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2.1 Old English
Old English is prior the beginnings of English, the inhabitants of Great Britain spoke primarily Celtic languages. During the later part of the 5th century,
three tribes invaded England from Western Germany and Denmark. These tribes spoke a similar language that, over says, develop into Old English.
There are three about Old English
1 The Indo-Eorupean languages
The Indo-Eorupean languages do certain things in much the same way. For example, they share some basic vocabulary. Consider these words for ―father‖ :
Old English :
foe Latin
: pater
Greek :
pater Sanskrit
: pitr
We can easily see the resemblance among the latin, greek and sanskrit words. We may begin to understand why the Old English word looks different
from the others when we compare these words for ―foot‖: Old English
: fot
Latin :
pedem Greek
: poda
Sanskrit :
padam If we suspect that Latin
―p‖ will always correspond to Old English ―f‖, we are right, more or less. Torecognize that the Indo-Eorupean languages share a
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good bit of vocabulary, through the changes that all languages go through often bring it about that the same word looks quite different in different languages.
2 The Germanic languages
Perhaps the most important development that distinguishes the Germanic languages from others in the Indo-European family is the one that produced the
difference, illustrated above, between the ―p‖ of Latin and the ―f‖ of Old English
faeder.
3 West Germanic and Low German
The West Germanic languages differ from North and East Germanic in number of features which are not very striking in themselves, but quite numerous.
For example, the consonant [z] became [r] in North and West Germanic. Low German is defined in part by something that did not happen to it. This
non- event is the ‗high german consonan shift‘, which alterd the sounds of high
german dialects as radically as Grimm‘s Law had altered the sounds of Germanic. Students of Modern German will recognize the effects of the High German
consonant shift in such pairs as English eat and German essen, and English sleep and German schlafen. Another important difference between high German and
Low German is that the Low languages did not distinguish person in plural verbs. In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than Modern
English is. That is,there were more case endings for nouns, more person and number and number endings for verbs, a more complicated pronoun system,
various endings for adjectives, and so on. Old English nouns had four cases- nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. Adjectives had five- all these and an
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instrumental case besides. Present day English has only two case for nouns- common case and possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all. On
the other hand, we now use a more rigid word order and more structure words prepostions, auxilieries, and the like to express relationships than Old English
did.
2.2 Middle English
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