Manuscript Studies
Medieval and Early Modern

VI. An Outline History of the English Language

• Old English: ca. 500 to ca. 1100.
  In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England; as a consequence French was the dominant language in England until the latter part of the fourteenth century. English, reduced to the language of the lower (and illiterate) classes, underwent rapid and profound changes, which turned it into Middle English; but this period of rapid change is also a period from which we have no documents: our first text in what is definitely Middle rather than Old English is Layamon's Brut of the late twelfth century, so although the invasion of 1066 is the principal cause of the changes, these changes are not recognizable until the beginning of the twelfth century.

• Middle English: ca. 1100 to ca. 1450.

• Early Modern: ca. 1450 to ca. 1800.

• Later Modern: ca. 1800 to the present.

Orthographic variability is the norm in Old and Middle English: spelling is purely phonetic until about the fifteenth century. Partly under the influence of printers' practices, spelling becomes more stable and "traditional" beginning in the fifteenth century (and many of the peculiarities of the modern English spelling system--the quantities of "silent" letters in words like "knight," for instance--have to do with the fossilization of fifteenth-century spellings), but it is Samuel Johnson's and Noah Webster's dictionaries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which "fix" British and American spelling systems with their differences and idiosyncracies.

Old English is, relatively, a highly inflected language, with consequent looseness of syntax. One aspect of the history of English through Middle to Modern English is the gradual loss of inflectional endings and the correspondent fixing of syntactic structures into a quite rigid Subject-Verb-Object order.

Punctuation as we know it is an Early Modern development, based upon medieval systems of "pointing" texts.