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CHAPTER 13
History of English: Old to Early Modern English
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter can be used in various ways, depending on the course in
which the text is used, its place in the broader curriculum, and the
instructor’s interests, orientations, and expertise.
In a departmental curriculum that requires a single language course for its
majors, the chapter is particularly useful, as the instructor cannot assume
that students know much about the history of English. It can be taught as a
free-standing chapter (like the chapters on phonology, morphology, syntax,
etc.) at the end of a twelve- to fourteen-week term, depending on the
number of other chapters assigned and the amount of time spent on each.
In such circumstances, Chapters 13 and 14 together can help you to
summarize the term’s work and point to the likelihood of further change,
development, and variation in the future of English. If many students who
take the course plan to become secondary school teachers, this approach is
recommended.
It is also possible to assign the chapter, along with Chapters 1 and 2,
toward the beginning of a course on Modern English, so that students have
historical development in mind throughout the term and a broader
perspective on technical issues. You can choose to discuss the chapter
fully then, but the exercises generally require knowledge of earlier
chapters. We recommend using the exercises later in the term, in
conjunction with other chapters, and reiterating material from Chapter 13
whenever it illustrates problems discussed in other chapters. For instance,
Exercise 13.2 works very well in conjunction with Chapter 4, and Exercise
13.1 works well after students have worked through Chapters 4 through 6.
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This approach works particularly well if an instructor spends the rest of
the term on Chapters 3 through 8 or 9 and ends by requiring students to
complete a big, time-consuming project in discourse or stylistics. It also
helps if the instructor is well versed in the history of English and uses it
well on an impromptu basis while discussing other linguistic topics.
In some departments, students are expected to take both Modern English
(or something approximating it) and History of the English Language. In
such circumstances, Chapter 13 may prove an occasion to connect the two
courses.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Explain what historians of English mean by “the beginnings” of
English and why they typically date it to the fifth century.
• Account for Latin influence on English during the three periods
covered in the chapter.
• Account for the influence of Old Norse on English during the late Old
and early Middle English periods.
• Account for the influence of French on Middle English.
• Outline how Middle English dialects varied from one another.
• Describe the rise and increasing prestige of Standard English.
• Describe and explain the gradual transition of English from a synthetic
to an analytic language.
• Describe the relationships among Old, Middle, and Early Modern
English in terms of continuity of change.
• Describe the Great Vowel Shift and its importance to the history of
English.
• Outline the sequence of significant political and cultural events that
mark the historical development of English.
• Outline the sequence of political and cultural events and developments
that indicate or effect change in language attitudes.
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• Explain the relationship between Modern English, as described
throughout the book, and its historical antecedents.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
ablaut
analogy
gender
grammatical gender
hypotactic
natural gender
orthography
paratactic
Considered in sequence, this chapter introduces very few new terms. If an
instructor chooses to use the chapter early in a course, however, students
may need “vocabulary support,” whether in class discussion, use of the
glossary at the end of the text, or handouts. The smaller the class, the
easier it is to provide this support, and the instructor will have to accept
that some students will be rattled at first because they don’t know all the
terms they encounter.
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Many English majors enjoy history, and there is a historical orientation
throughout the book, intensified and extended in Chapters 13 and 14.
In most settings, the story of English engages students and orients
them in the more technical linguistic chapters.
• Many students resist learning dates, names, or facts about earlier
stages of English, and the instructor must determine the extent to
which a concrete framework will serve students in the course, in the
English curriculum, or in work or school after graduating from college.
Obviously, the text is not designed for courses on the history of
English. Most instructors using the text will not emphasize the details,
but will use the chapter instead to suggest the historical context of
Modern English.
• As noted earlier, some students find it difficult to accept that change
and variation are natural, even essential, to language. Whether an
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instructor uses it at the outset or at the conclusion of a course, Chapter
13 allows students to consider current change and variation in the
context of the past, where it is less threatening. The instructor can
always ask of a prescriptive student, “How is this different from
variation among Middle English dialects?” or “Is this loss of an
inflectional ending simply one more change in the transition from
synthetic to analytic structure in English?” These questions, by the
way, are not necessarily rhetorical.
• The Great Vowel Shift will confuse many students. The instructor will
need to determine how integral the subject is to the course and how
much time should be spent on clarifying the shifts. If the class has
already been introduced to the GVS during discussion of Chapter 3,
reintroduction of it here will more likely be successful. Students
should illustrate the GVS aloud together in class—judging the relative
positions of vowels in the mouth is really the only way to grasp the
nature and significance of the shift.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES/INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
In a small class, with independent students, or with a syllabus in need of
major graded assignments, some of the exercises at the end of Chapter 13,
especially Exercises 13.1 and 13.4, are useful homework activities. But
they are also useful for in-class work: for instance, Exercise 13.1 is
essentially a format for discussion.
Exercise 13.4 allows for in-class work after students have completed the
assignment as homework. We have used this assignment with a class of
sixty or so students and provided a different passage to each student—that
is, ten passages for each of the text types (poetry, Web text, nonfiction
prose, etc.) represented in the assignment. After completing the
assignment, students meet in groups to compare their results, first in six
groups of ten by text type (all those with passages from poetry, all those
with passages from fiction, etc.), and then in ten groups of six, one student
for each text type. The class then reconvenes as a whole and discusses the
relation between text type and retention of Old English elements in
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Modern English. Thus the exercise, when supplemented by additional
work in class, allows students to connect material in Chapters 4, 6, 8, 9,
(potentially 11 and 12, though this requires more careful selection of texts),
13, and 14.
EXTRA RESOURCES
We particularly recommend David Crystal’s The Stories of English (New
York: Overlook Press, 2004), a relatively recent history of English with
fresh ideas and little-known facts useful to an instructor teaching this
chapter. Seth Lerer’s Inventing English (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007) provides engaging close readings of early English literary
texts, which will be especially appealing to English majors. The multi-
volume Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Richard M.
Hogg, and the Oxford History of the English Language, edited by Lynda
Mugglestone, are both very useful resources, as is A Companion to the
History of the English Language (Blackwell, 2008), edited by Haruko
Momma and Michael Matto. There are several excellent Web sites
relevant to this chapter as well, including:
• Raymond Hickey’s exceptional “Studying the History of English
(SHE)” Web site, a comprehensive and well-organized site covering
all periods of the language’s history http://www.uni-due.de/SHE/.
• Edwin Duncan’s equally extensive History of the English Language
Home Page: http://pages.towson.edu/duncan/helhome.html.
• The University of Michigan’s Middle English Compendium, which
includes the full text of the Middle English Dictionary, a hyper-
bibliography of texts cited in the Dictionary, and full texts of many
Middle English works, some of them reproduced as photo-facsimiles
of the manuscripts: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/.
The first two sites have sound files to illustrate pronunciation and sections
on additional resources. All three sites contain material ideal for display in
high-tech classrooms.