A Brief Look at the History of English

The history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into common chord periods usually called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern English. The earlier period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A. D., though no records of their spoken language survive from forrader the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial seismic disturbance on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break-dance down. The following brief sample of Old English prose illustrates several(prenominal) of the significant ways in which change has so change English that we must look carefully to find points of simile between the language of the tenth century and our own. It is taken from Aelfrics preachment on St. Gregory the Great and concerns the famous story of how that pope came to dart missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after seeing Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome:

Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon.



Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon.

A few of these words will be recognized as identical in spelling with their modern equivalents -- he, of, him, for, and, on -- and the resemblance of a few others to familiar words may be guessed -- nama to name, comon to come, wære to were,

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