An introduction to english language and literature in the middle ages

The era of confessional conflict and war had come to an end inbut urban culture continued to decline, and the empire became a country of innumerable courts. Dependent mostly upon princely patronage, cultural life became decentralized and very provincial. Enlightenment optimism envisioned progress as attainable through education and science.

The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries.

The history of the language can be traced back to the arrival of three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th Century AD. The inhabitants of Britain previously spoke a Celtic language. This was quickly displaced. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland.

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One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Their language was called Englisc from which the word, English derives. Old English The invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall.

The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what is now called Old English. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east.

The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distant, including the prefixes, suffixes and inflections of many of their words.

The Germanic language of these Old English inhabitants of Britain was influenced by the contact with Norse invaders, which may have been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of Old English, including loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case with the notable exception of the pronouns.

The most famous work from the Old English period is the epic poem "Beowulf", by an unknown poet. The introduction of Christianity added the first wave of Latin and Greek words to the language. It has been argued that the Danish contribution continued into the early Middle Ages. The Old English period ended with the Norman conquest, when the language was influenced, to an even greater extent, by the Norman French-speaking Normans.

The use of Anglo-Saxon to describe a merging of Anglian and Saxon languages and cultures is a relatively modern development. English continued to be the language of the common people. The Norman influence reinforced the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English.

Among the changes was a broadening in the use of a unique aspect of English grammar, the "continuous" tenses, with the suffix "-ing".

During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.

Various contemporary sources suggest that within fifty years most of the Normans outside the royal court had switched to English, with French remaining the prestige language largely out of social inertia.

For example, Orderic Vitalis, a historian born in and the son of a Norman knight, said that he only learned French as a second language. English literature starts to reappear circa ADwhen a changing political climate, and the decline in Anglo-Norman, made it more respectable.

By the end of that century, even the royal court had switched back to English. Anglo-Norman remained in use in specialised circles for a while longer, but it had ceased to be a living language.

English is continuously assimilating foreign words, especially Latin and Greek, causing English to have the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. As there are many words from different languages the risk of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain in a few regional dialects, notably in the West Country.

In Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary.The Middle Ages is a term coined around to describe a thousand years of European History. In this Very Short Introduction, Miri Rubin provides an exploration of the variety, change, dynamism, and sheer complexity that the period lausannecongress2018.com the provinces of the Roman Empire, which became Barbarian kingdoms after c, to the northern and eastern regions that became increasingly.

Index to Chapters of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes: JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. English language, West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Dutch (in Belgium called Flemish) languages.

English originated in England and is the dominant language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe's Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Wycliffe's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation of, John lausannecongress2018.com appeared between about and These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and cause of the.

This article is focused on English-language literature rather than the literature of England, so that it includes writers from Scotland, Wales, and the whole of Ireland, as well as literature in English from countries of the former British Empire, including the United lausannecongress2018.comr, until the early 19th century, it only deals with the literature of the .