History of the origin and development of the English language.

The history of modern English began in the VIII century BC. During this period, the territory of modern great Britain was inhabited by Celts who communicated in the Celtic language. So the word "Britain" itself comes from the Celtic "brith", which means"painted".

After Britain was conquered by the great Caesar, and in the first century BC it was considered part of the Roman Empire. Some Romans began to move to the province, who had to communicate closely with the local population, that is, with the Celts, which was reflected in the language. So, in modern English, words with Latin roots appeared. For example, "street" = via strata " = paved road, many geographical names - Manchester.

In 449 ad, the progenitors of the English language, the Celts and Romans, were invaded by the Germanic tribes of the angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes, who greatly outnumbered the local population. So the Anglo-Saxon dialect gradually began to replace the Celtic dialect, destroying or transforming existing words. Thanks to the Germanic tribes, many words with Germanic roots appeared in English, which were also borrowed at one time from Latin: "butter, Saturday, silk, mile, pound, inch".

Only in remote areas of Britain, the Germans were unable to reach, and there are still Celtic languages. These are Wells, the Highlands, Cornwall and Ireland (see Appendix 1).

Then in the second half of the IX century, the Danes began to conquer the Anglo-Saxon lands. The Scandinavian Vikings intermarried with the Anglo-Saxons, mixing their old Norse language with the dialect spoken by the local peoples. As a result, the words from the Scandinavian group came to English:" anger","aye". The combination of the letters " sc - "and" sk - " in English words is a clear sign of borrowing from Scandinavian languages: sky, skin, skull.

In the middle of the 11th century, during the middle ages, England was conquered by the French (see Appendix 2). So in the history of the development of the English language began the era of three languages: French - for the aristocracy and the judicial system, Latin - for science and medicine, Anglo-Saxon-for the common people. The mixing of these three dialects gave rise to the formation of the English that the whole world is learning today. Thanks to mixing, the vocabulary has doubled. The vocabulary was  divided into high (from French) and low (from German) versions of the language.

So, an example of social division can serve as the names of domestic animals that have German roots, that is, workers 'and peasants': «swine», «cow», «sheep». But the name of the meat of these animals, which the intelligentsia ate, came from the French: "beef", "mutton".

In the XIV century, English became a literary language, that is, an exemplary one, and it also became the language of education and law.

In 1474, the first book in English appeared. It was a translation by William Caxton of R. Lefevre's "Collection of stories of Troy". Thanks to Caxton's work, a lot of English words have gained completeness and integrity. During this period, the first grammatical rules appeared. Many verb endings have disappeared, and adjectives have acquired degrees of comparison.

The founder of modern literary English is considered to be William Shakespeare (see Appendix 3).

Shakespeare's English is a word game that allows you to unravel the subtext, read between the lines. The author introduced colloquial words into literary speech, filling them with new shades. The type of language is early new English, with its own prepositions and pronouns, and grammatical features.

The origin of the English language at the time of writing the epochal works of Shakespeare underwent changes: the stage was called the period of "lost endings". Verbs and nouns became similar to each other (for example, the word "love" - meant "любить" and "любовь"), the meaning was captured depending on the order of words in the sentence.

Old English has its own morphological features, they must be studied before reading such works as" Romeo and Juliet"," hamlet", sonnets. Let's look at them in more detail.