Боргуль Н. М. Пособие по основам теории изучаемого языка, печать
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- § 4. Periods in the history of the English language
| § 3. The Germanic Conquest
Undoubtedly, the Teutons (Germanic tribes) had made piratical raids on the British shores long before the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 AD, but the crisis came with the departure of the last Roman legions. The 5 th century was the age of increased Germanic expansion. Reliable evidence of the period is very scarce. The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, Historia Ecclesistica Gentis Anglorum. According to Bede the invaders came to Britain in 449 AD under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa. The invaders of Britain came from the western subdivision of the Germanic tribes. They were: the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles. The Britons fought against the conquerors for about a century and a half – till about the year 600. The Jutes settled in Kent, the Isle-of-Wight and the neighboring part of Hampshire. The Saxons occupied the banks of the Thames and the remaining part of England southward. The Angles occupied most of the territory north of the Thames up to the Firth-of-Forth. Since the settlement of these tribes in Britain the ties of their language with the continent were broken and its further development went in its own way. It is at this time that the History of the English language begins. 10 § 4. Periods in the history of the English language There is a tendency to divide any lengthy history into parts or periods. For the English language the conventional major divisions are three: Old English, for the period from beginnings to about 1100, Middle English, for about 1100 to 1450/1500 and New, or Modern English, for the language from the sixteenth century to the present. The principal basis for these divisions lies in the changes in the systems of grammatical inflections: the times of most rapid change in the inflectional system are represented by approximate dates. The English scholar Henry Sweet (1845 - 1912), author of a number of works on the English language and on its history, proposed the following division of the history of the language 1 st period, Old English – the period of full endings . This means that any vowel may be found in an unstressed ending. E.g. the word sin ʒ an has the vowel a in its unstressed ending, while the word sunu has the vowel u in a similar position; 2 nd period, Middle English – the period of levelled endings . This means that vowels of unstressed endings have been levelled under a neutral vowel (something like [ ə ]), represented by the letter e . Thus OE sin ʒ an became ME singen , OE sunu became ME sune , etc. 3 rd period, New English – the period of lost endings . This means that the endings are lost altogether. E.g. singen – sing, sune – sun. жүктеу/скачать 0,78 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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