Outline of

“A brief history of English”

By: Paul Roberts

I. The Period of the Old English

A. The things that happened within 700 to about 1100
1. The Northumbrian Renaissance, In 700 C.E.
2. The Movement of the center of influence, In 800 C.E.
3. The copied literature of the Northumbrian, In 900 C.E.
4. The Norsemen Traveler’s, In 900 to about 1000
II. The Period of the Middle English
A. The things that happened within 1100 to about 1450 or 1500 C.E.
1. The Normans Conquest, Within 1000 and 1200.C.E.
2. The French Influence in English Language, Within 1100 to 1500 C.E.
3. The change in the sound of the Language, Within 1400 to 1600 C.E.
III. The Period of the Modern English
A. Early Modern English, Within 1500 to 1700 C.E.
1. The English Renaissance, Within 1600 to 1700 C.E.
2. The own version of Bible by Shakespeare, In 1611
B. Late Modern English, Within 1700 C.E. to the present day
1. The movements in the history of English, Within 1700 to 1800 C.E.
2. The Products of the Last century, From 1800 C.E. up to the present day.
 Summary of
“A Brief History of English’
By: Paul Roberts

The History of our language begins a little after 600 C.E., And our ancestors is
believed to be savages wandering through the forest of Northern Europe. It is Divided
into three different periods, The Old or native English, The Middle English, and the
Modern English.
As England came into History it was divided into Independent Kingdoms who
sometimes fought to rule over the other. In the century after the conversion, the most
advanced kingdom was the Northumbrian. By 700 C.E. they developed a respectable
civilization which is sometimes called the Northumbrian Renaissance. In eight centuries,
Northumbrian’s power declined and the center of influence was moved to Mercia. After a
century, it was moved again to the Wessex who copied the Northumbrian literature
within two centuries earlier. It is why almost most of the old English passed to us was
wessex dialects of 900 or later. In the Ninth and tenth centuries, there came the Norsemen
who landed an attack on the East England. The linguistic result of that attack was the
injection of the Norse words into the English Language.
Between the year of 1000 and 1200 came various changes in the structure of
English which is triggered by the Normans conquest. In 1066, The Normans became the
king of England whose language was French. It affected the language in terms of its
vocabulary. Sometimes between 1400 and 1600, English language underwent a couple of
sound changes. One is the elimination of the vowel sound and the other one is the great
vowel shift. These two changes Produced basic differences between the middle and the
modern English.
Within the Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the early modern
English and the English Renaissance began. Englishmen had grown into borrowing
words from French as a result of the Normans conquest, and within this period they also
borrowed from Greeks and Latin. In 1611, Shakespeare published his own version of the
bible which made many features of early Modern English perfectly familiar down to the
present time. In the Eighteenth centuries, a vigorous attempt to control what the people
could and could not write and say happened. This attempt failed but it changed the
native’s speaker feeling about it. In the late Modern English came the invention of
dictionaries and English grammar which has tended to keep people from being interested
in English.
In the present time, The English Language now perhaps is the greatest language
of the world who is spoken by a quarter of a billion of people and as a second language of
a million more. All of the things that the English Language encounter became a big part
of what was the English language we used as of today.
 Bataraza National High School
Bataraza, Palawan
SY: 2019-2020

An Outline and a Summary of

“A Brief History of English “
By: Paul Roberts

Alfaizen N. Morad
Sam M. Narrazid

September 05, 2019