Historical periods and approaches to the chronological divisions in the history of English.

. The historical development of a language is a continuous unin­terrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformations, There­fore any periodisation imposed on language history by linguists, with precise dates, might appear artificial, if not arbitrary. Yet in ail lan­guage histories divisions into periods and cross-sections of a certain length, are used for teaching and research purposes. The commonly ac­cepted, traditional periodisation divides English history into three pe­riods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and New English (NE), with boundaries attached to definite dates and historical events affect­ing the language. OE begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th c.) or with the beginning of writing (7th c.) and ends with the Nor­man Conquest (1066); ME begins with the Norman Conquest and ends °n the introduction of printing (1475), which is the start of the Modern or New English period (Mod E or NE); the New period lasts to the pres­ent day.

The amendments proposed to the traditional periodisation shift the boundary lines or envisage other subdivisions within the main periods: it has been suggested that ME really began at a later date, c. 1150 (A. Baugh), for the effect of the Norman Conquest on the language could not have been immediate; another suggestion was that we should single out periods of transition and subdivide the three main periods into early, classical, and late (H. Sweet). Some authors prefer a division of history by centuries (M. Schlauch) or a division into periods of two hundred years {B. Strang).

It has been noticed that although language history is a slow uninter­rupted chain of events, the changes are not evenly distributed in time: periods of intensive and vast changes at one or many levels may be fol­lowed by periods' of relative stability. It seems quite probable that the differences in the rate of changes are largely conditioned by the linguistic situation, which also accounts for many other features of language evo­lution. Therefore division into chronological periods should take into account both aspects: external and internal (extra- and intralinguistic). The following periodisation of English history is partly based on the conventional three periods; it subdivides the history of the English language into seven periods differing in linguistic situation and the na­ture of linguistic changes.

§ 74. The first — pre-written or pre-historical — period, which may be termed Early Old English, lasts from the West Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, that is from the 5th to the close of the 7th c. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians), which were gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongues. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English.

§75. The evolution of the language in this period is hypothetical. It has been reconstructed from the written evidence of other Old Ger­manic languages, especially Gothic, and from later OE written records. It was the period of transition from PG to Written OE. Early OE lin­guistic changes, particularly numerous sound changes, marked OE off from PG and from other OG languages.

§ 76. The second historical period extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th. The English language of that time is referred to as Old English or Anglo-Saxon-, it can also be called Written OE as compared with the pre-written Early OE period. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. Towards the end of the period the differences between the dialects grew and their relative position altered. They were probably equal as a medium of oral communication, while in the sphere of writing one of the dialects, West Saxon, had gained supremacy over the other dialects {Kentish, Mercian and Northum­brian). The prevalence of West Saxon in writing is tied up with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex to political and cultural prominence.

The language of this historical period is usually described syn- chronically and is treated as a more or less stable system, though this assumption may be due to scarcity of evidence. Careful examination of OE texts has revealed increasing variation in the 10th and 11th c., which testifies to growing dialectal divergence and the historical instability of the language.

§ 77. OE was a typical OG language, with a purely Germanic vo­ cabulary, and few foreign borrowings; it displayed specific phonetic pe­culiarities, owing to intensive changes which took place in Early OE. ^_s far as grammar is concerned,. OE was an inflected or “synthetic” language with a we 11-developed system of morphological categories, es­pecially in the noun and adjective, and with an elaborate grouping of _aj) inflected parts of speech into morphological classes. H. Sweet, a prominent English scholar of the late 19th c., called OE the “period of full endings” in comparison with later periods. The decline of the mor­phological system began in the Northern dialects in the 10th and 11th c.

§ 78. The third period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and covers the 12th, 13th and half of the 14th c. It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences — Scandinavian and French. The dialectal division of present-day English owes its origin to this period of history.

Under Norman rule the official language in England was French, or rather its variety called Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman] it was also the dominant language of literature. There is an obvious gap in the English literary tradition in the 12th c. The local dialects were mainly used for oral communication and were but little employed in writing. Towards the end of the period their literary prestige grew, as English began to displace French in the sphere of writing, as well as in many other spheres. Dialectal divergence and lack of official English made a favourable environment for intensive linguistic change.

§ 79. Early ME was a time of great changes at all the levels of the language, especially in lexis and grammar. English absorbed two layers of lexical borrowings: the Scandinavian element in the North-Eastern area {due to the Scandinavian invasions since the 8th c.) and the French element in the speech of townspeople in the South-East, especially in the higher social strata (due to the Norman Conquest), Phonetic and gram­matical changes proceeded at a high rate, unrestricted by written tradi­tion. Grammatical alterations were so drastic that by the end of the period they had transformed English from a highly inflected language into a mainly analytical one; for the most part, they affected the nom­inal system. Accordingly, the role of syntactical means of word con­nection grew.

§ 80. The fourth period — from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th — embraces the age of Chaucer, the greatest English medieval writer and forerunner of the English Renaissance. We may call it Late or Classical Middle English. It was the time of the restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language and the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect used in writing and literature was the niixed dialect of London. (TheLondon dialect was originally derived from the Southern dialectal group, but during the 14th c. the southern traits were largely replaced by East Midland traits.) The literary authority of other dialects was gradually overshadowed by the prestige of the Lon­don written language.

In periods of literary efflorescence, like the age of Chaucer, the pat­tern set by great authors becomes a more or less fixed form of language.

si

Chaucer’s language was a recognised literary form, imitated throughout the 15th c. Literary flourishing had a stabilising effect on language, so that the rate of linguistic changes was slowed down. At the same time the written forms of the language developed and improved.

§ 81. The written records of the late 14th and 15th c. testify to the growth of the English vocabulary and to the increasing proportion of French loan-words in English. The phonetic and grammatical structure had incorporated and perpetuated the fundamental changes of the pre­ceding period. Most of the inflections in the nominal system — in nouns, adjectives, pronouns — had fallen together. H. Sweet called Middle English the period of “levelled endings”. The verb system was expand­ing, as numerous new analytical forms and verbal phrases on the way to becoming analytical forms were used alongside old simple forms.

§ 82. The fifth period — Early New English — lasted from the in­troduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare, that is from 1475 to c. 1660. The first printed book in English was published by William Cax- ton in 1475. This period is a sort of transition between two outstanding epochs of literary efflorescence: the age of Chaucer and the age of Shake­speare (also known as the Literary Renaissance).

It was a time of great historical consequence: under the growing capitalist system the country became economically and politically uni­fied; the changes in the political and social structure, the progress of culture, education, and literature favoured linguistic unity. The growth of the English nation was accompanied by the formation of the national English language.

Caxton’s English of the printed books was a sort of bridge between the London literary English of the ME period and the language of the Literary Renaissance. The London dialect had risen to prominence as a compromise between the various types of speech prevailing in the coun­try and formed the basis of the growing national literary language.

§ 83. The Early NE period was a time of sweeping changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The growth of the vocab­ulary was a natural reflection of the progress of culture in the new, bourgeois society, and of the wider horizons of man’s activity. New words from internal and external sources enriched the vocabulary. Ex­tensive phonetic changes were transforming the vowel system, which resulted, among other things, in the growing gap between the written and the spoken forms of the word (that is, between pronunciation and spelling). The loss of most inflectional endings in the 15th c. justifies the definition “period of lost endings” given by H. Sweet to the NE period. The inventory of grammatical forms and syntactical construc­tions was almost the same as in Mod E, but their use was different. The abundance of grammatical units occurring without any apparent restrictions, or regularities produces an impression of great “freedom of grammatical construction”. Perhaps the choice of forms was moti­vated in a given situation, but its reasons are hard to discern today, and they appear to be used in free variation.

§ 84. The sixth period extends from the mid-17th c. to the close of the 18th c. In the history of the language it is often called “the age of

normalisation and correctness”, in the history of literature — the “neo­classical” age. This age witnessed the establishment of “norms”, which can be defined as received standards recognised as correct at the given period. The norms were fixed as rules and prescriptions of correct usage in the numerous dictionaries and grammar-books published at the time and were spread through education and writing.

It is essential that during the 18th c. literary English differentiated into distinct styles, which is a property of a mature literary language. It is also important to note that during this period the English language extended its area far beyond the borders of the British Isles, first of all to North America.

§ 85. Unlike the age of Shakespeare, the neo-classical period dis­couraged variety and free choice in pronunciation, vocabulary and gram­mar. The 18th c. has been called the period of “fixing the pronunciation”, The great sound shifts were over and pronunciation was being stabilised. Word usage and grammatical construction were subjected to restriction and normalisation. The morphological system, particularly the verb system, acquired a more strict symmetrical pattern. The formation of new verbal grammatical categories was completed. Syntactical struc­tures were perfected and standardised.

§ 86. The English language of the 19th and 20th c. represents the seventh period in the history of English — Late New English or Modern English. By the 19th c. English had achieved the relative stability typi­cal of an age of literary florescence and had acquired all the properties of a national language, with its functional stratification and recognised standards (though, like any living language, English continued to grow and change). Theclassical language of literature was strictly distinguished from the local dialects and the dialects of lower social ranks. The dialects were used in oral communication and, as a rule, had no literary tradition; dialect writing was limited to conversations interpolated in books composed in Standard English or to recording folklore.

The 20th c. witnessed considerable intermixture of dialects. The local dialects are now retreating, being displaced by Standard English. The “best” form of English, the Received Standard, and also the regional modified standards are being spread through new channels: the press, radio, cinema and television.

Nevertheless the two dimensions of synchronic functional stratifi­cation of English are as important as before; the horizontal stratifica­tion in Britain applies to modified regional standards and local dialects, while the vertical dimension reflects the social structure of the English- speaking communities.

The expansion of English overseas proceeded together with the growth of the British Empire in the 19th c. and with the increased weight of the United States (after the War of Independence and the Civil War). English has spread to all the inhabited continents. Some geographical varieties of English are now recognised as independent variants of the language.

§ 87. In the 19th and 20th c. the English vocabulary has grown °n an unprecedented scale reflecting the rapid progress of technology, science and culture and other multiple changes'in all spheres of man’s activities. Linguistic changes in phonetics and grammar have been con­fined to alterations in the relative frequency and distribution of linguistic units: some pronunciations and forms have become old-fashioned or even obsolete, while other forms have gained ground, and have been accept­ed as common usage.

Though most of these changes are difficult to notice and to define, it is apparent that an English speaker of the 1950s or 1980s uses a form of language different from that used by the characters of Dickens or Thackeray one hundred and fifty years ago. Therefore we may be fully justified in treating the 19th and 20th c. as one historical period in a general survey of the history of English. But in order to describe the kind of English used today and to determine the tendencies at work now, the span of the last thirty or forty years can be singled out as the final stage of development, or as a cross-section representing Present- day English.