The History of English What is the History

The History of English What is the History of English?

History of English studies: the history of its phonetic structure the history of spelling the evolution of its grammatical system the growth of lexis

When Latin characters were used in Britain (7 th c. ) writing was phonetic When printing was introduced (the 15 th c. ) the written form of the world became fixed but the sounds continued to change e. g. knight, root, tale

Reconstruction of English the earliest written texts in English date to the 7 th the earliest records in other Germanic languages go back to the 3 d or the 4 th c. the development of English began a long time before it was recorded

Information about early English and Germanic history in the works of ancient historians and geographers, especially Roman

Methods of comparative linguistics in the 19 th c. to discover the kinship of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages to group them into Germanic, Slavonic, Celtic and others

Method of internal reconstruction studies history from internal sources alone based on the assumption that every language is a well-organized and well-balanced structure of elements If among the productive systems of the language there occur some non-productive systems they are relics of preceding stages of development

Modern nouns oxen , teeth go back to the nouns of a-stem declension, neuter gender, long syllable type e. g. swin (singular) – swin (plural)