morning), sorwe (огорчение), norwe (narrow) early Mn. E. words appeared. [morv][sorv][narv] which is 16 th century turned into the diphthong[ou] and today this words changed into morrow, sorrow, narrow

we->w->ow

Some vowels in intermediate syllable were dropped out during early Mn. E.

Ex. Shapiter->chapter, courtesy->curtesy\curtsy-реверанс ; fantasie->fansy\fantasy; medicine[medsin] лекарство \[medisin] медицина ; colonel [cənəl] полковник, business [bizines] early Mn. E. [biznes] дело; [bizines] занятость; paralysie-> palsy[polzi] ; damisel->damsel девица ; dirige ->dirge [ә]; coppise->copse чаща; rr->ar.

This process was started in 14 century and was finished at the end of 15^th century begin 16^th century

In majority of cases spelling fix phonetic phenomena a new rule of spelling emerged. In some cases this combination turned into -ear, in some cases -ear was preserved. ferre->far; sterre->star; were->war; terr->tar деготь ; herte->heart; ferm->farm; hervest->harvest; dweref->dwarf

In some cases the combination –er was preserved, wasn’t changed. Certain, servant, universal, lear, merchant, person/u|сохранилось и перешло/ parson священник. There are some cases when –er turned into –r in pronunciation, but preserved its spelling –er ex. clerk[kl^:k] ; Derby[d^bi]. University in colloquial speech :[v^siti], servant[savan], kerchief[k^chn]

au->o In the 16^th century the combination au whatever the origin changed into rounded [o:] and the spelling au, aw was preserved

ex. cause[kauze] ; haute[o:te] ; paw[p^u] ; down[d^un] заря

In the words where the au combination emerged from a with the following e the letter a was preserved but with [o] pronunciation : talk, call. hall, walk

Other cases : when we deal with lf, lb the pronunciation becomes different, it is not [o] becomes [o] : calf, behalf half, to half. It is not the end of the day. еще не вечер

Sometimes the al combination is pronounced as av: swealth, Ralf, salf спасать груз

Morphologocal complicated situation occurres when diphthong au preceeds an+consonant, am+consonant. In this case we deal woth 3 possibilities. We either pronounce [e:][^:][o:]

[e:] : cant лицемерие : scant скудный ;sample ; ansister

[^:] : enchant;advantage; branch, charms

[o:] : haunt, gaunt

перед [dg] как правило e: change, danger In some words the sound rounded [o:] didn’t develop into [ou] and it became short :cloth

Ранненовоанглийский период. In the 17^th century the short [u] becomes [^] ex. but[but]->[b^t]; [cut]->[cΛt] ; [hunt]->[hΛnt] ; [blunt]->[blΛnt]; [stump]->[stΛmp]; [sun]->[sΛn]

Sometimes the sound [u] was given by the letter o come звучало [cum], some[sum], love[luv] из O. E. lufian ; dove[duv] son[sun]->[sΛn] won[wun] ->[wΛn]

The sound [Λ] also was found in the long [o:] in M. E. . This o was transfered changed into [u] again[u] changed into [Λ].

[o:]->[u:]->[u]->[Λ]

ex. mouth was [mo:nθ] than it became [mu:nθ] than [munθ] and then [mΛnθ].

The same sound Λ could be given with the help of oo: spelling ex. blood[blo:d]->[blu:d]->[blud]->[blΛd]; [flo:d-]>[flu:d]->[flud]->[flΛd]

One more spelling is connected with ou-spelling. rough[rΛf] This word in M. E. time was pronounced as [rux] ->[ruf]->[rΛf]

enough o. e. [genux]->m. e. [enux]->[inuf]->[inΛf] tough[tΛf] [tux]->[tug]->[tΛf]

Same :young, couple, double, trouble

The short u was left unchanged ex. but, bully, pulpit, pudding, ful, wolf

Nevertheless despite of labial consonant which precedes the short vowel there are some words which change their vowel sounds according to the rule of long sounds becoming Λ-sounds. Bulb, puplse, pulmanary, plum, buzon, cusion

! переход в Λ означает появление новой для языка фонемы

Согласные\ Consonants.

The consonant system was changed very seriously during this time as well. And we should discuss

-the loss of sound l before k, m, f

-the appearance and loss of the sound w

-the development of the sound x

-the change in voiceless consonants

-the loss of consonants in consonant groups

The sound [l] was lost during early modern English period before such consonants as k, m, f, v: talk, walk, chalk, yolk, folk, calf, half, palm, calves, halves

When l is before v in words of Latin origin the pronunciation of the sound l is preserved as in resolve, desolve.

The sound [l] disappeared in such words as should, would, where l preceeds consonant d and the reason for disappearance lies in the way people use should, would in unstressed position. When this process took place some words’d be pronounced with or without l. This made people uncut whether to write l or not. This brought to the practice of writing l in some French words borrowed from Latin. Corresponding latin words ahd l.

gaute- не имел буквы, звука l, попало таким. In early mn. e. period решили, что в лат. falta стали использовать fault. Многие слова стали писаться с l по латинскому образцу. \Шампунь-индийское слово, означает "взбивать подушку"\Вопреки историческому развитию получили l : fault, falkon сокол, realm

The appearance and loss of w.

The most famous case of such appearance of the sound [w] we can see in numeral one [Λn] in o. e. ; in m. e. it was [o:n] deep o. Then in early mn. e. it becomes [wΛn] and even it was in written form wone which proves that people began pronouncing [w] before one. So the chain of development can be shown like this: [o:n]->[wo:n]->[wu:n]->[wun}->[wΛn]

The scholars have different opinions on the reasons of the sound [w] appearance the opposite process disappearance can be shown in such words in unstressed position :answer[Λnsә]], conquerer[konkәrә], liqueur вместо kw-k : southwark [sΛθәk] ; Berwick[bәrәk];Chiswick[tſizik] ; Greenwich[fri:nidg] ; Norwich[no:ridg]

Changes in early Mn. E.

Next phonetic feature is connected with voicing of such voiceless consonants as [s]-[z], [ks]-[kz], [f]-[v], [tζ]-[dʒ]

dessert, exhibition[ekzibit], knowledge [tζ]-[dʒ]early Mn. E. , in M. E. [nole tζe]

patreche->partridge /куропатка/, Norwiche->Norwich

Scientists assume that during this period the voicinh accurred in such words as there, then, this, that, though.

The omission of consonants in groups of consonants

During this period in the words containing mb group like bomb, lamb, climb, dumb the sound [b] became silent, but graphically retained; in the words containing mn combination the last part becomes silent: damn, condemn. In nouns containing lm combination n becomes silent. miln /мельница/mill

In combination containing 3 consonants the middle consonants becomes dropped out.

ex. stl->sl castle: stn->sn fastern: ftn->fn often

Early Mn. E. disappears ftn[ ofn] end of XX, beginning of XXI appear ftn{oftn]

ex. ktl->kl exactly [ækzatli]

mcl->ml muscle [mΛsl]

In combination with … d in the middle drops out Wednesday[vinsdi], handkerchief[hænkertζif] handsome[hænsΛm]

Consonant d becomes th usually in words of Germanic origin such as fader->father, modor->mother. the joining of consonants such merges would take place in the cases when a vowel preceding groups of consonants are stressed.

ex. the combination of sj becomes sh[ζ] firmer, stronger-Asia, Russia, plusion, fusia.

11. The vocabulary.

Old English had a purely Germanic vocabulary and few foreign borrowings. There were two main layers of words in the language: large number of native words and some borrowings.

The layer of the native words consist of common Indo-European words – the oldest part of the vocabulary, denoting the immediate surrounding of the human; common Germanic words, denoting aspects of the everyday life; and specifically Old English words, which do not appear in the other languages.

The layer of the borrowed words consists of the Celtic and Latin borrowings. Very few Celtic-loans denote mainly place-names. The Latin language had a notable influence on the Old English alphabet, writing and literature and also on the vocabulary. There three sources of the Latin words in Old English: from the Romanized Celts, from the continental West Germanic tribes and due to the introduction of Christianity.

Middle English: There were two layers of lexical borrowings: the Scandinavian element in the North-Eastern area and the French element in the speech of townspeople in the South-East.

The written records of the late 14th and 15th c. show the growth of the English vocabulary and the increasing proportion of French loan-words in English.

Early Modern English: The new, bourgeois society and the wider horizons of man's activity caused the growth of the vocab­ulary.

In the 19th and 20th c. the English vocabulary has grown due to the rapid progress of technology, science and culture and other changes in all spheres of man's activities.

Norman French in the Kingdom of England.

The transfer of power in 1066 resulted in only limited culture shock. But the top levels of society of English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies were removed. Their replacements spoke Norman French and used Latin for administrative purposes. Thus Norman French came into use as a language of polite discourse and literature, and this fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of the early period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. Although Old English was by no means as standardised as modern English, its written forms were less subject to broad dialect variations than was post-Conquest English. Even now, after nearly a thousand years, the Norman influence on the English language is still apparent, though it did not begin to affect Middle English until somewhat later.

Consider these pairs of Modern English words. The first of each pair is derived from Old English and the second is of Anglo-Norman origin: pig/pork, chicken/poultry, calf/veal, cow/beef, wood/forest, sheep/mutton, house/mansion, worthy/honourable, bold/courageous, freedom/liberty.

The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government which derive from Anglo-Norman: court, judge, jury, appeal, parliament. Also prevalent in Modern English are terms relating to the chivalric cultures which arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism and crusading. Early on, this vocabulary of refined behaviour began to work its way into English: the word 'debonaire' appears in the 1137 Peterborough Chronicle; so too does 'castel' (castle), another import of the Normans, who made their mark on the English language as much as on the territory of England itself.

This period of trilingual activity developed much of the flexible triplicate synonymy of modern English. For instance, English has three words meaning roughly "of or relating to a king":

* kingly from Old English,

* royal from French and

* regal from Latin.

Likewise, Norman and — later — French influences led to some interesting word pairs in English, such as the following, which both mean "someone who defends":

* Warden from Norman, and

* Guardian from French (itself of Germanic origin).

E.M.E. Vocabulary.

Although the language is otherwise very similar to that current, there have in time developed a few "false friends" within the English language itself, rendering difficulty in understanding even the still-prestigious phrasing of the King James Bible. The most glaring is that the passage "Suffer the little children" meant, "Permit..." (this usage of the word "suffer" is still sometimes used in some dialects in formal circumstances; also where we get the word "suffrage" from).

Development from Middle English

The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of vocabulary or pronunciation changing: it was the beginning of a new era in the history of English.

An era of linguistic change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardized language with a richer lexicon and an established (and lasting) literature. Shakespeare's plays are familiar and comprehensible today, 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average reader.

12. Noun.

O.E. The Noun.

The Old English noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. The noun had three genders: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter and four cases: Nom., Gen., Dat. and Acc.. There are two declensions of the noun: strong and weak.

Strong Noun Declension
Case	masc. engel 'angel'		neut. scip 'ship'		fem. sorg 'sorrow'
	Sg.	Pl.	Sg.	Pl.	Sg.	Pl.
Nom.	engel	englas	scip	scipu	sorg	sorga
Gen.	engles	engla	scipes	scipa	sorge	sorga
Dat.	engle	englum	scipe	scipum	sorge	sorgum
Acc.	engel	englas	scip	scipu	sorge	sorga/sorge

Weak Noun Declension
Case	masc. nama 'name'		neut.mēage 'eye'		fem. tunge 'tongue'
	sg.	pl.	sg.	pl.	sg.	pl.
Nom.	nama	naman	ēage	ēagan	tunge	tungan
Gen.	naman	namena	ēagan	ēagena	tungan	tungena
Dat.	naman	namum	ēagan	ēagum	tungan	tungum
Acc.	naman	naman	ēage	ēagan	tungan	tungan

The athematic nouns are those that sometimes have i-mutation of the root vowel instead of an ending; they are the ancestors of Modern English nouns like man/men and tooth/teeth.

		masc.	short fem.	long fem.
sg.	nom.	mann 'man'	hnutu 'nut'	bōc 'book'
	gen.	mannes	hnyte	bēċ
	dat.	menn	hnyte	bēċ
	acc.	mann	hnutu	bōc
pl.	nom.	menn	hnyte	bēċ
	gen.	manna	hnuta	bōca
	dat.	mannum	hnutum	bōcum
	acc.	menn	hnyte	bēċ

Irregular strong nouns – a noun whose main vowel is short 'æ' and ends with a single consonant change the vowel to 'a' in the pl.:

Dæg 'day' m.
Case	Sg.	Pl.
Nom.	dæg	dagas
Gen.	dæges	daga
Dat.	dæge	dagum
Acc.	dæg	dagas

Examples:

ðæt flod weox ðā and ābær upp ðone arc – subject, active agent (that flood increased then and bore up the arc);

wearð ðā ælc ðing cwices ādrenct – subject, recipient of an action or state (was then everything alive drowned);

The analysis of the morphological structure of the language showed that Old English was a highly inflected synthetic language as compared with Modern English. Old English uses an extensive case, number, gender and person system. The Modern English language is an analytic language with very few inflections, which are ancestors of synthetic forms of Old English.

Inflections in the Old English language were necessary, because the word order was not fixed and was formed more or less free. Inflections helped to express one's mind correctly, unambiguous and without misunderstandings.

M.E.

Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English. The early Modern English words engel (angel) and name (name) demonstrate the two patterns:

	strong		weak
	singular	plural	singular	plural
nom/acc	engel	engles	name	namen
gen	engles*	engle(ne)**	name	namen
dat	engle	engle(s)	name	namen

The strong -(e)s plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak -(e)n form is now rare in the standard language, used only in oxen, children and brethren; and it is slightly less rare in some dialects, used in eyen for eyes, shoon for shoes, hosen for hose(s) and kine for cows.

Reduction of inflexions.

As a result of merging of unstressed vowels into a single sound the number of distinctive inflectional endings in English was drastically reduced. Change of the greatest importance such as the loss of an indication of gender distinguishing mechanism.

The inflexion of nouns. The structure of English was profoundly affected by the leveling of unstressed vowels. The O. E. feminine Nom. Sing. Form in –u fell together with the Nom. plur. form in -a. Denu, deтa became in M. E. dene (луга) It was similar with neuter Nom. Accus. plurals in -u, and gen. plur. in –a. fell together to obtain the same e-ending.

The –es-ending reduced in M. E. but in some cases this –es became the form of plurality in all forms.

Окончательно G. es стал маркером множественности существительных, язык сам выдвинул новое окончание.

A few –esless Genitives. Ex. Fem. nouns or words, denoting family relationship ending in-r remained throughout the period and survived into early M. E. along with a few modern nouns from the O. E. n-stems. Sometimes the Genitive –s was left of a noun that ended in –s or that was followed by a word beginning with the letter –s.

Ex. For pity sake which indicates the same pronunciation in conversational speech as for pity's sake. The few nouns that didn’t conform to the pattern of forming the plural by suffix –es nevertheless followed the pattern of using the Nom. -Accus. Plural as a general plural form. They include those nouns that lack –s plural today:

Ex. Oxen, deer, feet. They were also in M. E. a number of survivals of weak declension plurals in –en that have subsequently disappeared. Ex. ogen (uses), shuen (shoes), fuen (foot);

A few long-syllabic words that had been neuters n O. E. occurred with unchanged plural forms especially animal names sheep, swine, deer, horse. The most injuring in this alternative plurals are those with mutation: men, feet, gees, teeth, lies, mice.

During the M. E. period practically all nouns were reduced to 2 forms. One is without –s, used as general non-Genitive singular form and the other one is with the ending –s which was both used a Genitive sing. And general plural form. The O.E. language thus acquired a device for indicating plurality without consideration of case namely the –s ending which in the strong masc. declension. It also lost all traces of any case distinctions except for the Genitives which became identical in form with the plural form. English had come to depend on particles especially mainly prepositions and conjunctions as well as word order to express grammatical relations that had previously been expressed by inflexion.

In O.E. the reduction of declensions had already begun. Many i-stems and u-stems were influenced by the a-stems. Some vacillation (колебание) was already observable within the a-declension and u-declension. So the O. E. noun system was ready for the change in it’s morphology system when the Scandinavian tribes came to the territories with the local people this contact shattered the system of declension again became in the course of communication people would omit endings rather than roots. Because Scandinavians and Saxons belong to one language family. They’d understand each other mostly in endings. 2nd shok came with the arrival of the Normans.

In the 11-13 cent. these tendencies added first by Scandinavian influence then by Norman and developed more intensively. Weakening of inflexions is connected with leveling of endings. This process is accompanied by the analogical formation. Reduction of the morphological system develops more quickly in the northern dialect while is followed by the midland as we’ve pointed considerable part was to O.E. in Scandinavian. The root was identical, endings were different. Under such circumstances the root eats the element that would help mutual intercourse while the endings would be an obstacle to eat. So it was perfectly all-right and natural that both speaker and listener would concentrate on root, and neglect the ending. This state of affairs promoted weakening and subsequent loss of endings.

Ex. O. E. people would say sunu, Scandinavians would say sunr, sun was identical for both –u, -r became to be obstacle. They got rid of both endings attached 1 small not very obvious sound schwa.

In the northern and midland dialects of grammatical gender was already lost in 11, 12 cent. The distinction between strong and weak deletions was lost as well. Typical O. E. weak declension with letter n at the end disappeared so when weak declension lost, most characteristic feature was no use to differ strong, weak became identical.

These changes began in 12^th century, only 2 endings proved stable: -es of Gen. sing. masc. and neuter a-stems as well as –as of Nom. , Accus. , plural masc. r-stems. The Gen. pl. also took –es. In the course of 12 cent. The es-ending spread to all nouns with very few exceptions. This type of loss of endings is observed in all other parts of speech.

E.M.E. Changes in grammar. Noun.

Noun. Plurality of nouns. In ME there was a competition between different ways of expressing plurality: en – s – es. Eyen, foen. Strong ME forms began to weaken and in modern E the s-form eyes replaced the older form. But even in EME at the end of the 16th century we still find forms like eyen.

Plural forms of nouns with final f, th alteration of the voiceless fricative with its voiced counterpart (v) was eliminated: roof – roofs, death – deaths. But there are wife – wives, half – halves. In some cases two variants are possible: scarf – scarfs – scarves. The word staff split into two words: staff and stave. Alteration f-v extends in modern E: handkerchief – chiefs – chieves.

A few nouns have preserved their plural forms of the weak declension or mutation: ox – oxen; child – children, mouse – mice; foot – feet; goose – gees; tooth – teeth.

These words remind us about ancient linguistic processes, that had been happening in the language system.

There is a group of nouns, which do not accept the –s ending at all: sheep, deer, swine, fruit, fish, summon, trout, cord.

Some isolated plurals have also been preserved in a few phrases, that merged together into compound words: fortnight, seningt. Mile – miles – idiom.

The two case system, which was typical of Chaucer's English, emerged in modern E. Preposition of – analytical form of the Genitive case. The Genitive case became restricted to words denoting living beings and some time notions. Words denoting inanimate objects and abstract ideas were used with preposition of to render the meaning of the Genitive case.

In modern E time we can see the start of the apostrophe use to denote the Genitive case.

13. Verb.

O.E. The verb.

The verb-predicate agreed with the subject of the sentence in two grammatical categories: number and person. Its specifically ver­bal categories were mood and tense.

The category of Person was made up of three forms: the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd. The category of Mood was constituted by the Indicative, Impera­tive and Subjunctive. The category of Tense consisted of two categorical forms, Pres. and Past, The tenses were formally distinguished by all the verbs in the Ind. and Subj. Moods.

Verbs of the weak class make the past tense by adding a dental consonant (-d- or -t-) as a suffix. Strong verbs do not add a dental suffix to make its past tense, but rather change the vowel of its root syllable. The root vowels of strong verbs undergo i-mutation in the present second- and third-person sg. indicative.

Conjugation of Verbs in Old English

	Strong		Weak
Infinitive	findan	beran	deman	locian
	find	bear	deem	took
Present tense
Indicative
Sg. 1st	finde	bere	derae	locie
2nd	fintst	birst	demst	locast
3rd	fint	birð	demð	locað
Pl.	findap	berað	demað	lociað
Subjunctive
Sg.	finde	bere	deme	locie
Pl.	finden	beren	demen	locien
Imperative
Sg.	find	ber	dem	loca
Pl.	findap	berað	demað	lociað
Participle I	findende	berende	demende	lociende
Past tense
Indicative
Sg. 1st	fond	basr	demde	locode
2nd	funde	bærе	demdest	locodest
3rd	fond	baer	demde	locode
Pl.	fundon	beron	deradon	locodon
Subjunctive
Sg.	funde	bærе	demde	locode
Pl.	funden	bærеn	deraden	locoden
Participle II	gefundon	gebоrеn	gedemed	gelocod

Future tense. There are just two tenses, past and present. Old English has various strategies for referring to future time: it uses auxiliary verbs (including willan), explicit references to time (e.g. tōmorgen 'tomorrow'), and the simple present, relying on context to express futurity.

Perfect. Old English has no perfect and pluperfect. It can use forms of the verb habban 'to have' with the past participle, as Modern English does (hæfð onfunden 'has discovered', hæfde onfunden 'had discovered'), it can use the adverb ǣr 'before' with the simple past (ǣr onfand 'had discovered'), or it can use the past tense alone, in which case you must infer the correct translation from the context.

Preterite-present verbs. Most of the Old English auxiliaries belong to a class of verbs called preterite-presents, whose present tenses look like strong past tenses and whose past tenses look like weak pasts.

Preterite-present verbs
'know how to'	'be able to'	'be obliged to'	'know'
infinitive
cunnan	magan	sculan	witan
present indicative
iċ cann	iċ mæġ	iċ sceal	iċ wāt
ðū canst	ðū meaht	ðū scealt	ðū wāst
hēo cann	hē mæġ	hit sceal	hēo wāt
wē cunnon	ġē magon	hīe sculon	ġē witon
past indicative
iċ cūðe	hēo meahte, mihte	hit sceolde	hē wisse, wiste
ðū cūðest	ðū meahtest, mihtest	ðū sceoldest	ðū wistest
wē cūðon	ġē meahton, mihton	hīe sceoldon	wē wisson, wiston
present subjunctive
iċ cunne	hēo mæġe	ðū scyle, scule	hē wite
past subjunctive
iċ cūðe	hēo meahte, mihte	ðū sceolde	hē wisse, wiste
participles
---	---	---	witende
cunnen, cūð	---	---	witen

Anomalous verbs. Additionally there is a further group of four verbs which are anomalous, the verbs will, do, go and be.

		'do'		'go'		'will'
infinitive		dōn		gān		willan
present indicative		iċ dō		iċ gā		iċ wille
		þū dēst		þū gǣst		þū wilt
		hēo dēð		hit gǣð		hē wile
		wē dōð		ġē gāð		hīe willað
past indicative		iċ dyde		hit ēode		hēo wolde
		þū dydest		þū ēodest		þū woldest
		wē dydon		ġē ēodon		hīe woldon
present subjunctive		iċ dō		hēo gā		þū wille
past subjunctive		iċ dyde		hēo ēode		þū wolde
participles		dōnde		---		willende
		ġedōn		ġegān		---
infinitives	bēon, wesan 'to be'
present indicative	iċ eom		iċ bēo		past indicative		iċ wæs
	ðū eart		ðū bist				ðū wǣre
	hē is		hēo bið				hit wæs
	hīe sind, sindon		wē bēoð				ġē wǣron
present subjunctive	hē sīe		ðū bēo		past subjunctive		iċ wǣre
	wē sīen		ġē bēon				hīe wǣren
imperative	bēo, wes
	bēoð, wesað
participles	bēonde, wesende
	ġebēon

The forms are an amalgam of three different verbs: one that accounts for the present forms in the first column, one that accounts for all the b- forms, and one that accounts for all the w- forms.

Classes of weak verbs. Germanic weak verbs fall into three classes: the first two of these are well represented in Old English and the third has almost disappeared.

Class 1: sceððan – sceðede – sceðedon – gesceðed (i-mutation, germination)

Class 2: lufian – lufode – lufodon – gelufod

Class 3: libban – lifde – leofode – ġelifd

Classes of strong verbs. There are seven classes.

Class 1: drīfan – drāf – drifon – gedrifen

Class 2: frēosan – freas – fruron – gefroren (rhotacism)

Class 3: findan – fand – fundon – gefunden

Class 4: beran – bær – bāron – geboren

Class 5: sprecan – sprec – spreacon – gesprecen

Class 6: faran – fōr – fōron – gefaren

Class 7: cnāwan – cneow – cneowon – gecnāwen

M.E.

Verbs.

As a general rule, the first person singular of verbs in the present tense ends in -e ("ich here" - "I hear"), the second person in -(e)st ("þou spekest" - "thou speakest"), and the third person in -eþ ("he comeþ" - "he cometh/he comes"). (þ is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think").

In the past tense, weak verbs are formed by adding an -ed(e), -d(e) or -t(e) ending. These, without their personal endings, also form past participles, together with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y- and sometimes bi-.

Strong verbs, by contrast, form their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g. binden -> bound), as in Modern English.

Verb

Verb continued to conform to the germ. division into strong, weak as they still do today. Although the vowels of ending were leveled, the gradational distinctions expressed in the root vowel of strong verbs were fully preserved. The tendency to use exclusively one or the other of the preterite vowel grades however had begun though there was little consistency. The vowel of the older plural might be used in the sing. Or vice versa. The older distinction as for ex. I sang, we sungen was more lightly to be retained in the midlands and the south than in the north. In strong verbs the vowel gradation was ī-> ō->-i-I n : rīde(n) -> rōd-> ridēn->(i)riden

In O. E. : rīdan->rad->ridon->geriden

группа	infinitive	Pretorate sing.	Preterite plur.	Past participle
1	rīden	rod	riden	(i)riden
2	crepen	crēp	crupen	crōpen
3	fīnden	found	founden	founden
4	tēren	tar	tēren	tōren
5	mēten	mat	mēten	mēten
6	fāren	fōr	fōren	fāren
7	fallen	fēl	fēllen	fallen

Although the 7 strong verb pattern continued in M. E. they ‘re far more weak verbs than strong ones.

Если внутренний мех-м языка слабее внешнего воздействия, то язык умирает, если внутренний мех-м сильнее(когда например люди компактно живут) то отбрасывается все лишнее. –ed – мех-м стандартизации, усиления языка. Стандартный русский язык называется литературным.

Consequently the weak –ed-ending for the preterite and past participle came to be used with many originally strong verb thus for a time verbs could be conjugated in either way. Speakers of M. E. were able to use either strong or weak forms for such verbs as:

Both weak and strong:

verb	Verb in M. E.	strong	weak
glide	gliden	glōdor	glided
creep	crēpen	crēp	creped
help	helpen	halp	gelped
	mēten	mat	mēted
	wēpen	wēp	wēped

Ultimately the strong forms were lost altogether in these or many other verbs. A few verbs however continued both forms even today.

Ex. Hang-hung-hanged ; weave-wove-weaved

Personal ending.

The O.E. endings –ast and -að were used for the 2^nd and 3^rd persons of the present indicative of those weak verbs that had infinitives, ending in –ian, not reseeded by the letter –r. lufian – lufast – lufað.

During the M.E. period the endings began to reduce but still this is the period of leveling the language. It preserved some of the endings ex. in O. E. –ast, -að were used for 2^nd, present of predicative weak verbs had –ian not preceded by constr. r When they fell together with endings –ist, -ið of verbs with infinitive in –an a historical conjunction between 2 weak conjunctions was broken down. если одинаковое окончание, разницы между глаголами нет.

When the O. E. present indicative plural ending – að likewise became –eth the distinction between plural and 3^rd person singular disappeared. O.E. bereth and berath both and up as bereth a single form that continued to do double duty in the south of England. The midland dialects however substituted the –en of the plural. Subjunctive for the plural -eth and thereby achieved a formal distinction in number of the expense of one in mood. In the Northumbrian dialect of O. E. the ending –as was a frequent ending of present indicative plural. It developed into –es which is characteristic of the Northern dialect of M. E. So for ex. we bear, you bear, they bear was we bears, they beares in M. E e beares. The same ending is in Northern characteristic in present indicative in 3^rd person singular and it was in Mn. E. times turned into –eth. In M. E. times it had spread from the North into the Midland dialects which show both –es, -eth –endings in the 3^rd person and –es\-en in the plural.

ex. finden (pres. sing.): I find, You findest, He\she findeth (finds).

finden (pres. plur.): I finden (finds) finde (s\n).

Participle.

The ending of the Present Participle varied from dialect to dialect. In the north the present particle had the ending –and\-ande. In midlands –ende\ing\-inge. In the South –inde\-inge. The –ing –ending which has prevailed in Mn. E. came from the old verbal noun ending –ung ex. leornung(verbal noun)\knowledge\.

Past Participles might or might not have the initial inflexion –e(-i) instead of the O. E. prefix –ge.

The prefix was lost in many parts of England including the East Midland but frequently occurred in the speech of London as it is shown in the works by father of literature Jeffrey Chauser.

Oкончания унифицируются в –ing который превалировал в Midlands вычленение общего языка из диалектов (lingva franca) язык межнационального общения.

During M. E. period many other changes occurred to the language. ex. the perfect tense became more formulated, Future tense appeared, Continuous tenses appeared, the passive voice became more frequent.

Future tense.

Actually the F.T. was absent from O.E. At the end of this period occasionally verbs as shall and will were used in the cases when future action was in need to be described what happened was that verbs shall, will became auxiliary verbs loosing model shades of meaning. This process usually called grammaticalization. Sometimes they preserve somehow their modal meaning not only in M. E. in special occasions even in Mn.E.

ex. I shall go –ordinary meaning F. T. ; The company shall pay – means obligation \юридическое долженствование\

Present Perfect.

He is gone (старая форма перфекта). В немецком языке два варианта перфекта, в английском языке have+ PII, диалект. to be+PII.

Continuous forms.

M. E. period –начало появления формы been+PI. У Чёсера встречается 6 раз.

A new category of words began to emerge which appear by means of the preposition on and a noun or participle. Then on becomes reduced to are and we have such examples in M. E. time.

ex. are slepe (asleep); are alieve (aflown); are wape ; are fered (afraid);

The language despite of being very seriously influenced by the French language it preserved the majority of its Germanic features and became enriched and by many linguistic features taken from other contract languages.

ex. taken (take) replaced the O. E. verb nahmen and all the Scandinavian borrowed verbs were conjugated like the other weak verbs. To the group of such verbs borrowed from Scandinavian dialects belong such verbs as callen (call) wanten, gessen, dwellen, flingen.

Scandinavian linguistic features influenced the conjugation of some native English verbs.

ex. run [run] began to be conjugated according to Scandinavian conjugation in O. E. of this verb was complicated.

iernan (run), arn, urnon roots same in scandinavian, English.

метатеза (гласные и согласные меняются местами) run=urnon, arn, в сканд языке был глагол rena –raun-runon по влиянием сканд. языка происходит метатеза, глагол начинает спрягаться по сканд. типу.

French verbs.

Usually conjugated according to the weak verbs as well ex. persen (пронзить pear); engendren (порождать) punishen (punish); catchen; spoilen

Отдельные глаголы спрягаются по слабому склонению, редко по сильному. Во время стандартизации сильных глаголов стало меньше. Новые заимствования примыкают к слабым, правильным глаголам.

E.M.E. Verbs.

Verb conjugations in the "thou" form (second person informal singular) end in -(e)st (e.g. "thou takest"). In Early Modern English, third person singular conjugations end in -(e)th instead of -s (e.g. "he taketh"). Both the second person informal singular and third person singular lost their endings in the subjunctive, which uses the bare stem of the verb.

The perfect tenses of the verbs had not yet been standardized to all use the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", as in this example from the King James Bible, "But which of you ... will say unto him ... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules that were followed as to which verbs took which auxiliaries were similar to those still used in German and French.

Verb. New forms had its development: continuous forms, perfect forms.

The ending –e was lost in the 1st p. sg., pl., present indicative and in infinitive.

The 2d p. form –st connected with thou was gradually ousted during the 17th century.

In the 3d p. sg. the ending –eth was gradually replaced by the ending –s, which in ME had been a characteristic feature of the northern dialect. This replacement took place between the 15th and the 17th century,

The four basic form system of strong verbs in OE and ME changed into three form system in modern E.

A number of short verbs became weak. And some strong verbs acquired a weak form or retain strong form.

The period of lost endings: majority of endings disappeared. Only endings which still were seen and heard around archaic forms –en ending for plural and main trend of regularization. Language becomes more regularized. –en ending of some participle forms which began to be replaced to more standard form –ed. In some cases we see retained prefix y- [ju] which came from OE ge-. (Sh: y-clad=closed) when it comes to –en ending to Participle II we can see double froms.: bidden-bid, got-gotten .

Weak verbs: because of loss of e-ending classification or division of weak verbs into groups and classes becomes unnecessary, because all of them acquired –ed in the past forms (deem-deemed-deemed, hope-hoped-hoped). Sometimes in early MnE, in Sh language especially e in –ed­ is pronounced in rare cases. Performed [æd] enlarged [inlargæd] (по рифме определили, что æ произносится). The ustressed vowel is kept only after d and t. ended [endid], wanted [wcntid]. e-less pronounciation in most words. Some peculiar forms are retained in 1 class of verbs. ex. in M.E. there was such verb recnen [retſen]-reughte[rohte]-raught[ro:t]; in early Mn.E. became rich-riched, strechen-straughte-straught \stretch-stretched-streched in Mn.E.) aught осталось в прил. straight. Futher changes in verbs is connected with transferece of verbs with strong verbs.

Ex.

1 class Grippen\to grip\ gliden \glide\

2 class Chewen\to chew\cleven\to cleve\crepen\to creep\bowlen\bow\

3 class climben[klimben]helpen, swalowen\to swallow \melten \to melt\

5 class meten\to melt\ wrecken \to wreck\

6 class faren \to fare\shawen \to shave\backen \to bake\graven \to grave\wacken \wake\

7 class lepen \to leep\ slepen \to sleep\solten walken[wΛlken]wepen\weep\

*4 class распределился между остальными в средние века

Some verbs preserved in ME both strong forms and weak forms. to cleve , PII both cleft, clove verb to climb sometimes is used its archaic strong past form clomb. to melt sometimes retains its PII archaic form molten. In fixed expressions molten lead плавленый свинец. Some verbs belonging to strong conjugation sometimes have weak forms. abide has standard abade, but sometimes it also has abided-abided. thrive standard throve, thriven and thrived-trived. The vernb niman used to belong to 4^th class which than came together with class 5. This verb was pure Germanic english word then replaced by scandinavian to take. Today it has archaic PII in numb- meaning.

The process of acquiring past tense and participle forms of passive aspects found development up to today's grammatical system of English language. Later Mn.E. is being knelt. 1650 до конца 19 в. – later Mn.E. лифтонгизация e в [i] vowel shift see[se:] à[si] ; two [to:] à [tu:]

14. Adjective.

The adjective.

Adjectives in Old English are declined using the same categories as nouns: five cases (nom., acc., gen., dat., and instr.), three genders (masc., fem., neut.), and two numbers (sg., pl.). In addition, they can be declined either strong or weak. The weak forms are used in the presence of a definite or possessive determiner, while the strong ones are used in other situations. The weak forms are identical to those for nouns, while the strong forms use a combination of noun and pronoun endings.

The adjective does the job of the article, to convey definiteness and indefiniteness.

Strong adjectives.

		masc.	neut.	fem.
sg.	nom.	gōd 'good'	gōd	gōd
	gen.	gōdes	gōdes	gōdre
	dat.	gōdum	gōdum	gōdre
	acc.	gōdne	gōd	gōde
	instr.	gōde	gōde
pl.	nom.	gōde	gōd, gōde	gōda, -e
	gen.	gōdra	gōdra	gōdra
	dat.	gōdum	gōdum	gōdum
	acc.	gōde	gōd, gōde	gōda, -e

Weak adjectives.

		masc.	neut.	fem.
sg.	nom.	gōda 'good'	gōde	gōde
	gen.	gōdan	gōdan	gōdan
	dat.	gōdan	gōdan	gōdan
	acc.	gōdan	gōde	gōdan
pl.	nom.	gōdan	gōdan	gōdan
	gen.	gōdra, -ena	gōdra, -ena	gōdra, -ena
	dat.	gōdum	gōdum	gōdum
	acc.	gōdan	gōdan	gōdan

Comparative adjectives and ordinal numbers (except for ōðer 'second') are always declined weak.

Comparison of adjectives.

The comparative adjective is made by adding -r- between the root syllable and the inflectional ending, which is always weak regardless of context. The superlative is made by adding -ost, which may be followed by either a weak or a strong inflection. Examples:

heard 'hard, fierce'	heardra	heardost
milde 'kind'	mildra	mildost
hāliġ 'holy'	hāliġra	hālgost
sweotol 'clear'	sweotolra	sweotolost

Some adjectives have i-mutation in the comparative and superlative forms, and in these cases the superlative element is usually -est. For example:

eald 'old'	ieldra	ieldest
ġeong 'young'	ġinġra	ġinġest
hēah 'high'	hīera	hīehst
lang 'long'	lenġra	lenġest
strang 'strong'	strenġra	strenġest

Modern English has lost the alternative comparative and superlative sēlra 'better' and sēlest 'best'.

M.E. Adjective.

Adjectives

Before we address to the morphological changes in adjectives: the O.E. had category of definite\indefinite in paradigm of the adjectives which would show the difference in any quality of a noun or some certain quality. That difference would be shown in ending. When they began to drop out there was no difference between definite, indefinite forms-> distinction disappeared.

The problem is that 1^st feature of Germanic language disappeared. M. E. can be of креольского происхождения, пройти стадию креолизации. Остальные показатели принадлежности к германским языкам сохраняются, креольское-definiteness\indefiniteness.

Morphological features.

In the general level to the sound e of unstressed vowels. The O. E. comparative ending –ra first becomes –re, then –er. The superlative suffixes –ost and –est fell together as –est. if the root vowels of an adjective was longer, it was shorten before these endings.

Ex. Swēte ->swetter ->swettest

Долгота исчезает за счет долгого слога. Though the analogy of the positive form, frequency cost the original length to be restored in comparative, superlative forms.

Dublet, latter, later изменения не произошло, долгота сохраняется, где стало кратким

As in O. E. the words evel, gooter, mikel, litel had compare., superl. Forms unrelated to the ethimology

Ex. Their forms were different. Verse\хуже->verst \плохо god-> betre->best, mikel or muchel->lesse or lasse->leste(сам. маленький)

Also some M. E. adjectives had mutational degrees.

Ex. Long->logre, lengre, langer->longest old->elder, elder->eldest

In future with standardization of language some parts would change. Old->older, elder in Mn. E. have different meanings.

E.M.E. Adj.

Adjectives. Adjectives dropped the ending –e, which had signaled the plural and the weak declension in ME and this phenomenon was very important. The language lost the idea or necessity of agreement between a noun and an adjective in number.

In modern E two types of degrees of comparison were different. They were different in the following way: suffixes of degrees of comparison are used for monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives. Forms with more and most became limited to the rest of disyllabic and polysyllabic adjectives. This process had long continuation as we can see in the language of Shakespeare, where we can find both types and mixed forms.

Mutated forms of comparative and superlative degrees were present in ME, but were eliminated in modern E. In ME we had long – lenger – longest, old – elder – eldest. Elder – changed its meaning.

Suppletive forms of degrees of comparison good – better – best have been preserved to the present days. Evil – bad – worth.

15. Pronoun.

The Pronoun.

Personal pronouns.

Personal pronouns in Old English had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd person, (two numbers in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd person. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person had suppletive forms like their parallels in other Indo-European languages. The pronouns of the 3rd person, having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter.

The first-person pronouns:

Sing. Nom. ic	Dual. Nom. wit	Plur. Nom. wē
Gen. mīn	Gen. uncer	Gen. ūser, ūre
Dat. mē	Dat. unc	Dat. ūs
Acc. mec, mē	Acc. uncit, unc	Acc. ūsic, ūs

The second-person pronouns:

Sing. Nom. ðu	Dual. Nom. ġit	Plur. Nom. ġē
Gen. ðīn	Gen. incer	Gen. ēower
Dat. ðē	Dat. inc	Dat. ēow
Acc. ðec, ðē	Acc. incit, inc	Acc. ēowic, ēow

The third-person pronouns:

Masc. gender: Sing. Nom. hē	Fem. gender: Sing. Nom. hēo	Neut. gender: Sing. Nom. hit	Plur. Nom. hīe
Gen. his	Gen. hire	Gen. his	Gen. hira
Dat. him	Dat. hire	Dat. him	Dat. him
Acc. hine	Acc. hīe	Acc. hit	Acc. hīe

The third-person pl. pronouns don't start with th- the way their Modern English counterparts do. Dat. pl. him is exactly the same as the masc./neut. dat. sg. pronoun.

Interrogative pronouns.

There are three common interrogative pronouns: hwā (who/what); hwelċ/hwilċ/hwylċ (which); and hwæðer (which of two). The instr. form is the ancestor of Modern English why, and is used to mean 'why'.

Interrogative pronoun 'who', 'what'
	masc. and fem.	neut.
nom.	hwā	hwæt
acc.	hwone, hwæne	hwæt
gen.	hwæs
dat.	hwām, hwæm
instr.	hwæ, hwon

The other two interrogative pronouns mentioned above are inflected as strong adjectives.

Relative pronouns.

There are several ways to make a relative pronoun. One is simply with the indeclinable particle ðe:

Ðā bēoð ēadiġe ðe ġehyrað Godes word [They are blessed who obey God's word]

Another is to use a form of the demonstrative se with ðe:

Hē lifode mid ðām Gode ðām ðe hē ær ðēowode [He lived with that God whom he earlier had served]

A third way is to use a form of the demonstrative pronoun alone, without ðe:

Danai ðere ēa, sēo is irnende of norðdæle [the river Don, which flows from the north]

Demonstrative pronouns.

The family of demonstratives can behave either as pronouns or as determiners. There are two demonstrative pronouns, se/ðæt/sēo and ðes/ðis/ðēos. The first does the job of Modern English that/those and also that of the definite article the. The second does the same job as Modern English this/these.

Declension of sē, sēo, ðæt:

Case	Sg.			Pl.
	M N F			All genders
Nom.	sē, ðæt, sēo			ða
Gen.	ðæs ðæs ðære			ðāra, ðæra
Dat.	ðæm, ðām ðæm, ðām ðære			ðām, ðæm
Acc.	ðone ðæt ðā			ðā
Instr.	ðy, ðon ðy, ðon ðære			ðæm, ðām
Demonstrative pronoun 'this', 'these'
		masc.	neut.		fem.		pl.
nom.		ðes	ðis		ðēos		ðās
gen.		ðisses	ðisses		ðisse, ðisre		ðisra
dat.		ðissum	ðissum		ðisse, ðisre		ðissum
acc.		ðisne	ðis		ðās		ðās
instr.		ðys	ðys

M.E. Pron.

Pronouns

Post-Conquest English inherits its pronouns from Old English, with the exception of the third person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse (the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped):

Personal pronouns in Middle English
		Singular			Plural
		Subject	Object	Possessive	Subject	Object	Possessive
First		I	me	mi(n)	we	us	ure
Second		thou	thee	thy	ye	you	your
Third	Impersonal	hit	it/him	his	he they	hem them	hir their
	Masculine	he	him	his
	Feminine	sche	hire	hir

Here are the Old English pronouns. Middle English pronouns derived from these.

First, Second and Third Person
	First Person		Second Person		Third Person
	singular	plural	singular	plural	masc.	fem.	neut.	pl.
nom.	ic, ih	wē	þū	gē	hē	hēo	hit	hīe
acc.	mec, mē	ūsic, ūs	þec, þē	ēowic, ēow	hine	hīe	hit	hīe
gen.	mīn	ūser, ūre	þīn	ēower	his, sīn	hiere	his, sīn	heora
dat.	mē	ūs	þē	ēow	him	hiere	him	heom

The first and second person pronouns in Old English survived into Middle English largely unchanged, with only minor spelling variations. In the third person, the masculine accusative singular became 'him'. The feminine form was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into 'she', but unsteadily—'ho' remained in some areas for a long time. The lack of a strong standard written form between the eleventh and the fifteenth century makes these changes hard to map.

The overall trend was the gradual reduction in the number of different case endings: the dative case disappeared, but the three other cases were partly retained in personal pronouns, as in he, him, his.

Personal pronouns (Эмма).

I sing plur

Nom	ich, i, ic	Wa
Objective	me	Us
Gen	me, min	Oure, oures

you

Nom	Thu->thou	ye
Objective	thee	You
Gen	Thi, thin	Youre, youres

he

Nom	he	They, thou
Objective	Him, hine	Hem, heom, them, thaim, theim
Gen	his	Here, there, heres, theres

“she”

Nom	She, ho, hye, hi, scho, cho, he, heo
Objective	Hire, here, he
Gen	Hire, here, hires

it

Nom	Hit, it
Objective	Hit, it
Gen	his

The dialects of M. E. differed in the forms for the pronouns.

Ex. ic was used in northern parts of the country in other parts it’d be ich, i, Nom. forms they, thau which were derived from scandinavian prevailed in the North, Midlands. Corresponding Objective, Genitive forms them, thime, theim, there were used principally in the north during most M. E. period. Notive Nom. He remained currently in the southern dialects and it’s corresponding Objective hem, heo, here were used in both the south and midlands. Sometimes they’d be used in the speech in mixed forms.

Ex. Chauser could use Nom. they Accus. hem. Gen. here.

Demonstrative pronouns.

O. E. theo, that, se plural tha were ultimately reduced to the, that, plural tho. The form the at masc. Nom. se, but then it came to be use as an invariable definite article regardless of sexes.

Demonstrative pronouns during the M. E. period formed especially linguistic innovation in English language which is called the article -> definite article.

Not each language has got such a device, being syntactical language the O. E. could cope without articles very well. In the situation of a changing language with lots of losses in the ending the emergence of such a device became vital.

Interrogative.

The O. E. masc. in M. E. whō, hwā and hwæt(-> whāt). As the other pronouns the Dat. Case draw out. The Accus. In O. E. hwōne of the 1^st of Huse and Dat. Whom from hwæt became to be used for objective purposes. In M. E. who was customarily used only as an interrogative pronoun or indefinite relative meaning whoever. The most frequently used relative pronoun in M. E. is that which is not declinable anymore.

E.M.E. Pron.

In Early Modern English, there were two second person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, which was both the plural pronoun and the formal singular pronoun, (like modern French tu and vous and modern German du and ihr). (Thou was already falling out of use in the Early Modern English period, but remained customary for addressing God and certain other solemn occasions and sometimes for addressing inferiors.)

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye had different forms depending on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou was thee, its possessive forms were thy and thine, (compare modern German; thou - du, thee - dich, thine - dein); and its reflexive or emphatic form was thyself, while the objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms were your and yours, and its reflexive or emphatic forms were yourself and yourselves.

In other respects, the pronouns were much the same as today. One difference is that my and thy became mine and thine before words beginning with a vowel and letter h; thus, mine eyes, thine hand, and so on.

Personal pronouns in Early Modern English
		Nominative	Objective	Genitive	Possessive
1st Person	singular	I	me	my / mine	mine
	plural	we	us	our	ours
2nd Person	singular informal	thou	thee	thy / thine	thine
	plural or formal singular	ye	you	your	yours
3rd Person	singular	he / she / it	him / her / it	his / her / his (it)	his / hers / his
	plural	they	them	their	theirs

The possessive forms were used as genitives before words beginning with a vowel sound and letter h (e.g. thine eyes, mine heire). Otherwise, "my" and "thy" is attributive (my/thy goods) and "mine" and "thine" are predicative (they are mine/thine). Shakespeare pokes fun at this custom with an archaic plural for eyes when the character Bottom says "mine eyen" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third person neuter it as well as of the 3rd person masculine he. Genitive "it" appears once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.

Pronouns. Distinction between Nom. ye and Obj. you began to disappear. The form ye became archaic.

The neuter pronoun vacillation between hit and it continued to the end of 16th century. H – dropping.

The neuter possessive pronoun his survived until the 17th century.

The forms mine and thine were used both with a noun following it and without it.

New pronouns: compound – somebody, nobody, something, anything, nothing.

16. The Old English Numeral.

It is obvious that all Indo-European languages have the general trend of transformation from the synthetic (or inflectional) stage to the analytic one. At least for the latest 1,000 years this trend could be observed in all branches of the family.

The level of this analitization process in each single language can be estimated by several features, their presence or absence in the language. One of them is for sure the declension of the numerals.

In Proto-Indo-European all numerals, both cardinal and ordinal, were declined, as they derived on a very ancient stage from nouns or adjectives, originally being a declined part of speech. There are still language groups within the family with decline their numerals: among them, Slavic and Baltic are the most typical samples. They practically did not suffer any influence of the analytic processes. But all other groups seem to have been influenced somehow. Ancient Italic and Hellenic languages left the declension only for the first four cardinal pronouns (from 1 to 4), the same with ancient Celtic.

The numeral.

Cardinal numbers (one, two) may function either as nouns or as adjectives.

ān	fēower	seofon	tīen
twēġen, twā	fīf	eahta	endleofan
ðrīe, ðrēo	siex	nigon	twelf

The cardinal ān is usually declined as a strong adjective; when it is declined weak (āna) it means alone: hē āna læġ 'he lay alone'. The cardinals two and three have their own peculiar inflectional system:

The numerals twēġen and ðrīe
		masc.	neut.	fem.
two	Nom.	twēġen	twā, tū	twā
	Gen.	twēġa, twēġra	twēġa, twēġra	twēġa, twēġra
	Dat.	twǣm, twām	twǣm, twām	twǣm, twām
	Acc.	twēġen	twā, tū	twā
three	Nom.	ðrīe	ðrēo	ðrēo
	Gen.	ðrēora	ðrēora	ðrēora
	Dat.	ðrim	ðrim	ðrim
	Acc.	ðrīe	ðrēo	ðrēo

The numbers thirteen-nineteen are made by adding -tīene to the numbers ðrēo - nigon: ðrēotīene, fēowertīene, etc. From twenty through the sixties, numbers are in the form ān and twentiġ 'twenty-one'.

Starting with seventy, Old English prefixes hund- to the expected forms: hundseofontiġ 'seventy', ān hund 'one hundred', hundtwelftiġ 'one hundred and twenty'.

Ordinal numbers (first, second) are always adjectives, and all of them are declined weak except for ōðer 'second', which is always strong.

forma, fyrmest	fēorða	seofoða	tēoða
ōðer	fīfta	eahtoða	endlyfta
ðridda	siexta	nigoða	twelfta

For 'thirteenth' to 'nineteenth', add the element -tēoða in place of ordinal -tīene: ðrēotēoða 'thirteen'. For 'twentieth' and higher, add -tigoða, -tegoða or -teogoða: fīfteogoða 'fiftieth', fīf and hundeahtatigoða 'eighty-fifth'.

Middle English.

Cardinal numerals.

1. ōn develops from OE án

2. twō from OE twá. Narrowing > ō is explained by the influence of the preceding “w” (ср. whp>whō). “tweie(n)” was also used ( developed from OE “twegen”, Nominative and Accusative form, masculine)

3. thré from þréo

4. fower, four (OE. feower).The sound “e” was absorbed by surrounding labial sounds.

5. five (from OE Nominative form “fife”, Genitive “fifa” etc.from fif)

6. six (OE. siex, six)

7. seven (OE. seofon)

8. eighte (OE eahta)

9. nigen, nin, nine, nyne (OE ni3on)

10. ten (OE. tien, ten, shortening of the vowel sound)

11. enleven, elleven (OE. endleofan)

12. twelf, twelve (OE. twelf)

13. thirtene (OE þrittiene)

14. fourtene (OE. fēowertiene)

15. fiftene (OE. fīftiene, shortening of the first vowel preceding 2 consonants)

16. sixtene (OE. sixtiene)

17. seventene (OE seofontiene)

18. eightetene, eightene (OE. eahtatiene)

19. nigentene, nintene (др.-a. nigontiene) (на самом деле там не совсем g, а ее старый вариант, похожий на 3, только с плоской верхушкой. надеюсь, понятно объяснила)))

20. twenty (OE twentig<*twegentig)

21. 30—thritti, thirty (with metathesis r, OE. þrittig)

22. 40 — fourty (OE. fēowertig)

23. 50 —fifty (OE fiftig)

24. 60—sixty (OE sixtig)

25. 70—seventy (OE hundseofontig). This numeral, as well as the following ones, lost their OE prefix “hund“.

26. 80—eighty (OE. hundeahtatig)

27. 90—ninty (OE hundnigontig)

28. 100—hundred (OE hundred, hund)

29. 1 000 —thousand (OE þūsend).

Such numerals as 29, 73 were expressed in the following way: nine and twenty, thrē and seventy.

In the ME period the numeral millioun 'миллион' was borrowed from French.

Ordinal numerals.

Ordinal numerals, except the word “second”, developed from the OE numerals:

1 —first (OE fyrest 'передний', 'первый', along with OE forma 'первый');2—second (French “second”; this word ousted OE ōþer); 3 — thirde (OE þridda, in the Northumbrian dialect sometimes it is “þirda”); 4 —fourthe (OE feowerþa); 5—fifte (OE fifta); 6 — sixte (OE sixta); 7— sevethe, seventhe (OE seofoða; ME form with “n” was derived from the cardinal numeral seven); 8 — eighte (OE eahtoþa); 9 —nīnthe (OE nigoþa; ME form with “n” was derived from the cardinal numeral nin). 10—tenthe (OE tēoþa; ME form with “n” was derived from the cardinal numeral ten); И — eleventhe (OE endleofta); 12 — twelfth (OE twelfta); 13—19—these numerals end in -tenthe; they are derived from the corresponding cardinal numerals(OE tēofa). 20 — 90 — these numerals end in –tithe < OE -tigoþa.

Modern English numerals developed from the Middle English without any deviation, in accordance with the phonetic laws of this period (Новоанглийские числительные развиваются из средне­английских без каких-либо особых отклонений, в соответствии с фонетическими закономерностями этого периода).

Modern English.

Cardinal numerals.

1—MidE ōn > ūn > [wʌn] (орфография one); 2— twō > twū > [tu:] (орфография two); 3 — thrē>[θri:] (орфография three); 4 — four > [fɔ:] (four); 5 —five > [faiv] (five); 6 —six; 7 —seven; 8 — eighte > [eit] (eight); 9 —nīn>[nain] (nine); 10 —ten; 11 — elleven > eleven; 12 — twelve; 13 —thirteen > ['θə:’ti:n] (thirteen); 14 — fourteen; 15 — fifteen; 16 — sixteen; 17 — seventeen; 18 — eightetene>eighteen; 19 —nineteen; 20 —twenty; 30 — thirty > ['θə:ti] (thirty); 40—forty; 50 —fifty; 60 —sixty; 70 —seventy; 80 -eighty; 90—ninety; 100 —hundred; 1000—thousand; 1,000,000 — million.

Ordinal numerals.

1 — first > [fə:st] (first); 2 —second > [seknd] (second); 3 — third > [θə:d] (third); 4 —fourth; 5 — fift> fifth (-th by analogy with other ordinal numerals); 6 — sixt> sixth (то же); 7 —seventh; 8 —eighth > [eitθ]; 9-ninth; 10-tenth; 11-eleventh; 12 — twelfth; 13—19—teenth; 20—90—tieth [tiiθ]; 100 —hundredth; 1000 —thousandth; 1,000,000 —millionth.

17. Adverb.

The adverb.

Adverbs are not inflected. An adverb may be made from an adjective by adding -e; since many adjectives are made by adding -liċ to nouns or other adjectives, you will often see adverbs ending in -līċe.

Adverbs may also be made by adding case endings to nouns, for example, Gen. dæġes 'by day', unðances 'unwillingly'; Dat. nēode 'necessarily', hwīlum 'at times'.

Interrogative adverbs: hū 'how'; hwǣr 'where'; hwider 'whither'; hwonne 'when'; hwanon 'whence'; hwȳ 'why'.

Comparison of adverbs.

Adverbs made from adjectives normally add -or to make the comparative and -ost to make the superlative: ġearwor and ġearwost from ġearwe 'readily' (adjective ġearo 'ready'), lēoflīcor, lēoflīcost from lēoflīċe 'lovingly' (adjective lēof, lēofliċ 'beloved'). Other adverbs may add -rra or -ra for the comparative and -mest for the superlative (e.g. norðerra, norðmest from norð 'northwards').

A few common adverbs make their comparatives by applying i-mutation:

ēaðe 'easily'	īeð	ēaðost
feorr 'far'	fierr	fierrest
lange 'long'	lenġ	lenġest
sōfte 'softly'	sēft	sōftost

Others are anomalous:

lȳtle, lȳt 'a little'	lǣs	lǣst, lǣsest
miċle 'much'	mā	mǣst
nēah 'near'	nīer	nīehst, nēxt
wel 'well'	bet, sēl	betst, sēlest
yfle 'badly'	wiers(e)	wierrest, wierst

Из лекции Володарской:

The great major of adverb is old. English adverbs are formed from adjectives by means of the suffix –e-. Historicaly this suffix came from the ending –o plus instrumental case.

e.g wreth – angry

wrethe (adv)

ly – маркер современного наречия, означало body.

e.g. lych gate

The differences of noun and adjective is the prescuse of instrumental case in adjective.

This -e ending was lost along with all other final –e by the end of the 19^th century which resulted many modern english adjectives and adverbs being identically in form.

“deep”, “loud”, “slow” can be both with and without “ly” in modern english.

e.g He thought deeply abuot religious matters. (metaphorical)

He dives deep in the sea. (physically)

В метафрическом значении прибавляется “ly”.

In addition of other forms ??? might be use adverbiation.

e.g. the genetive and the dative.

Adverbied genetive:

He hwearf aeges ond nihtes (gen).

He wndered by days and nights.

He works nights. – Он работает по ночам. (сохранилось окончание –s в nights)

Adverbied dativ:

e.g. nwilum – at times

winte – at all

Adverbs regulary formed the comparative degree with the suffixes or the superlative with the suffixes –ost- or –est-.

e.g. wrethe – (иногда писалось долгая а)

wrethor

wrethost

Орфография английского письма очень долгое время была сверхразнообразна.

Одни и те же слова писались разными вариантами, реже с германскими корнями и чаще с заимствованиями. (всё)

Just some words about the adverbs from the Enternet.

They can be either primary (original adverbs) or derive from the adjectives. In fact, adverbs appeared in the language rather late, and eraly Proto-Indo-European did not use them, but later some auxiliary nouns and pronouns losing their declension started to play the role of adverbial modifiers. That's how thew primary adverbs emerged.

Middle English

-The adverbs made from adjectives by adding suffix “e” continue to exist in the Middle English period, for example fayr 'прекрасный' — fayre, bright 'яркий' —brighte, high 'высокий'— hye, fast 'крепкий' — faste. If an adjective ends in “e”, the adverb is made without adding the suffix, for example newe 'новый' — newe. В среднеанглийском языке продолжают существовать унаследованные от древнеанглийского наречия, образованные от прилагательных при помощи суффикса –е.

-Adverbs are also made by adding the suffix “ly”, f. e. special 'особенный' — specially, thrifty 'тщатель­ный'—thriftily. This way of formation of the adverbs appeared in the OE period and continued to develop in the MidE.

-The comparative and the superlative degrees of the adverbs are normally formed with the help of the same suffixes as the degrees of comparison of the corresponding adjectives (Степени сравнения наречий образуются с помощью тех же суффиксов, что и степени сравнения соответствующих прилагательных), for example.: grētly - gretter – grettest.

-In some cases the vowel gradation, that appeared in the Old English as a result of the umlaut, is preserved: longe - lenger – longest.

-A few adverbs preserve irregular degrees of comparison (Несколько наречий сохраняют степени сравнения,, образованные супплетивным способом):much - mō, mōre – mōst, litel – lasse – lēst, wel - bet, better – best, evile - wers, werse – werst.

-In the Middle English the combination “more/most + an adverb” first appears. (more bravest)

-At the same time there are changes in the system of adverbs, mainly based on the analogy (Одновременно в системе наречий происходят некото­рые изменения, главным образом основанные на аналогии).

-In the OE there existed a type of adverbs, that was formed from the genitive singular of the declinable parts of speech, f. e.: ānes 'однажды' (fixed form of the genitive of the numeral ān 'один'); elles 'иначе' (fixed form of the genitive of the pronominal stem alja-, готск. aljis 'другой'). (Ср. в русском языке наречия, образовавшиеся из форм родительного падежа: "вчера", "сегодня").

These adverbs end in the morpheme –s, that in the Middle English period is also added to the adverbs of different origin, f. e. OE fianon 'оттуда' in the MidE became thane(n), thene(n); after the suffix “s” has been added this adverb turns into thenes, thens (Modern English thence). Likewise OE hwanon? 'откуда?' turns into MidE whannes, whennes, whens, ModE. whence; OE. heonan 'отсюда'—MidE hennes, hens, ModE hence. OE siþþan 'потом' (from siþ þan) turns into MidE sithens, sins, ModE since; OE nēade 'непременно'— MidE. nēdes, ModE needs; OE ealne weg 'весь путь', 'все время', 'всегда'—MidE alway, always, ModE always; OE twīwa 'дважды'—MidE twīes, ModE twice; OE þrīwa 'трижды' — MidE thrīes, ModE thrice.

Modern English

The major difference between Middle English and Modern English is that starting from this period the suffix “ly” has become the only universal means of formation of the adverbs from adjectives. This suffix can be added to the stem of any adjective, that is capable of forming an adverb (Этот суффикс можно принципиально присоединить к основе любого прилагательного, значение которого допускает образование наречия).

The Middle English adverbs with the suffix “e” has become identical with adjectives in their outer form, as a result of the drop of the unstressed “e”. A number of such adverbs has been preserved in Modern English, f. e.: fast 'крепко' или 'быстро', loud 'громко', hard in such expressions as to work hard 'работать усердно'. Other old adverbs, which coincided with adjectives in their outer form, have been ousted by the new adverbs with suffix “ly”.

There have been no considerable changes in the degrees of comparison as compared with the Middle English period.

18. Sentence.

Old English was a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms, which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the word order was not fixed and there were no use of strong syntactic rules for word connections. It was primarily a spoken language; therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech, except of literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person. The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now.

þa com he on morgenne to þtem tūn-gerefan sē þe his ealdorman wæs; sægde him, hwylce gife hē onfēng 'then in the morning he came to the town-sheriff the one that was his alderman; (he) said to him what gift he had received'.

There was no formal subject in many impersonal sentences (though it was present in others).

There was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accompanied by other negative words, mostly naht or noht, these words reinforced the meaning of negation.

Ne con īc nōht singan... īc nōht singan ne cuðe 'I cannot sing' (lit. "cannot sing nothing"), 'I could not sing' (nōht was later shortened to not, a new negative particle).

Another peculiarity of Old English negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

...hē ne mihte nān ping gesēon ^'he could not see anything' (nān from ne ān 'not one')

hit nā būton gewinne næs 'it was never without war' (næs from ne mass 'no was'; NE none, never, neither are traces of such forms).

Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (correlation) was common in complex sentences.

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns.

A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives, numerals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modifiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case.

on ðǽm ōðrum ðrīm daзum ‘in those other three days’ – Dat. pl Masc.

Ohthere sæde his hlāforde, Alfrede cuninge ‘Ohthere said to his lord, King Alfred’ – the noun in apposition is in the Dat. sg. like the head noun.

An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique cases with or without prepositions, and infinitives.

him wæs manna ðearf ‘he was in need of man’.

Verb patterns included a great variety of dependant components: nouns and pronouns in oblique cases with or without prepositions, adverbs, infinitives and participles

brinз ðā ðīnз ‘bring those things’.

Word order.

The order of words in the Old English sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. The word order of Old English was not important because of the synthetic morphology of the language. As long as declension was correct, it did not matter whether is said, "My name is..." as "Mīn nama is..." or "Nama mīn is..."

Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming in­dependence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.

Because of its similarity with Old Norse, it is believed that the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from subject-verb-object to verb-subject-object.

I am... becomes Am I...? Ic eom... becomes Eom ic...?

Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full in­version with simple predicates and partial – with compound predi­cates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:

Hwanon ferigeaþ ge fætte scyldas? 'From where do you bring (lit. "bring you") ornamented shields?'

Eart þu Esau, mīn sunu? 'Are you Esau, my son?'

Hwæt sceal ic singan? 'What shall I sing?'

Prepositions and postpositions.

Old English prepositions often come after their object; that is, an Old English prepositional phrase can consist of a noun or noun phrase followed by a preposition.

E.g: God cwæð him ðus to (God said thus to him).

In the example the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun. Prepositions usually precede their objects when the object is a noun, but they often follow the object if the object is a pronoun.

The analysis allowed us to specify the main tendencies in Old English syntax: free word order due to numerous inflections, double negation, rare complicated syntactical structures. Different types of word order could be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that in many respects Old English syntax was characterized by a wide range of varia­tion and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tend­encies.

In the course of history the structure of the simple sentence in many respects became more orderly and more uniform. Yet, at the same time it grew complicated as the sentence came to include more extended and complex parts: longer attributive groups, diverse subjects and predicates and numerous predicative constructions (syntactic complexes).

In OE the ties between the words in the sentence were shown mainly by means of government and agreement, with the help of numerous inflections. In ME and Early NE, with most of the inflectional endings levelled or dropped, the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by their relative position, environment, semantic ties, prepositions, and by a more rigid syntactic structure.

Every place in the sentence came to be associated with a certain syntactic function: in the new structure of the sentence syntactic functions were determined by position, and no position could remain vacant. This is evidenced by the obligatory use of the subject. For instance, in OE the formal subject, expressed by the pronoun hit, was used only in some types of impersonal sentences, namely those indicating weather phenomena. In ME the subject it occurs in all types of impersonal sentences, e. g.

For it reynyd almoste euery othir day. (Brut) ('For it rained almost every other day.') Of his falshede it dulleth me to ryme. (Chaucer) ('Of his falsehood it annoys me to speak.')

The use of the verb-substitute do, as well as the use of auxiliary and modal verbs without the notional verb proves that the position of the predicate could not be vacant either. This is evident in short answers and other statements with the notional verb left out, e. g.:

Helpeth me now, as I dyde yow whileer. (Chaucer) ('Help me now as I did (help) you formerly.').

Standi So I do, against my will... Is Guiiliams with the packet gone? He is, my lord, an hour ago. (Shakespeare).

As compared with OE the subject of the sentence became more varied in meaning, as well as in the forms of expression. We have already mentioned the increased use of the formal subject it. Due to the growth of new verb forms the subject could now denote not only the agent or a thing characterised by a certain property, but also the recipient of an action or the "passive" subject of a state and feeling.

The predicate had likewise become more varied in form and meaning. The simple predicate could be expressed by compound forms which indicated multiple new meanings and subtle semantic distinctions, lacking in OE verb forms or expressed formerly by contextual means.

Though some types of compound predicates had turned into simple — as the verb phrases developed into analytical forms — the compound predicate could express a variety of meanings with the help of numerous new link-verbs and more extended and complex predicatives. ME witnessed a remarkable growth of link-verbs: about 80 verbs occur as copulas in texts between the 15th and 18th c. In a way the new link-verbs made up for the loss of some OE prefixes and compound verbs which denoted the growth of a quality or the transition into a state, e. g.:

And tho it drewe nere Cristenesse. (Brut)

('And though it drew near Christmas', 'Christmas was coming')

Cecilie cam, whan it was woxen night... ('Cecily came when it was night...')

as me best thinketh (Chaucer) {'as it seems best to me')

It faltep profyte to summe men to be bounde to a stake. (Wykllf) ('It appears good for some men to be bound to a stake.')

A murd'rous guilt shows not itself more soon Than love that would seem hid...

The rose looks fair ... (Shakespeare).

The structure of the predicative became more complex: it could include various prepositional phrases and diverse attributes, e. g.:

Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse. (Chaucer) ('He was twenty years old, I guess.')

That's a deep story of a deeper love;

For he was more than over shoes in love. (Shakespeare)

The compound verbal predicate in ME was characterised by a wider use of modal phrases and verbs of aspective meaning, e. g.:

No, though I seye, I nam nat lief to gabbe. (Chaucer) ('No, though I say I am not inclined to gabble.')

Most frequent in Chaucer's works was a verb phrase of aspective meaning gfl" plus Inf- (NE begin):

He stired the coles til relente gan the wex.

('He stirred the coals till the wax began to melt.').

One of the peculiar features of the OE sentence was multiple negation. The use of several negative particles and forms continued throughout the ME period, e. g.:

Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous. (Chaucer) ('Don't bring every man into your house,')

(-ne- is a negative particle used with verbs, nat — another negative particle, for its origin see §219.)

No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have. (Chaucer) ('He had no beard, and never would have one.')

See also the example: No, though I seye, I nam nat lief to gabbe above where nam is made up of the negative particle ne and am. In Shakespeare's time the use of negations is variable: the sentence could contain one or more means of expressing negation. Cf.:

So is it not with me as with that Muse ...

Good madam, hear me speak,

And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come,

Taint the condition of this present hour... (Shakespeare)

Gradually double negation went out of use. In the age of Correctness — the normalising 18th c. — when the scholars tried to improve and perfect the language, multiple negation was banned as illogical: it was believed that one negation eliminated the other like two minuses in mathematics and the resulting meaning would be affirmative. These logical restrictions on the use of negations became a strict rule of English grammar.

Word Order.

In ME and Early NE the order of words in the sentence underwent noticeable changes: it has become fixed and direct: subject plus predicate plus object (S+P+O) or subject plus the notional part of the predicate (the latter type was used mainly in questions).

Stabilisation of the word order was a slow process, which took many hundreds of years: from Early ME until the 16th or 17th c. The fixation of the word order proceeded together with reduction and loss of inflectional endings, the two developments being intertwined; though syntactic changes were less intensive and less rapid. They may have been delayed by the break in the written tradition after the Norman conquest and by the general unsettling of the grammatical system during the Early ME dialectal divergence, whereas morphological changes may have been Intensified for these very reasons.

Though the word order in Late ME may appear relatively free, several facts testify to its growing stability. The practice of placing thе verb-predicate at the end of a subordinate clause had been abandoned, so was the type of word order with the object placed between the Subject and the Predicate. The place before the Predicate belonged to the Subject, which is confirmed by the prevalence of this word order in prosaic texts and also, indirectly, by the transition of the "impersonal" constructions into "personal": as shown above, in the pattern the mann(e) liketh the noun was understood as the Subject, though originally it was an Object in the Dat. case

In the 17th and 18th c. the order of words in the sentence was generally determined by the same rules as operate in English today. The fixed, direct word order prevailed in statements, unless inversion was required for communicative purposes or for emphasis, e. g.:

Now comes in the sweetest morsel in the night... These numbers wilt I tear and write in prose. (Shakespeare)

The order of the Subject and Predicate remained direct in sentences beginning with an adverbial modifier:

then the two bears will not bite one another when they meet. (In OE an initial adverbial modifier required an inverted word order — P+S)

In questions the word order was partially inverted — unless the question referred to the subject group. The analytical forms of the verb and the use of the do-periphrasis instead of simple forms made it possible to place the notional part of the Predicate after the Subject even with simple Predicate. Cf.:

Are they good}... Can you make no use of your discontent? ... Who comes here? ... Lady, will you walk about with your friend? ... Did he never make you laugh? (Shakespeare)

Occasionally we find simple verb forms in questions placed before the Subject: Which way looks he? ... How came you to this? Full inversion in questions is more common with Shakespeare than with later authors

19. Ways of expressing syntactic relations.

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; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech — unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person. As compared with later periods agreement and government played an important role in the word phrase and in the sentence. Accordingly the place of the word in relation to other words was of secondary importance and the order of words was relatively free.

The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. In the following instance the subject is not repeated but the form of the predicate shows that the action is performed by the same person as the preceding action:

One of the conspicuous features of OE syntax was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accompanied by other negative words, mostly naht or noht (which had developed from ne plus a-wiht 'no thing'). These words reinforced the meaning of negation:

Ne con Ic noht sin3an... Tc ndht singan ne cu5e 'I cannot sing' (lit. "cannot sing nothing"), 'I could not sing' {noht was later shortened to not, a new negative particle).

Another peculiarity of OE negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

...he ne mihte nan ping jeseon 'he could not see anything' {nan from ne an 'not one')

hit na buton 3ewinne nses 'it was never without war' (nses from ne w&s 'no was*; NE none, never, neither are traces of such forms).

Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory of subordinate clauses, subject clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses, adverbial clauses. And yet many constructions — especially in early original prose — look clumsy, loosely connected, disorderly and wanting precision, which is natural in a language whose written form had only begun to grow.

Coordinate clauses were mostly joined by and, a conjunction of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations. The ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES abound in successions of clauses or sentences all beginning with and, e.g.;

Andpa onjeat se cynin; paet ond he, on pa duru eode, and pa unbeanllce hine werede, op he on bone sepeling locude, and pa Qt raesde on hine, and hine miclum 3ewundode; and hie alle on pone cynin3 wa>ron feoh-tende, op pset hie hine ofslaesennehfefdon, 'and then the king saw that, and he went to the door, and then bravely defended himself, until he saw that noble, and then out rushed on him, and wounded him severely, and they were all fighting against that king until they had him slain' (from the earliest part of the CHRONICLES A.D. 755).

Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed "correlation") was common in complex sentences:

pa he pair to sefaren wees, pa eodon hie to hiora scipum 'then (when) he came there, then they went to their ship.'

Attributive clauses were joined to the principal clauses by means of various connectives, (here being no special class of relative pronouns. The main connective was the indeclinable particle pe employed either alone or together with demonstrative and personal pronouns:

and him cypdon paet hiera ma^as him mid wa-ron, pa pe him from noldon 'and told him that their kinsmen were with him, those that did not want (to go) from him'.

The pronouns could also be used to join the clauses without the particle pe:

Hit 5elamp 510 pastte an hearpere wass on pare 3lode fle Dracia hatfe, s(o wa?s on Creca rice; se hearpere wa?s swioe ungefr^lice jod, 3a?s nama wajs Orfeus; he hsefde an swl5e aenlic wif, sio waos haten Eurydice 'It happened once that there was a harper among the people on the land that was called Thrace, that was in the kingdom of Crete; that harper was incredibly good; whose name (the name of that) was Orpheus; he had an excellent wife; that was called Eurydice' (see also § 182 for the use of pronouns).

The pronoun and conjunction pst was used to introduce object clauses and adverbial clauses, alone or with other form-words: o5 diet 'until', mr, peem pe 'before', pset 'so that' as in:

Isaac ealdode and his eajan pystrodon, pset he ne mihte nan ping Seseon 'Then Isaac grew old and his eyes became blind so that he could not see anything'.

Some clauses are regarded as intermediate between coordinate and subordinate: they are joined asyndetically and their status is not clear:

pa wses sum consul, Boethius waes haten 'There was then a consul, Boethius was called' (perhaps attributive: '(who) was called Boethius' or co-ordinate '(he) was called Boethius').

In the course of OE the structure of the complex sentence was considerably improved. ^Elfric, the greatest writer of the late 10th— early 11th c, employed a variety of connectives indicating the relations between the clauses with greater clarity and precision.

The evolution of English syntax was tied up with profound changes in morphology; the decline of the inflectional system was accompanied by the growth of the functional load of syntactic means of word connection. The most obvious difference between OE syntax and the syntax of the ME and NE periods is that the word order became more strict and the use of prepositions more extensive. The growth of the literary forms of the language, the literary flourishing in Late ME and especially in the age of the Renaissance, the differentiation of literary styles and the efforts made by 18th. c. scholars to develop a logical, elegant style — all contributed to the improvement and perfection of English syntax.

The structure of the sentence and the word phrase, on the one hand, became more complicated, on the other hand — were stabilised and standardised.

The main difference from the preceding ages lay in the ways of connection between the adjective and the nouns or noun-pronouns used as dependent components of the pattern. In OE an adjective could take an object in the Dat. or Gen. case (with or without prepositions); in ME these objects were replaced by the Comm. case usually preceded fay a preposition, e. g.: with face pale of heme; so harde of his herte; atnyable of port; unlyk to my dede;.. discreet in alte his wordes and dedes; so patient unto a man. (Chaucer) ('with a pale face; hard-hearted; amiable in behaviour, unlike my deed; discreet in all his words and deeds; so patient to a man').

Some adjectives, especially the most frequent ones, displayed great vacillation in the choice of prepositions. For instance, in the 14th c. fair and good occur with the prepositions of, in, to, at, by.

The adjective freely combined with the Infinitive since the earliest periods. Examples from Chaucer are; redy for to ryde 'ready to ride'; / am free to wedde 'I am free to marry'; A manly man, to been an abbot able 'a manly man, able to be an abbot*.

The use of adjectives with the -mg-form was more restricted; in later periods it increased steadily as the gerund and gerundial complexes began to replace the Infinitive in adjective phrases, e. g.;

measurable in looking and in berunge (Chaucer) ('moderate in appearance and behaviour' (lit. "looking and bearing")

But yet her portion is worth your taking notice, Master Aimwell. (Shirley, early I7th c.)

In OE the ties between the words in the sentence were shown mainly by means of government and agreement, with the help of numerous inflections. In ME and Early NE, with most of the inflectional endings levelled or dropped, the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by their relative position, environment, semantic ties, prepositions, and by a more rigid syntactic structure.

Every place in the sentence came to be associated with a certain syntactic function: in the new structure of the sentence syntactic functions were determined by position, and no position could remain vacant. This is evidenced by the obligatory use of the subject. For instance, in OE the formal subject, expressed by the pronoun hit, was used only in some types of impersonal sentences, namely those indicating weather phenomena. In ME the subject if occurs in all types of impersonal sentences, e. g.

For it reynyd almoste euery othir day. (Brut) ('For it rained almost every other day.') Of his falshede it dulleth me to ryme. (Chaucer) ('Of his falsehood it annoys me to speak.')

The use of the verb-substitute do, as well as the use of auxiliary and modal verbs without the notional verb proves that the position of the predicate could not be vacant either. This is evident in short answers and other statements with the notional verb left out, e. g.:

Helpeth me now, as I dyde yow whileer. (Chaucer) ('Help me now as I did (help) you formerly.')

Standi So I do, against my will... Is Guiiliams with the packet gone? He is, my lord, an hour ago. (Shakespeare)

The growth of the written forms of English, and the advance of literature in Late ME and Early NE manifested itself, among other changes, in the further development of the compound and complex sentence. Differentiation between the two types became more evident, the use of connectives — more precise. The diversity of sentence structures in Late ME and Early NE reveals considerable freedom in the nature and use of clauses. The flexibility of sentence patterns and the variable use of connectives were subjected to new constraints and regulations in the period of normalisation.

Many new conjunctions and other connective words appeared during the ME period: both..xtnd, a coordinating conjunction, was made up of a borrowed Scandinavian dual adjective bath and the native and; because, a subordinating conjunction, was a hybrid consisting of the native English preposition by and a borrowed Latin noun, cause {by+cause 'for the reason'); numerous connectives developed from adverbs and pronouns — who, what, which, where, whose, how, why. These connectives sometimes occurred in combination with that (like whan that in the above quotation from Chaucer), which probably served to show that the former pronouns and adverbs were employed in a new, connective, function.

The following examples from Chaucer's works illustrate various types of subordinate clauses in ME and some of the connectives used to join the clauses, especially the polyfunctional that:

Subject and object clauses: And notified is thurghout the toun That every wight, with greet devocioun, Sholde preyen Crist that he this manage Receyve in gree, and spede this viage.

('And it is notified throughout the town that every man should pray to Christ with great devotion that he receive this marriage favourably and make the voyage successful.')

An attributive clause joined by that and which correlated with thil-ke ('such'):

A knyght ther was and that a worthy man That fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrie...

('There was a knight and he was a worthy man, that loved chivalry from the time he first began to ride out (as a knight.')

That oon of hem was blynd and myghte nat see, But it were with thilke even of his mynde With whiche men seen, after that they been blynde. ('That one of them was blind and could not see except with such eyes of his mind, with which men see after they get blind.')

An adverbial clause of result joined by so ... that: And so ferforth she gan oure lay declare That she the constable, er that it was eve Converted, and on Crist made hym bileve.

('And she began to declare ("preach") our creed to such a degree that she converted the governor and made him believe in Christ, before evening came.)

The last two quotations contain also adverbial clauses of time introduced by after that, er that.

An adverbial clause of manner introduced by as: And for to kepe his lordes hir degre — As it is ryght and skylfy! that they be Enhaunsed and honoured, ...

('And to maintain the rank of his lords, as it is right and reasonable that they should be promoted and honoured, ...')

Adverbial clauses of condition joined by if that and if: What wot I, if that Crist have hider ysent My wyf by see...

{'what do I know if Christ has hither sent my wife by sea.')

And if so be that thou me fynde fals, Another day do hange me by the hals

('And if it be so that you find me false, the next day hang me by the neck.')

Adverbial clauses of concession joined by wher-so and though thai:

But forth she moot, wher-so she wepe or singe.

('But she must (go) forth, whether she weeps or sings.')

For I ne can nat fynde

A man, though that I walked in-to Ynde

Neither in citee nor in no village.

('For I cannot find a man, though I walked to India, either in a city or in a village.')

An adverbial clause of cause joined with the help of by way af reason and by cause that:

Than seye they ther-in swich difficultee

By way of resoun, for to speke al playn,

By cause that ther was swich diversitee

Bitwene her bothe lawes...

{'Then they saw there such difficulty in it for the reason, to speak plainly, because there was so much difference between their two laws...').