Evolution Of English

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Name : Nur Sabrina Balqis Binti Kamal Baharom. Assignment: Evolution of English language. Course: Introduction to the History of English. English language is one of the wide world languages. The total number of English speakers may exceed one billion. The English language is like a vast flea market of words, handed down, borrowed, and created over more than 2000 years. And it is still changing, borrowing and trading. This is because there are so many ways for words enter the language such as invaders, migrants, artworks, sciences terms, and technology and so on. The stages of English are old English (446- 1100 c.E ), Middle English ( 1100-1500), Early Modern English and Modern English ( 1500- present). Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms of England. English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo Frisian dialects that brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from different part of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classic Latin and it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than Modern English in many aspects including grammar. Nouns came in numerous declensions with deep parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Besides that, verbs came in nine conjugations that refer to the modification of a verb from its basic form. Old English is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive with exception of limited epigraphic evidence. In the Middle English, 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy which part of modern French, invaded and conquered England. The new conquerors Normans brought a kind of French which became the language of the Royal Court, the ruling, and business classes. In the 14th century, English became dominant in Britain again, yet many French words
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