English comes into its own periods: Old English and Middle English

Old English 700 to 1100 - the language of the famous poem Beowulf;
from 1100 to 1450 there is Middle English the language of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales;
from 1450 to 1700 it's early modern English the language of Shakespeare and King James Bible ;
from 1700 to 1900 it's late modern English the language of the philosopher David Hume and the novelist
Jane Austen;
and after that it's
present-day English now which will be preserved in the lyrics of Britney Spears and Justin Bieber.

These five different periods correspond to certain socio-political cornerstone dates so with regard to Old
English we can say that around four hundred fifty-three dramatic tribes arrived on the British
Isles the Angles Saxons and Jutes and even though they didn't start speaking Old English right away you
know that marks the beginning that lays the foundation of English for middle English.
1066 - the Norman Conquest; William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings causing massive social
and linguistic upheaval and thereby marking the beginning of the Middle English period
1450 - 1476 - marks the establishment of the first printing press in Britain.

The beginning of early modern English , late modern starting around 1700 there is no single date that
we can point to, but there are two major social developments going on: the Industrial Revolution and
The rise of the British Empire. The rise of British colonialism chiefly in the Caribbean at that time so
that's how late modern English is contextualized present-day English.
Old English - the birth of English around 450 with the arrival of the Angles Saxons and Jutes they came
from Northern Germany, Denmark
Archaeological evidence seem to agree that the major influx of Germanic immigration into England came
in the mid 5th century right the sources refer to a Celtic proud tyrant who invited the Saxons into the
country to help his people resist attacks from the Barbarian, picked Scots of the north. This invitation was
a gross miscalculation as the Germanic tribes soon turned against their erstwhile employers.

Some characteristics of Old English:

- Rich inflectional morphology;

- Nouns:
1) Three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter)
2) Marked for case ( nominative, genitive, dative, accusative)
3) Number ( singular, plural )
4) Declension classes (different for gender, case and number )

Agreement

- Demonstratives and adjectives agree in case, number and gender with the noun they modify.

Weak verbs: dental past suffix –ed

- Verbs: regular vs. irregular ( weak vs. strong ) verbs

walk – walked – walked vs. sing – sang – sung

fill – filled – filled break – broke – broken

- OE weak verbs from their past tense forms and theirs past participles with a so-called dental
suffix.
Fremm-an ‘ to perform, do’
Past: 1. Sg. Frem-ed-e Present: fremm-e
2. Sg. Frem-ed-est frem-est
3.Sg. frem-ed-e frem-ep
Plur. Frem-ed-on fremm-ap
 Past Participle: (ge-) frem-ed
Pres. Part.: fremm-ende

Strong Verbs: Ablaut

- The present tense endings of strong verbs are identical to the ones of weak verbs.
- Past tense and past participle forms change the vowel in the stem (ablaut)

Strong and weak adjective declensions

- Strong – alone with a noun, or predicative function.

- Weak – with a demonstrative or possessive and a noun.

Viking Invasion ( 800 – 1000 ) Viking invaders landed on North-East coast of England. They
were different Scandinavian tribes speaking North Germanic dialects ( Old Norse ).
Language contact during that time significantly shaped English grammar and also English lexis.
Harrogate, Selby, Scunthorpe, Grimsby ( - by, -gate, - stoke, -kirk, - thorpe, -thwaite, etc)

Old Norse lexical influence

- Skull, skin, sky, skirt, scream…
Anglo-Saxon Old Norse
- Craft skill
- Hide skin
- Ill sick
- Wrath anger

Middle English

Loss of inflections

- Old English was highly inflectional language ( nominal and verbal paradigms, agreement marking
on demonstratives and adjectives )
- During the Middle English, the unstressed inflectional endings first merged ( as indicated by the
spelling with <e>), and then reduced to schwa ( ǝ), before they finally got lost.
 Loss of final inflectional – n
- First person possessive pronoun:

- Infinitive suffix:

Effects of morphological simplification

1. Use of prepositions instead of case markers

2. Change in marking of grammatical relations

Se cyning metep pone biscop. ‘ The king meets the bishop’
Pone biscop metep se cyning. ‘ The king meets the bishop’
- Grammatical relations marked on DET ( and N)
- Relatively flexible word order
The king meets the bishop.
The bishop meets the king.
-Grammatical relations marked by word order
-Fixed word order
 Influx on Norman French vocabulary

- Administration:
Crown, state, empire, realm, reign, royal, tax, parliament, subsidy, office, treasurer, peasant,
slave, servant

- Jurisdiction:
Felony, arson, fraud, estate, bounds, property, justice, innocent

- Domestic life:
Gown, robe, collar, dinner, supper, feast, beef, pork

To sum it up:
OE – 700-1000
ME – 1100 -1450

OE:- inflectional morphology in nouns and adjectives

- Weak and strong verbs
- Weak and strong adjectives inflections
- Lexical influence of Old Norse

ME: -reduction of morphological complexity

- Rise of analytics expressions and fixed word order

- Lexical influence from Norman French