ical categories and relationships by attaching inflections (endings) to word roots, in a similar way to Latin or German., In the Old English clause wolde guman findan? he wanted to find the man, the -e on wolde indicates a 3rd person singular subject: he wanted; the -n on guman indicates that the man is the object, not the subject of the verb; and the -an on findan indicates an infinitive: to find .end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not of course change the language immediately. Although the most senior offices in the church were filled by Normans, Old English continued in use in chronicles such as the Peterborough Chronicle until the middle of the 12th century. The non-literate would have spoken the same dialects as before the Conquest; though these changed slowly until written records of them became available for study, which varies in different regions. Once the writing of Old English comes to an end, Middle English has no standard language, only dialects that derives from the dialects of the same regions in the Anglo-Saxon period.Middle English, changes in the pronunciation of unstressed syllables, mainly occurring at the ends of words, caused most inflections to merge indistinguishably, or be dropped altogether. This inflectional breakdown could have created ambiguity (eg wanted man find), but speakers compensated by using more rigid word order (subject - verb - object, usually), among other strategies.important feature of the early Middle English period was the influence of Norman (and later, central) French, following the Norman conquest of 1066. French dominance and prestige in such contexts as the royal court, law, the church and education encouraged extensive borrowing of vocabulary, for instance, French words for farmed animals pork, beef and mutton were adopted alongside native words swine, cow and sheep.borrowed words came to signify only the meat of these animals, mainly eaten by wealthier French speakers, whereas the words inherited from Old English came to refer only to the living animals. Norman scribes also influenced the way English was written, respelling words using conventions from French; thus Old English? s became ice, cw? n became queen. However, by the 14th and 15th centuries, French influence in Britain had begun to wane, being replaced for many purposes by English.
Modern English can be regarded externally as starting with the introduction of printing. Caxton s selection of an East Midlands/London variety of English for the first printed books at the end of the 15th century contributed to the development of a standardized variety of the language, with fixed spelling and punctuation conventions and accepted vocabulary and grammatical forms.perception of this standard variety as correct, good English was also supported by attempts at codification, notably Johnson s dictionary and many prescriptive grammars of the 18th century. The vocabulary of English was consciously elaborated as it came to be used for an increasing variety of purposes, including translations of classical works rediscovered in the Renaissance, a burgeoning creative literature, and the description of new scientific activities. Thousands of words were borrowed from Latin and Greek in this period, for example, education, metamorphosis, critic, conscious .internal feature which characterized the movement towards Modern English was the Great Vowel Shift - an important series of linked pronunciation changes which mainly took place between the 15th and 17th centuries. In Middle English, the sound system had contained broadly corresponding series of long and short vowels, represented in writing by the same letters.instance, the vowel in caas? case was simply a longer version of the vowel in blak? black; similarly mete? meat (long vowel) and hell (short vowel), or fine (long) and pit (short). In early Modern English, people began to pronounce the long vowels differently from the corresponding short vowels: long e ended up sounding like long I, leaving a gap in the sound system; this was filled by shifting the pronunciation of long a to sound like long e, and so onanges were not reflected in Modern English spelling, already largely fixed by standardization, adding to the disparity between pronunciation and writing which differentiates English today from most other European languages.the present day, English is used in many parts of the world, as a first, second or foreign language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity, the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige.continues to change at all linguistic levels, in both standard and non-standard varieties, in response to external influences (for example, modern communications technologies; contact with other world languages) and pressures internal to the language system (for example, the continuing impulse towards an efficient, symmetrical sound-sys...
