The main three periods of history of English.
Scholars have divided the history of English into three main periods, representing very different stages of the language: 1. The old English period extends from the arrival of the Germanic tribes in Britain in the second half of the 5th century (the year 449) to the end of 11th century (1066 – the Norman Conquest).
2. The Middle English period lasts from the 12th century (after 1066) till 1475, the year of introduction of printing.
3. The New English period from the 16th century and up to now (early new English 15-17 centuries, i.e. to the Age of Shakespeare) and Modern New English (from 17th up to now).
Borrowings in the English language versus native words.
Borrowing words from other languages is characteristic of English throughout its history More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms. It is also characterisitic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.
English history is very rich in different types of contacts with other countries, that is why it is very rich in borrowings. The Roman invasion, the adoption of Cristianity, Scandinavian and Norman conquests of the British Isles, the development of British colonialism and trade and cultural relations served to increase immensely the English vocabulary. The majority of these borrowings are fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar, spelling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.
English continues to take in foreign words, but now the quantity of borrowings is not so abundunt as it was before. All the more so, English now has become a «giving» language, it has become Lingva franca of the twentieth century.
Borrowings can be classified according to different criteria:
a) according to the aspect which is borrowed,
b) according to the degree of assimilation,
c) according to the language from which the word was borrowed.
(In this classification only the main languages from which words were borrowed into English are described, such as Latin, French, Italian. Spanish, German and Russian.)
East Germanic languages
According to historical tradition, at least some of the Germanic tribes migrated to the mouth of the Vistula from Scandinavia. Little is known of Gepidic, Rugian, and Burgundian; some knowledge of Vandalic, Visigothic, and, especially, Ostrogothic is provided by the names recorded in Greek and Latin writings. The only East Germanic language on which there is extensive information is the Gothic—more specifically, Visigothic—that was spoken along the western shore of the Black Sea about the middle of the 4th century ce.
Knowledge of Gothic is derived primarily from the remains of a Bible translation made for the Visigoths living along the lower Danube by Ulfilas, a Visigothic bishop of the Arian church, who lived during the 4th century. The surviving manuscripts of this translation, which are not originals but later copies thought to have been written in northern Italy during the period of Ostrogothic rule (493–554), include considerable portions of the New Testament. The best-known manuscript is the Codex Argenteus, written in silver and gold letters on purple parchment and containing (in 188 leaves remaining from an original 330 or 336) portions of the four Gospels. Closely related to these biblical manuscripts are eight leaves containing fragments of a commentary (called the Skeireins in Gothic) on the Gospel According to John. Minor nonbiblical texts include a fragment of a calendar, two deeds containing some Gothic sentences, and a 10th-century Salzburg manuscript that gives the Gothic alphabet, a few Gothic words with Latin transliteration, and some phonetic remarks with illustrative examples.
In the 4th and 5th centuries Gothic (Visigothic and Ostrogothic) must have spread to some degree, along with the conquering Goths, throughout much of southern Europe; but there is no evidence for its survival in Italy after the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and in Spain it is doubtful that the Visigoths retained their language until the Arab conquest. In the 9th century the German monk Walafrid Strabo mentions that Gothic was still being used in some churches near the lower Danube. After that time Gothic seems to have survived only among the Goths of the Crimean Peninsula, who were last mentioned in the middle of the 16th century by a Flemish diplomat named Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, who, while on a mission to Constantinople in 1560–62, collected a number of words and phrases showing that their language was still essentially a form of Gothic.
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