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e. English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern ...
Mar 17, 2009 · It also affected spelling greatly, for various reasons. The most obvious is that the use of English in written documents was greatly reduced. English was no longer the dominant language for law and government, so the tendency toward standardization for Anglo-Saxon writing was essentially stopped in its tracks.
Jan 15, 2011 · As concerns the contractions that we write with apostrophes today, it is likely that they, too, were more often fully pronounced in 1800 than now. On the other hand, there are some written contractions that we do not use any more, such as 'tis and 'twere. That is because there are many other processes going on in the development of language all ...
- [Edited] What is contraction? In all languages I know, there is a general tendency to contract existing words in speech. I will comment on contract...
- Here's a post on this very subject by a professor of linguistics: “ True Grit isn't true ” by Mark Liberman. He did a quick little “Breakfast Exper...
- In the 19th Century, I very much doubt whether TLAs * were used anything like as much as they are now - they are definitely a more recent phenomen...
Rothwell has called Anglo-French 'the missing link' because many etymological dictionaries seem to ignore the contribution of that language in English and because Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French can explain the transmission of words from French into English and fill the void left by the absence of documentary records of English (in the main ...
- Great Britain and Ireland
Mar 28, 2024 · Old English language, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages. Learn more about the Old English language in this article.
May 25, 2022 · The first mention of Received Pronunciation. RP didn’t exist in 16th-century England. People in the South-East, around the capital, of course, considered their way of speaking to be superior. By the end of the 18th century, the accent used there by the upper classes had become the pronunciation to imitate if one wanted to appear cultured.
Nov 26, 2021 · So that is how Old English evolved into Modern English. The Norman invasion brought a French influence and the church brought a Latin influence into the originally West Germanic language, and they merged over time as the trilingual population began to mix and become Middle English. Middle English then evolved into Modern English through the ...
