The History of English__ LanguagePPT课件

A-Brief-History-of-EnglishA Brief History of EnglishN o understanding of the English language can be very satisfactory without a notion of the history of the language. But we shall have to make do with just a notion. The history of English is long and complicated, and we can only hit the higl1 spots.不了解英语的历史很难真正掌握这门语言，然而对此我们只能做到略有所知。

因为英语的历史既漫长又复杂，我们只能抓住其发展过程中的几个关键时期。

At the time of the Ro1nan Empire, the speakers of what was to become English were scattered along the northern coast of Europe. They spoke a dialect of Low German. More exactly, they spoke several different dialects, since they were several different tribes. The names given to the tribes who got to England are Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who are referred to collectively as Anglo-Saxons4.在罗马帝国时期，散居在欧洲北部沿海的居民说一种西部德语的方言，这就是英语的前身。

更确切地说，由于隶属于不同的部落，他们说的是几种不同的方言。

英语属于西日耳曼语支，起源于盎格鲁-弗里西亚方言，是在日耳曼人入侵时被引入不列颠的。

English is a West Germanic language that originated from theAnglo-Frisian dialects, broughtto Britain by Germanic invaders最初的古英语由多种方言组成，晚期西撒克逊语最终成为了统一英语的语言。

现代人所认识的英语，很大程度上和公元1400年的书面中古英语相似。

这种转变是由历史上两的入侵，他们在公元八、九世纪征服并使部分不列颠岛成为他们的殖民地。

第二次是十一世纪时来自诺曼人的入侵，他们讲的古诺曼语最终发展为英语的一种变体，称为盎格鲁-诺曼语。

Middle English differed from Old English because of two invasions which occurred during the Middle Ages. The 1st invasion was by peoples who spoke North Germanic languages. They conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. The 2nd invasion was by the Normans of the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and eventually developed an English form thereofcalled Anglo-Norman.Proto-English英语诞生于日耳曼人的语言，主要包括盎格鲁语，撒克逊语，弗里西语，朱特语。

这其中还可能含有法兰克语，之后又融合了拉丁语。

The languages of Germanic peoples gave rise to the English language( the best known are the Angles, Saxons, Frisii, Jutes and possibly some Franks,) . Latin loan wordsentered the vocabulary.Old English – from the mid-5th century to the mid-11th century人们现在所讲的古英语是长期以来多个殖民部落的方言融合而形成的。

A History of the English LanguagePast Changes Precipitate Worldwide PopularityLauralee B. YorkRewritten August. 2, 1999The history of the English language is of significance because English is spoken more frequently than any other language except Chinese, according to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (410). A Germanic language, English is spoken by an estimated 1,500,000,000 people, and that number is ever increasing, according to An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (121).English is the chief language of world publishing, science and technology, conferencing, and computer storage as well as the language of international air traffic control (121). English is also used for purposes of international communications, and international politics, business communications, and academic communities (122).The history of English can be traced to the colonization of people from a family of languages which spread throughout Europe and southern Asia in the fourth millennium BC, (185). It is thought that a seminomadic population living in the steppe region to the north of the Black Sea moved west to Europe and east to Iran and India, spreading their culture and languages (186). According to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, the European languages and Sanskrit, the oldest language of the Indian sub-continent, were tied to a common source. When a systematic resemblance was discovered in both roots and verbs and in grammar forms, by comparing similar features of the European languages and Sanskrit, a common source language was reconstructed named Proto-Indo-European (298).The Proto-Indo-European language was more complex than English today. According to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, It is possible to reconstruct three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and up to eight cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental). Adjectives agreed in case, number, and gender with the noun. The verb system was also rich in inflections, used for aspect, mood, tense, voice, person, and number. Different grammatical forms of a word were often related by the feature of ablaut, or vowel graduation: the root vowel would change systematically to express such differences as singular and plural or past and present tense, as is still the case in English foot/feet ortake/took (Crystal 299).The Proto-Indo-European language is thought to have been spoken before 3,000 BC, and to have split up into different languages during the following millennium (298). The languages families include Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Armenian, Anatolian, Albanian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Slavic languages. Yiddish, German, Afrikaans, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English make up the West Germanic subgroup of the Germanic Branch (Crystal 186).Scholars renamed the language group the Indo-European family after 3,000 BC (298). Theorists suggest that the horse was a major element of the Proto-Indo-European and theIndo-European family of languages. They conjecture that the culture was spread by warriors who conquered from horse-drawn chariots. Others discount this theory, according the Dictionary of Languages (273). The Indo-European languages have been marked by a succession of changes affecting different languages. One change of note includes thecentum/satem split. K followed by a front vowel became s or sh in Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit sata), Iranian (Persian sad), Slavonic (Russian sto), Baltic (Lithuanian simtas), Albanian (qind, pronounced chind) and Armenian. It remained k in Celtic (Welsh cant), Italic, Tocharian (kant), Greek (hetaton) and Germanic (with a subsequent move to h, English hundred).A sound shift in consonants occurred that differentiated the Proto-Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages. It included several consonants that were changed from the first example to the second example in the following consonants: p>f, t>0, k>x, b>p, d>t, g>k, bh>b, dh>d, and gh>h. The sound shift was named Grimms Law, after the man who described it, according to Contemporary Linguistics (332).The Proto-Indo-European, the Indo-European, and specifically the Germanic language, of which English is a derivative, influenced the early history of the English Language. The early history of the English language began in Britain and with several groups of people. At first people migrated to the placed now called England. Several invading groups joined the original settlers of England, bringing with them their language and culture. English became a mixture of languages that adapted to the circumstances and the needs of the people. England eventually commanded an empire, thus, spreading the language around the world. When the empire, diminished the Americas continued to spread the English language because of their political power and wealth. The history of the English language is fascinating and follows as events and language changes are pointed out.The Celts were the first Indo-European people to spread across Europe, according The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (304). They emerged from south central Europe and spread throughout most of Europe, reaching the Black Sea and Asia Minor. They migrated to south-west Spain, central Italy, and throughout Britain in a series of wave-like migrations. Their culture was named after a Swiss archaeological site called La Tene.The first group of Celts went to Ireland in the 4th century and later reached Scotland and the Isle of Man. The second group went into southern England and Wales, and later to Brittany, producing a type of Celtic know as British.During the greatest days of the Roman Empire, their law ruled all men from Britain to Egypt, from Spain to the Black Sea, according to A History of Knowledge, (67). The Romans had a fierce respect and love of the law. Everywhere the Romans governed, they took their laws and administered them over the peoples they ruled. In fact, Roman law continues to this day to be an influence upon almost all legal systems in the Western world. The Romans adopted the Greek alphabet, Greek ideas, images and world views. They copied the Macedonian order of battle and Spartan steel weapons and armor. They conquered everywhere they went, building roads, establishing cities, trading, and sharing their culture. The Romans build a transportation network with hundreds of miles of roadway. The roads the Romans built still exist today, after twenty centuries of continuous use.Britain was acquired as a province of the Roman Empire during the century after 14 AD, following the death of Augustus. Words from Latin and Greek languages were adopted into the language. The Greek alphabet, with a few minor changes, is used in the English language today (25). Eventually, the Romans also brought Christianity to Britain. English became a distinct tongue about 449 AD when Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who spoke Germanic dialects, arrived in Celtic-speaking Britain. Groups of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came to aid the Romanized Britons who were besieged by Picts and Scots after the Roman military withdrewin 410 AD (Bright 410). English owes its origin to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who crossed the sea and settled in Britain, according to the Dictionary of Languages, (166). The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms covered most of what is now England by around 600 AD.The West Saxons were the most powerful of the new kingdoms, and the only one able to withstand the Viking invasion in the 9th century AD. It was also in Wessex or the West Saxon kingdom that a written language first flourished. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics divides the history of English into three periods: Old English, Anglo-Saxon from 700 to 1100 AD, Middle English from 1100 to 1500 AD, and Modern English or New English from 1500 to the present (410).Old English (OE) was a highly inflected language. There were suffixes on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and demonstratives. It had an elaborate system of personal interrogative and relative pronouns. The four dialects during the Old English period were Kentish in the southeast, West Saxon in the south and southwest, Mercian in the Midlands, and Northumbrian above the Humber River. West Saxon was the written standard during the reign of Alfred the Great from 871 to 899 AD.Old English morphology included noun forms of singulars and plurals, with five cases, and three genders. Old English personal pronouns have been retained, and have transferred into New English, more of their morphological variations than any other form class.With the influx of the Christian religion at the end of the 6th century, some Latin words were added. About 2,000 Danish words and phrases were also added to Old English. At that time, the combining of native elements in prefixing, suffixing, and compounding was the most characteristic way of expanding the word stock. (Bright, 412)Britain was invaded again during the Viking age of about 750 to 1050. This invasion was mostly by Danes who then settled in central and southern England. Throughout Britain, most of the people spoke Old English and few words from the Celtic influence remained. Middle English began with the 1066 Norman Conquest. French-speaking Normans carried out government and educational duties. The Norman invasion caused a bilingual environment with the middle class speaking both French and English. It brought approximately 10,000 Norman French words into Middle English. The Normans exerted a great influence in food, fashion, education, religion, government, law, and the military.Social and linguistic upheaval changed the language climate in 1215 when King John of England was forced to acknowledge the Magna Carta. According to The Heritage of World Civilizations, this monumental document was a victory of feudal over monarchical power in the sense that it secured the rights of many the nobility, the clergy and the townspeople over the autocratic king; it restored the internal balance of power that had been the English political experience since the Norman conquest. Now the English people could be represented at the highest levels of government. This eventually brought English back into use as the countrys language (446-447).Modern English developed when Caxton established his printing press at Westminister in 1476. New English is a derivative of the dialect of medieval London. It is in the same dialect used by Cha cer and Chancery. During this time Johannes Gutenberg, a German printer invented type molds for casting individual letters. His first book using movable type was printed about 1450 and was printed on rag paper. (The Chinese government is credited withthe discovery of paper in 105 AD, however, Arabs also discovered how to make paper.) Gutenbergs invention made movable type practical because he could produce any quantity of letters and words and place the timeype in a frame. He used rag paper in his printings. His most famous printing is the Gutenberg Bible (Van Doren 154).According to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, all vowels were systematically raised, and the highest were dipthongized between 1400 and 1564. Also, there were 333 strong verbs in Old English. Half of the verbs are still used, although, only 68 are inflected as strong verbs (414). The most important phonological event in modern times is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. It began in late middle English and continued until the eighteenth century. The long vowels of Middle English came to be pronounced in a higher position, while the highest vowels became diphthongs, according to The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1125).With the approach of the 18th century, English became an analytical language. Its rich inflectional system weakened, causing a great increase in the use of prepositional phrases, in new phrasal prepositions (e.g. in spite of, with regard to, on the basis of), and in periphrastic verb construction. For example, did say is the periphrastic past tense of say, and said is the inflected past tense of say. During this period, there was a reduction of inflectional distinctions (Asher 1125). Also, Old English had used both SVO and SOV sentence word orders without requiring a grammatical subject. Middle English used SVO and the subject was obligatory (Bright 413).During the Renaissance, English displaced Latin as the language used in philosophy, science, and other learned arenas. Since English was lexically deficient, it borrowed Latin and Greek words for nouns and adjectives. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics estimated that during the first 150 years of New English, more than 10,000 words from 50 languages were borrowed. It also asserted that the current English language has borrowed foreign words from more than 75 languages with French as the principal donor. The Old English method of using affixes and compounding to form words was displaced in New English by borrowing words as the favorite way of enlarging the English word stock. According to the Dictionary of Languages, the history of Modern English has three important themes. The themes include the extension of English into new subject areas, the spread of English to many parts of the world, and the growth of English into Standard British English.The extension of the language began with the first printed English translation of the Bible in 1525. The Authorized Version of the English Bible was translated in 1611. Finally, the revised Book of Common Prayer was published in 1662. The Bible and the prayer book were in everyday use in Anglican churches until the 1970(s), where they influenced the speaking and writing of English for over 300 years. English took the place of Latin during the 16th century in religion, science, and scholarship. To make this transition possible, vast numbers of loan words have been added to the English language.English has spread to many parts of the world. It became a native language for English-speaking colonies, which are now independent and powerful states. English was spread by British trade and influence. It is the second language of many other states because the ex-colonial countries have no better choice of a national language. English is currently acknowledged as the universal language of diplomacy and science. It is also the language that people usually speak when addressing foreigners, and it is the most popular second language(167).Standard British English is the widely accepted standard language, the language of London and its elite. It is sometimes called the Kings (or Queens) English, BBC English, and Received Pronunciation. This standard use of English has been helped by the spread of education and literacy, the extension of printing and publishing, and recently the influence of radio and television. All these factors have increased the standardization of pronunciation, spelling, and spoken and written style.English shares linguistic features with other Indo-European languages. However, the lexicon, morphology, and phonology are characteristically Germanic. One example of this is that past tense inflections are a Germanic characteristic. Another distantly Germanic characteristic is the fixed primary stress on the first syllable, as expressed in the word brother (Bright 410). An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Language and Languages (AEDLL) describes English as spoken worldwide by a large and ever-increasing number of people. The English language has official status in more than 60 countries. Two diagrams called A Family of Languages and English: the world language follow the bibliography. One shows that English is listed with languages in the West Germanic subgroup, and the other illustrates the use of English in countries around the world today. A summary of the trends allows the prediction that English may become the language of universal communications.BibliographyAsher, R.E. and J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 10 Vols. New York: Pergamon Press, 1994. 1125.Bright, William. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. 4 Vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 410-415.Craig, Albert M., et al., eds., et The Heritage of World Civilizations. 2 Vols. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986. 446-447.Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd Ed. New York: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1997. 298-299.Crystal, David. An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Language and Languages. USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 121-122, 134, 185-186.Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to more than 400 Languages. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1998.166-179.OGrady, William, Michael Dobrovolsky and Mark Aronoff. Contemporary Linguistics. 3rd Ed. New York: St. Martins Press, Inc., 1992. 332.Van Doren, Charles. A History of Knowledge Past, Present, and Future. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. 154.。

AHistoryoftheEnglishLanguage第一篇：A History of the English LanguageA History of the English Language(2011-10-11 23:17:57)转载标签：分类：英语语言概论杂谈A History of the English LanguageThe history of English is a complex and dynamic history.It is often, albeit perhaps too neatly, divided into four periods: Old English, Middle English, Early-Modern English, and Late-Modern English.English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages.Currently, nearly two billion people around the globe understand it.It is the language of aviation, science, computing, international trade, and diplomacy.It holds a crucial place in the cultural, political, and economic affairs in countries all over the world.From its early beginnings as a series of Germanic dialects, English has been remarkable in both its colonizing power and its ability to adopt and amass vocabulary from all over the world.Yet it was nearly wiped out in its early years(Bragg 2003).Old English(500-1100AD) It is nearly impossible to identify the birth of a language, but in the case of English, it is safe to say that it did not exist before the West Germanic tribes settled Britain.During the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., West Germanic tribes from Jutland and southern Denmark(Norseland)invaded the British Isles.These tribes--which included the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes--spoke a Germanic language now termed Old English, a language which is similar to modern Frisian.Out of these tribes, four major dialects of Old English emerged, Northumbrian in the north of England, Merican in the Midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentishin the Southeast.These tribes, along with the English language, may well have been wiped out altogether by Viking raiders if not for a Wessex king named Alfred the Great.After defeating the Vikings, who threatened both the English way of life and its language, Alfred the Great encouraged English literacy throughout his kingdom(McCrum, et al 1986).Before the Germanic tribes arrived, the Celts were the original inhabitants of Britain.When the Germanic tribes invaded England, they pushed the Celt-speaking inhabitants out of England into what is now Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland.The Celtic language survives today in the Gaelic languages, and some scholars speculate that the Celtic tongue might have influenced the grammatical development of English, though the influence would have been minimal(Bryson 1990).Around A.D.850, Vikings or Norsemen made a significant impact on the English language by importing many North Germanic words into the language.From the middle of the ninth century, large numbers of Norse invaders settled in Britain, especially in the northern and eastern areas and, in the eleventh century, a Danish(Norse)King, Canute, ruled England.The North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had a fundamental influence on English.They added basic words such as “that,” “they,” and “them,” and also may have been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of Old English, including the loss of grammatical gender and cases(Bragg 2003).The majority of words that constitute Modern English do not come from Old English roots(only about one sixth of known Old English words have descendants surviving today), but almost all of the 100 most commonly used words in modern English do have Old English roots.Words like “water,” “strong,” “the,” “of,” “a,” “he”“no” and many other basic modern English words derive from Old English(Bragg 2003).Still, the English language we know today is a far cry from its Old English ancestor.This is evidenced in the epic poem Beowulf, which is the best known surviving example of Old English(McCrum, et al 1986), but which must be read in translation to modern English by all but those relative few who have studied the work in the original.The Old English period ended with the Norman Conquest, when the language was influenced to an even greater extent by the French-speaking Normans.The Norman Conquest and Middle English(1100-1500)In 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons.After the invasion, the Norman kings and the nobility spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman, while English continued to be the language of the common people.This class distinction can still be seen in the English language today in words such as “beef” vs.“cow” and “pork” vs.“pig.” The aristocracy commonly ate beef and pork, which are derivatives of Anglo-Norma, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle and hogs, retained the Germanic and ate cow and pig.Many legal terms, such as “indict,” “jury,” and “verdict” also have Anglo-Norman roots because the Normans ruled the courts.It was not uncommon for French words to replace Old English words;for example, “uncle” replaced “eam” and “crime” replaced “firen.” French and English also combined to form new words, such as the French “gentle” and the Germanic “man” forming “gentleman”(Bryson1990).To this day, French-based words hold a more official connotation than do Germanic-based ones.When the English King John lost the province of Normandy to the King of France in 1204, the Normannobles of England began to lose interest in their properties in France and began to adopt a modified English as their native tongue.When the bubonic plague devastated Europe, the dwindling population served to consolidate wealth.The old feudal system crumbled as the new middle class grew in economic and social importance as did their language in relation to Anglo-Norman.The highly inflected system of Old English gave way to, broadly speaking, the same system of English found today which, unlike Old English, does not use distinctive word endings.Unlike Old English, Middle English can be read(albeit with some difficulty)by modern English speakers.By 1362, the linguistic division between the nobility was largely over and the Statue of Pleading was adopted, making English the language of the courts and Parliament.Edward the III became the first king to address Parliament in English in 1362, and the first English government document to be published in English since the Norman Conquest was the Provisions of Oxford.And the most famous literary example of Middle English is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.The Middle English period came to a close around 1500 with the rise of Modern English(McCrum, et al 1986).Early Modern English(1500-1800)The Renaissance brought with it widespread innovation in the English language.The rediscovery of classical scholarship created an influx of classical Latin and Greek words into the language.While Latin and Greek borrowings diversified the language, some scholars adopted Latin terms awkwardly and excessively, leading to the derogatory term “inkhorn.” An important item for scholars, an inkhorn was simply a horn pot that held ink for quills...but later it became a deprecatory term for pedantic writers who borrowed obscure and opulent termssuch as “revoluting” and “ingent affability”(Bragg 2003).The invention of the printing press also marked the division from Old English to Modern English as books became more widespread and literacy increased.Soon publishing became a marketable occupation and books written in English were often more popular than books in Latin.The printing press also served to standardize English.The written and spoken language of London already influenced the entire country, and with the influence of the printing press, London English soon began to dominate.Indeed, London standard became widely accepted, especially in more formal context.Soon English spelling and grammar were fixed and the first English dictionary was published in 1604(Bryson 1990).In the fifteenth century, the Great Vowel Shift--a series of changes in English pronunciation--further changed the English language.These purely linguistic sound changes moved the spoken language away from the so-called “pure” vowel sounds which still characterize many Continental languages today.Consequently, the phonetic pairings of most long and short vowel sounds were lost, resulting in the oddities of English pronunciation and obscuring the relationship of many English words and their foreign roots.The Great Vowel Shift was rather sudden and the major changes occurred within a century, though the shift is still in process and vowel sounds are still shortening, albeit much more gradually.The causes of the shift are highly debated.Some scholars argue that such a shift occurred due to the “massive intake of Romance loanwords so that English vowels started to sound more like French loanwords.Other scholars suggest it was the loss of inflectional morphology that started the shift”(Bragg 2003).Late-Modern English(1800-Present)The pronunciation, grammar, and spelling of Late-Modern English are essentially the same as Early-Modern English, but Late-Modern English has significantly more words due to several factors.First, discoveries during the scientific and industrial revolutions created a need for a new vocabulary.Scholars drew on Latin and Greek words to creat e new words such as “oxygen,” “nuclear,” and “protein.” Scientific and technological discoveries are still ongoing and neologisms continue to this day, especially in the field of electronics and computers.Just as the printing press revolutionized both spoken and written English, the new language of technology and the Internet places English in a transition period between Modern and Postmodern.Second, the English language has always been a colonizing force.During the medieval and early modern periods, the influence of English quickly spread throughout Britain, and from the beginning of the seventeenth century on, English began to spread throughout the world.Britain’s maritime empire and military influence on language(especially after WWII)has consequently been significant.Britain’s complex colonization, exploration, and overseas trade both imported loanwords from all over the world(such as “shampoo,” “pajamas,” and “yogurt”)and also led to the development of new varieties of English, each with its own nuances of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.Significantly, one of England’s colonies, America, created what is known as American English and, in some respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than the modern Standard British English(or the modern Queen’s English)because many Americanisms are originally British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost at home(e.g., “trash” for “rubbish”).Native American andSpanish vocabulary have also been a great influence on American English, importing or adopting such words as “raccoon,” “canoe,” “mustang,” “ranch,” and “vigilante”(Bragg 2003).Global EnglishRecently, English has become a lingua franca, a global language that is regularly used and understood by many countries where English is not the first/native language.In fact, when Pope John Paul II went to the Middle East to retrace Christ’s footsteps and addressed Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the Pope didn’t speak Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, or his native Polish;instead, he spoke in English.In fact, English is used in over 90 countries, and it is the working language of the Asian trade group ASEAN and of 98 percent of international research physicists and chemists.It is also the language of computing, international communication, diplomacy, and navigation.Over one billion people worldwide are currently learning English, making it unarguably a global language.--Posted January 27, 2008ReferencesBragg, Melvyn.2003.The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language.New York: Arcade Publishing.Bryson, Bill.1990.Mother T ongue: English and How it Got That Way.New York: Perennial.McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.1986.The Story of English.New York: Viking.。

The history of the English languageThe history of the English language is divided into three periods: The period from 450 to 1150 is known as the Old English. It is described as the period of full inflections（词尾变化）, since during most of this period the case endings of the noun, the adjective and the conjunction（结合）of the verbs were not weakened. Old English was a highly inflected language. It had a complete system（体系）of declensions（变格）with four cases and conjunctions. So Old English grammar differs from Modern English grammar in these aspects（方面）.The period from 1150 is known as the Middle English period. It is known as the period of reducing inflections. This period was marked by important changes in the English language. The Norman Conquest was the cause of these changes. The change of this period had a great effect on both grammar and vocabulary. In this period many Old English words were lost, but thousands of words borrowed from French and Latin appeared in the English vocabulary. In the Middle English period grammatical gender（性）of nouns disappeared, completely replaced by the natural gender.The modern English period extends from 1500 to the present day. The Early modern English period extends from 1500 to 1700. The chief effect of this time was great humanistic（人文主义的）movement of the Renaissance. The influence of Latin and Greek on English was great. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are a period of rapid expansion（扩张）for the English. Vocabulary in the history of the English language.The development of the English language in America can be separated into three periods: The first period extends from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 to the end of colonial（殖民地的）times. In this period the population in America numbered about four million people, 90 percent of whom came from Britain. The second period covers the expansion of the original（最初的）thirteen colonies. This time may be said to close with the Civil War, about 1860. This period was marked by the arrival of the new immigrants（移民）from Ireland and Germany. The third period, since the Civil War, is marked by an important change in the source from which the European immigrants came. They came from northern and southern Europe in large numbers.As time went on, the English language gradually changed on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans adopted（接纳）many words from foreign languages and invented a large number of new words to meet their various needs.American English began in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the 17th century the English language was brought to North America by colonists from England. They used the language spoken in England, that is, Elizabethan English, the language used by Shakespeare, Milton and Banyan. At first the language stayed the same as the language used in Britain, but slowly the language began to change. Sometimes, the English spoken in America changed but sometimes the language spoken in the place stayed the same, while the language in England changed.Following the American independence, famous persons like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Noah Webster began to consider that the country should have a language of its own. English in America has developed a character（特点）of its own, reflecting（反映）the life and the physical and social environment（环境）of the American people.。