Unlike Russian, English is a quickly changing language.
But at the same time the development of English was slow, gradual and uninterrupted.
There is a considerable difference between the language of the 9th, 13th and, say, 17th centuries, in the vocabulary, grammatical systems and phonetic peculiarities.
English in Course of Time It is customary to divide the history of English into three periods:
Old English, Middle English and
New English.
OLD ENGLISH Anglo-Saxon ✓ At the beginning it was the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders, which were gradually losing contacts with the related continental languages.
✓ The tribal dialects were only used for oral communication.
✓ The 7th century was the beginning of writing, the tribal dialects were gradually changing into local and regional dialects.
Early Old English Early Old English lasts from the Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, i.e. from the 5th to the close of the 7th century.
Bede (O.E.: Bǣda or Bēda; 672/673 – 26 May 735), also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede was an Englishmonk at the Northumbrianmonastery of Saint Peter. His most famous work (The Ecclesiastical (духовный, церковный) History of the English People) gained him the title "The Father of English History".
The second period of Old English The second period of Old English extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th c. (the Norman Conquest, 1066).
Peculiarities of Old English ✓ Old English was a typical Old Germanic language with a purely Germanic vocabulary and few foreign borrowings.
✓ As for grammar, Old English was an inflected or “synthetic” language with a well developed system of morphological categories.
The Middle English period.
The Norman Conquest of the 11th century is regarded as the beginning of the Middle English period. It lasted from the 11th c. till the 15th c.
