Discuss how english have changed from old to modren english
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Author: Marisa Lohr
From old English to modern English
Updated Friday 1st March 2019
Marisa Lohr traces the origins and development of the English language, from its early beginnings around 450 AD to the modern global language we use today.
How and why has English changed over time?
In this brief introduction to the subject, I will show how we can look at the history of a language in two main ways: externally – where, why and by whom the language was used; the political and social factors causing change – and internally – the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and written appearance of the language; the motivations for change arising from the structure of the language itself.
I will structure my discussion around the conventional division of the history of English into three main periods: Old, Middle and Modern English.
The Old English (OE) period can be regarded as starting around AD 450, with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern Britain. They brought with them dialects closely related to the continental language varieties which would produce modern German, Dutch and Frisian.
This Germanic basis for English can be seen in much of our everyday vocabulary – compare heart (OE heorte), come (OE cuman) and old (OE eald) with German Herz, kommen and alt.
Many grammatical features also date back to this time: irregular verbs such as drink ~ drank ~ drunk(OE drincan ~ dranc ~ (ge)druncen) parallel German trinken ~ trank ~ getrunken. Similarly, many OE pronunciations are preserved in modern spellings e.g. knight (OE cniht, German Knecht), in which k would have been pronounced and gh sounded like ch in Scots loch.