Old English vs middle English vs modern English
Old English, middle English and modern English are the classification of English language. English is being termed as the world’s third most widely spoken native language following Mandarin, Chinese and Spanish. There is one significant fact that would be known to many of us that English has become the official language of so many other countries where it is not considered as the native language. This is the popularity of this language that sets it apart from many others being spoken all around the globe. This is the reason; it is also being termed as a global language which is being used in all the sects of life. But, with this, comes another interesting fact that modern English which gets to be spoken in this modern era tends to be completely different from that which was spoken in the olden times. Now, the modern speakers of this language can not recognize the older version of this language. and this is due top the fact that this language has a history of around 1700 years where it can be classified in to three categories, the old English, the middle English and the modern English.
English language has been bifurcated in to three most important periods ranging from old English to Middle English and then to lastly, the Modern English. English started its journey when it was first brought to the Britain by the Germanic invaders. These three periods of English language can be classified in the years as following…
Old English (450AD- 1100AD)
Middle English (1100AD-1500AD)
Modern English (1500 AD- till present day)
Old English
The origin of the English language lies in the West Germanic languages which were brought to the Britain when Germanics invaded this great continent. That language was an assortment of different dialects because there were three most important tribes that invaded Britain that time. Anglos, Saxons and Jutes were these tribes and language dialects spoken by these became the dialects for the original English language.
Middle English
In the eleventh century, there were various Norman conquests going in the region of Britain. And, this brought a huge difference in the development of the English language. The duke of Normandy, William the conqueror conquered Britain in 1066 and with this conquest, many newer impressions were got fixed on the English language. The most significant and important one was the French language impression which got mixed with the English language being spoken at that time. This is the reason; the modern English of today can be seen having its roots in French language.
Modern English
Right from the fifteenth century, this language took a great shift. This flux could be seen in the context of vowel pronunciation. The vowel pronunciation became shorter and thus, it took the form which is now reining in most of the countries in this modern era. With that vowel shift, started the classical renaissance period, the Romantic Movement and after that period, came the industrial revolution in Britain which added more towards the final evolution of English langue. Though, the changes which came into the English language after the industrial revolution gave it the name of the late modern English language which tends to have a more varied vocabulary as compared to the early version of modern English.
Hence, through this journey, English has become what is being spoken as native and official language in most of the countries around the whole world. In Anglo-Saxon, words tended to have inflectional endings that depicted their persona in the sentence. The word order in Anglo-Saxon sentence was not as essential to ascertain what the sentence implied as it’s now. In Middle English, several of these endings were dropped off, and the role a word represented in the sentence was ascertained by word order, like it is nowadays. There are differences naturally, but as a whole a Middle English phrase structure is similar to a Modern English sentence. Old English also had grammatic factors that other two have forgotten.
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