continuation of character of English

Latin	Greek	Sanskrit	English
pater	pater	pitar	father
pedam	poda	padam	foot
decem	deka	dasam	ten

est            esti              asti               is

These sets of words seem to have diverged from a common source, a common ancestor, a pre-historic original. This common ancestor we call the proto Indo-European from which were descended most of the languages of Europe, Northern India and Persia. This is only a hypothesis, but it is had been a useful starting point. As it goes, the 'Indo-European' spoken about 3500 - 3000 B.C. by a loosely linked group of communities living on the plains around the Black Sea. These people split up into several groups and moved in different directions in search of greener pastures and better conditions of living. They spread both East and West and grew heterogeneous with hardly any chance of meeting and mingling again. The common tongue which each group carried with it was modified by mixing with non-Indo-European languages, and got progressively differentiated from the speech of other groups, acquiring individual characteristics in tune with the changing needs and environments. This process went on, and by about 2000 B.C. there were eight clearly recognizable sets of languages, all descendants of the proto Indo-European. On the basis of their geographical dispersion, they fall into two broad classes, the Eastern and the Western. The former comprises

Indo-Iranian Armenian Albanian Balto-Slavic

The language sets of the latter are Hellenic Italic

Primitive Germanic Celtic

An the Indo-European, the numeral 100 was denoted by the term kmiom. While the languages of the Western group have retained the original /k/ sound {kentun), Sanskrit has changed it to an sh / sound. For this reason the Western languages are called Centum (Kentum) languages and the Eastern Satem languages)

The languages of the Indo-European are distinguished from the rest by two characteristics: (1) They lend themselves to description in terms of what were called 'Parts of Speech' by the Greeks (noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, preposition, conjunction, adverb, interjection), and (2) they all share a corpus of fundamental words such as those denoting family relationships, elementary domestic materials and familiar animals.

What follows is a diagrammatic representation of the genealogy of the Indo-European family of languages, with brief descriptive notes on each member.

1. Indo-Iranian

Indian: The Indian branch, Vedic Sanskrit, dates to about 1500 B.C. This language is found in the four vedas and other prose writings of the age. By the fourth century B.C., it developed into Classical Sanskrit in which were wrfcten the Mahabarata and the Ramayana and a large body of drama, poetry and philosophical works. From the colloquial dialects-of this tongue called Prakrits, there evolved Pali, and the modern languages of India-Bengali, Mahrati, Punjabi, etc.-and Sinhalese.

Iranian: This branch comprises Avestan and Old Persian. Modern Persian, Afghan, Beluchi, Kurdish, etc., were descended from Old Persian.

2. Armenian

Having been spoken in a small area south of the Caucusus mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea, it is known to us from about the fifth century A.D. through a translation of the Bible.

3. Hellenic

The common Greek. The earliest literature in this language, the two epics of Homer, goes back to the ninth or the tenth century B.C.

4. Albanian

A small branch found on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, it dates back to the 15th century.

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5. Italic

The ancestor of Latin. The principal descendants J Latin, known as Romanic or Romance languages, arl French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian.

6. Balto Slavic

The East European set. It comprises Bulgariarl Serbian, Czech, Russian and Polish.

7. Celtic

The Celtic tongues - Walsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelid Gallic and Manx- once spread across the greater part o| Western Europe, have now shrunk to the remote corners of France and the British isles.

8. Primitive Germanic (or Teutonic)

The immediate ancestor of English. The languages ol this set expand into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. The principal East Germanil branch is Gothic, preserved now in a translation of parts <J the Bible made by Bishop Ulfilas. North Germanic (alsl called Scandinaviam or Old Norse) includes Swedisll Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic; Norwegian ceased to bj a literary language in the 14th century. West Germanic spll into High German, Low German and Anglo-Friesian. Higl German has developed into Modern German. Thd descendant of Low German is Dutch. Old Friesian and Old English constitute the Anglo-Friesian subgroup. With the decline of power of the Frisians, once a great sea-faring people, their language has now been reduced to the positior of a dialect in Friesland. The history of the English language

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I begins with the settling of the North Germanic tribes, Angles, I Saxons and Jutes, in Britain.\

I b.     The Distinguishing Traits of the Germanic Family of Languages

The Germanic languages are marked by certain I characteristics which distinguish them from other Indo-I European groups. They are:

I 1.      The Great Consontant Shift, I 2.      The Verbal System, and I 3.      The Teutonic Accent.

1. The Great Consonant Shift (or Grimm's Law)

It is also called the First Sound Shifting in order to I distinguish it from another sound shifting which occurred later in Old High German.

Erasmus Rask, a Danish scholar, noticed a regular and systematic shifting of certain Indo-European consonants to certain other consonants in the Germanic languages. Following up his suggestion, the German philologist, Jacob Grimm, in the year 1822, formulated an explanation which systematically accounted for the correspondences between these consonants in the Indo-European tongues such as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and those in the Germanic languages. The formulation has come to be known as Grimm's Law.

This sound-shift, the most distinctive feature of the Germanic languages, might have occurred before the

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primitive Germanic split into East, West and North, and al a result of the migration of non-Germanic tribes intJ Germany. All these changes, obviously, might have takel place gradually over a period of time. The principal sounJ changes are:

I.              Indo-European aspirated voiced stops (bh, dh, ghl
become voiced stops (b, d, g) in the Germanil
languages.

II.           Indo-European voiced stops (b, d, g) become shifteJ
to corresponding voiceless ones (p, t, k) in thJ
Germanic languages.

III.        Indo-European voiceless (p, t, k) become changed;
to the corresponding voiceless fricative sounds (f, 61
h) in Germanic.

Verner's Law

However, it was found that Grimm's Law did not account for all the correspondences between the other Indo-European and the Germanic consonants. There were certain apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law. For example, between the pair, Latin centum and English hundred, the shift from c to h is in consonance with Grimm's formulation, but the shift from t to d was not, according to Grimm's Law. it shoulB have been from t to θ, The same deficiency could be seen between the pair, Sanskrit stigh and Old English stige Grimm himself was puzzled by the existence of such pairs of words. Because sound laws do not admit of any exceptions, it was realized that some combinative factor was at work by which the voiceless open consonants became voiced.

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Forty years later in 1875, Karl Verner, a disciple of Grimm, succeeded in solving this puzzle. He discovered that the variable Indo-European accent was responsible for the voicing of what should have been voiceless open sounds. This discovery he formulated into a law which came to be called Verner's Law. According to this law, when the Indo-European accent was not on the vowel immediately preceding the consonant in question, such voiceless open sounds became voiced in Germanic. This explains the shifting of the Latin voiceless t (in Centum) to the voiced d (in hundred) in English. Thus when the accent is on the syllable preceding the consonant in question, Grimm's Law operates, and when the accent is on the following syllable, it is in accordance with Verner's Law.

Verner, by formulating this law, vindicated the claim of regularity for the sound changes and thereby established that sound laws do not admit of exceptions.

2 (a). The Verbal System

Another distinctive feature ofthe Germanic languages is their verbal system.

The Indo-European had an elaborate and complex system of verb-conjugation, with a multitude of forms by which to indicate the time or tense of the action. Thus one series of forms indicated the progressive aspect of a verb; a second series indicated the perfective aspect; a third series the momentaneous aspect; and so on. But the Germanic verb has only two tenses, a present and a past, which are indicated by the primary forms of the verb. The other tenses and time references are shown of bringing in auxiliary verbs, compound tenses, etc. This tendency on the part of the Germanic languages has resulted in an increasing use of

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auxiliary verbs and a multiplying of compound tenses. While  it has facilitated an astonishing flexibility and subtlety of  expression, there is, at times, the scope for looseness of construction in the language.

2 (b). Vowel-Gradation or Ablaut

This is another striking phenomenon witnessed in the Teutonic languages. Ablaut is the term used by Jacob Grimm, a pioneer in Teutonic philology, to indicate a certain distancing of vowel sounds in a class of verbs in the Germanic languages. Basing himself on the criterion of tense changes, Grimm has divided the Germanic verbs into two classes, strong ve.bs and weak verbs. Strong verbs are those which indicate their tense according to a regular series of vowel-variation which is called Ablaut-series and which is now known in English as vowel-gradation. This vowel    gradation or alternation of vowels for grammatical purposes was a legacy of the Proto Indo-European, and it could be seen in modern forms such as rise, rose, risen; write, wrote, written; and drive, drove, driven. The change of tense in  these verbs is shown by changes of vowels in a series, with the consonantal framework in each form remaining the same. Only primary verbs, that too those which denote simple actions, not those derived from the forms of other words, have originally lent themselves to be classes as strong  verbs.

Weak verbs, a distinctive contribution of the primitive Germanic, according to Grimm, are those which show their tense not by vowel gradation but by adding a suffix (d or t) to their end, as in love, loved, loved ox walk; walked, walked. These verbs do not change their root-vowel in conjugation, and they are secondary or derived in the sense that they

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denote actions derived from other words (for example, to love derived from the noun love).

Vowel-gradation remained a well-marked phenomenon in Old English, serving as a principal means of expressing distinctions of time} Even though it has gradually become a relic of the past, in modern English^we have now some of the best examples of the Ablaut-series; (i, a, u) as could be seen in sing, sang, sung; drink, drank, drunk; ring, rang, rung; swim, swam, swum; begin, began, begun and so on. Again, it is possible to see several of the modern verbs as having been originally rooted in the (i, a, u) conjugational behaviour. Examples are rin (ran, run); swil {swell), swal, swul, etc.

Notwithstanding, the distinction between strong and weak verbs no longer holds good, and in several cases it has become blurred. We hold, for good reasons, that the Modern English verbs buy and dig were strong verbs but historically they are weak. Again, today, the strong verbs present a decayed order, and there has been a gradual but steady tendency to get the strong verbs merge into the ranks of the weak verbs which vastly outnumber the former. With all this said, the strong verb conjugation is one of the sources of the richness, complexity and variety of the Germanic languages of which English is a member.

3. The Teutonic Accent

It is another Teutonic characteristic of far-reaching historical significance. In the parent Indo-European, the accent was free and variable; it could be on different syllables of the same word depending upon context and meaning. But the Germanic languages developed a tendency to fix the stress of a word on its root syllable or as

38

near to its beginning as possible. The result of this tendency was that the syllables at the end of the word tended to be weakened and blurred in utterance and ultimately lost. This led to the gradual reduction and loss of inflections in the Germanic languages, which is a marked characteristics of the English language./That today English is an analytical language with a minimum of inflectional ending (plural, gender, past tense, possessive, derivative nouns, verbs, etc.) is largely due to the Teutonic accent.

We could profitably conclude this section with the words of Barber (1964: 116)

These, th >n are some of the main developments in Proto-Germanic : simplification of the inflexional system of Proto Indo-European; the introduction of the weak declension of the adjective; the introduction of the weak verbs; the great consonant change known as Grimm's Law, and the smaller change known as Verner's Law; the change from predominantly pitch to predominatly stress accent; the fixing of the accent on the first syllable of the word; and of course a host of lesser changes, both in grammar and in pronunciation.

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3. LANDMARKS IN THE HISTORY OF

ENGLISH & PHILOLOGY AND

LITERATURE

ABSTRACT

1.      (A. The Three Phases in the History of English : Old English (A.D. 450 - 1150) Middle English (1150 - 1500) Modern English (1500 - Present day)

B.        The Characteristics of Old English

The invasion of Britain by Angles. Saxons and Jutes

Anglo-Saxon (Old English)

The dialects of Old English (Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish)

The dominant position of West Saxon and its becoming the literary standard

The Characteristics of Old English

C.        The Characteristics of Middle English

The Conquest of England by William, the Duke of Normandy

The influence of French on English

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English becoming heterogeneous

The dialects of Middle English (Northern, East Midland, West Midland, and Southern)

East Midland dialect becoming the standard -the factors contributing to it.

The grammatical changes D. The Characteristics of Modern English

The Renaissance and the Reformation

Their impact on the language

The Standard English. II.      Philology and Literature

The historical relationship between the two

I. A. The Three Phases in the History of English

As far as the English language is concerned. It has an unbroken history of about fifteen hundred years, extending from the fifth century to the present. Historians of this 4anguage distinguish three main stages in its growth and development. The first stage is the Old English (or the Anglo-Saxon) period, spanning over nearly seven hundred years from A.D. 450 to A.D. 1150. The second is called the Middle English period extending from 1150 to 1500. And the third phase from 1500 onwards is called the Modern English period. These dates are based on A. C. Baugh's A History of Che English Language (1959 : 59). C.L. Wrenn goes in for slightly different points of time basing himself on certain

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other landmarks in the history of the English language. His dates are :

Old English      -      the close of the seventh

century to 1100

Middle English      -      1100 to 1450 Modern English     -      1450 to the present

These dates do not mean that the English language underwent a total change and attained a new form from a particular date. We must not, for example, assume that English from A.D. 1150 or 1500 was strikingly different from what it was a few years earlier. These points of division only indicate certain historically significant causal factors that have contributed to a particular linguistic change and development. Thus, the beginning of the history of English could be traced to the invasion of Britain by the Germanic tribes - Angles, Saxons and Jutes - about the year A.D. 449. (Or, we could fix it at A.D. 600 when the Angles and Saxons had succeeded in entrenching themselves and implanting their language in Britain). Again, the justification for 1150 as the beginning of the Middle English period stems from the consolidation of the Morman French king William the Conqueror in England and the beginning of the change of the basic character of English due to the overbearing impact of Norman French. And by A.D. 1500, the impact of the Renaissance was profoundly felt on the English soil, affecting both the language and the general intellectual climate.

The Old English period is described as the period of full inflecctions; the Middle English period as the period of levelled inflections; and the Modem English period as the period of lost inflections/We shall in the following pages, briefly substantiate these characterizations.

46 B. The Characteristics of Old English

About A.D. 449, Britain witnessed an event of far-I reaching historical significance, when the Germanic (also known as Teutonic) tribes - Angles, Saxons and Jutes -§ invaded the country in large numbers. The original inhabitants of the country who spoke a form of the Celtic tongue, unable to withstand the superior might of the invaders, gradually withdrew themselves into the hills ofl Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. These three powerful races of invaders came to entrench themselves in different parts of the country and there arose a number of small kingdoms; and there existed several dialects, the important among them! being Northumbrian. Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish. But! only one of them, the language of the Saxons of the West! Saxon kingdom, came to be recognized as the literary! standard for the whole country, thanks to the unification ofl Britain under the West-Saxon kings. Nearly all of Old English! literature is in this dialect, with even the literatures in other I dialects having been recopied into this tongue. Naturally, it has become the basis of Old English grammars and! dictionaries. However, it is an Anglian (Mercian) dialect,! not the West-Saxon, which is the direct ancestor of modern! literary English.

(The characteristics of Old English in brief are :

1.           It was a homogeneous, Anglo-Saxon language, almosl
pure with only a small amount of Latin influence!
followed by some from Scandinavian, on thel
vocabulary of the written language.

2.           Gnlike Modern English, Old English was largely
phonetic in its spelling. That is, there was a ot.e-to-
one correspondence between the spelling of a word!

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and its pronunciation. In Old English we do not come across what are now called silent sounds (as in words like come, stone, calm, etc.)

3.           The Anglo-Saxon vocabulary comprised about 20,000
words as against over half a million words in Modern
English. Nevertheless, the great English writers, down
the centuries have demonstrated a marked tendency
to adapt words from this corpus rather than go in for
borrowed words.

4.           A unique feature of the Old English vocabulary was
its capacity for derivation and word-formation, its
tendency to use its own materials and resources rather
than go in for borrowing from foreign languages.

5.           Old English had an arbitrarily fixed gender system: In
it, while nouns designating males are generally
masculine, and females feminine, those indicating
neuter objects are not always neuter.

Examples :

Stone - masculine moon - masculine

sun - feminine

Old English was characterized by an elaborate system of inflections - the nouns had four case endings for singular and four for plural; the adjectives declined (have case endings) for five cases and two numbers; The personal pronoun had distinct forms for genders, Persons, cases and numbers; the verb had three moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative), two numbers and three persons.

These traits contributed to Old English beirB characterized as a language of full inflections.

C. The Characteristics of Middle English

The Middle English period extends from A.D. 1150 to A.D. 1500. As we have referred to earlier in this lesson, the year 1150 marks a significant landmark in the history of the English language, as much as the political and social history of England. William the Duke of Normandy who invaded England in 1066 had his political dominance consolidated on the English soil by this date. Most of the important positions in the Court and the Church passed into the hands of the Normans, and French became an almost exclusive medium of the court, administration, church and thel aristocracy, with English remaining the language of thfl masses. In course of time, however, there was seerB increasing interaction and adjustment between the FrenclB and the native Anglo-Saxons; there were intermarriages* and eventually these two peoples amalgamated into one. I

Again, even though the Scandinavian invasions ofl England occurred during the Old English period, their impact I on the written language was felt only during the MiddleB English period.

These two events - the Norman Conquest and thel Scandinavian invasions brought about sweeping changes I in the languages of the Anglo-Saxons as well as theirl social structure. We shall, for our purpose here, deal with I the changes that characterized the language. These changes I are extensive, momentous, fundamental and far-reaching I in the history of the English language. They, in I outline, are :

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1. The Middle English period witnessed a variety of dialects, more divergent and more numerous than those of the Anglo-Saxon. The principal ones are Northern, East Midland, West Midland, and Southern.

As was the case with the West Saxon during the Old English period, the East Midland dialect came to attain to the position of a kind of 'standard' during the Middle English period. Several factors contributed to this : First, it was spoken in and around London, the heart of English social, political, commercial, legal and ecclesiastical life. Secondly, there were the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, in this region. Thirdly, London's very heterogeneous population, drawn from all over the country, developed a kind of mixed dialect of the educated and commercial classes. Fourthly, the East Midland District was the largest and the most populous of the major dialect areas. Fifthly, it was employed by Chaucer and a number of prominent writers of the day. And finally, by the close of the Middle English period Caxton printed his earliest books in this dialect, setting thereby a seal upon it as [he English language.

2- The Middle English grammar was marked by a great reduction in the inflectional system of Old English, resulting in an increased use of prepositions and periphrases. This weakening and loss of inflections was largely due to (i) the Teutonic tendency of fixing the accent on the first or the root syllable, the unstressed syllables at the end of the word becoming weakened and

50

lost, (ii) in the areas of mixed population, the! inflections were a source of confusion, since the! Scandinavian and English had similar roots butl different endings and (iii) the French scribes who I were not versed in the numerous inflectional! forms of the Anglo-Saxon speech copied the! manuscripts phonetically according to the! French conventions.

3.           This period also witnessed depletion of the ranks I
of strong verbs and a steadily growing body of
weak verbs.

4.           In the language of this period is seen a transition I
from the largely unmixed vocabulary of the
preceding era to the fully heterogenous one of
the succeeding Modern English period.

5.           The Norman French conventions greatly j
informed and modified Old English spelling and j
pronunciation.

6.           The English literature was exposed to the I
continental movements and trends of literary
expression, due largely to its contact with
French.

D. Modern English

Modern English runs from about 1500 to the present j day. We can, for the sake of convenience, divide this period ' into Early Modern English (1500-1700), and Later Modern English (1700 - to the present). The Early Modern English period was characterized by the following :

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i There had been a conscious interest in and attempts at cultivating English, and improving it in various ways - particularly enlarging its vocabulary and regulating its spelling.

2.           This period witnessed the defeat of Latin and the final
establishment of English as the sole literary medium
in England.

3.           Notwithstanding, the Renaissance (the intellectual
awakening of Europe) marked a rediscovery of the
classics, a revival of classical scholarship, and the
consequent borrowing of Latin terms in a very large
number.

4.           We attain in this period to something in the nature of
a standard, something that is recognizably modern in
the language. In the writings of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, we find the existence of a standard
literary language free from dialectal variations.

5.           A series of changes in pronunciation particularly the
Great Vowel Shift [i: -» al; e: —> i: ; o: -> ou ; o: -> u: ;
etc.], brought the pronunciation closer to a language
as we hear now.

&• The advent of printing and the efforts of the spelling reformers changed written English to a form that offers little difficulty to the modern reader.

' ■ By the end of the seventeenth century, the modern grammatical system came to be adopted. From being a complex, highly inflected language, English became a language of lost inflections with few traces of the old inflectional system.

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8.            Fixation of word-order followed the loss of inflections, I
and there witnessed increased use of prepositions and |
periphrases.

9.            The Protestant Reformation, and the various English
translations of the Bible as well as the contribution of j
Shakespeare immensely enriched the vocabularly of j
English.

10.       Dr Johnson's Dictionary almost 'fixed' the English
spelling for posterity by reducing the chaotic spelling
system to something like an order. Besides, we owe
to him the notion of 'good English', for it was he who
distinguished between 'reputable' and 'low' words.

11.       The public schools since the time of Arnold of Rugby
dominating the education of the English gentry, the
"everyday speech in the families of Southern English,
whose menfolk have been educated at the great public
schools", came to be accepted as Standard English.

12.      The eighteenth century, in tune with the prevailing
environment of classicism, tried to reduce the
language to rule and set up a standard of correct usage.
Consequently,    the    grammarians    and    the
lexicographers took upon themselves the task of
systematizing the facts of English grammar and
drawing up rules by which questions of correct usage
could be decided.

13.      In the nineteenth century, marked as it had been by
Empire-building and great commercial development,
the vocabulary of English was considerably enlarged
through foreign contacts and through borrowings of
learned and technical terms from the classical tongues.

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14 And today, in spite of there being varieties of English as ued in the United States, Canada, Australia, etc., "In formal writing, the essential structure of the language is practically the same throughout the English-speaking world; the differences in vocabulary are perceptible but not enormous; and the differences in spelling negligible. There is, therefore, a standard literary language which is very much the same throughout the English speaking community..."

II

Philology and Literature

Etymologically, the term 'philology' denoted 'love of logos', and logos implied thought and language. Naturally then, philology had been concerned with the study of literature in its totality : the thematic materials of a work of art and its structural elements including the linguistic matters. For, as seen by the classical and medieval writers, the understanding of a text comprised an understanding of its language as well as its 'content'. And today, perhaps due to the increasing tendency towards specialization, the meaning of 'philology' has been narrowed down to cover only the more technical study of language as distinct from literature. Mow, it is an 'old-fashioned' technical word designating "the study of the nature and especially development of words or language".

Obviously, this distinction between 'language and

literature' is misleading and harmful as much as artificial.

hese two disciplines are not only complementary to each

other, but they work in inseparable unity in the study of a

text. The aesthetic satisfaction of a text hinges primarily on

54

our knowledge of the meaning of its author's language. Especially when it comes to the study of older literature such as the works of Shakespeare and Milton, an understanding of the history of the language, and of the meanings words and idioms have had at different periods is essential. Take for example Olivia's referring to Malvolio as a fellow:

Let this fellow be looked to

In Elizabethan English to refer to anyone as 'fellow' was to place him on a level with oneself. In the eighteenth century we find this word undergoing a sad declension, as seen in Pope's line :

Worth makes the man and want of it the fellow.

Again, Shakespeare uses the word Bethlehem as an alternative for madman, but this meaning is now obsolete and has given place to that of noise and confusion. Or, take the following lines from Chaucer's Prologue :

If a presl be foul, on whom we trusle, No wonder is a lewed man to ruste

Here lewed (lewd) primarily means 'unlearned' or 'ignorant'. Its gradual depreciation over the years is too well-known. There are innumerable words and idiomatic expressions of this kind whose meanings, as seen in the writings of different periods, cannot be properly understood without the help of the historical study of language. It is also that our pleasure of studying poetry is enhanced when we come to see the varied nuances of words, and acquire a feeling for the imaginative qualities in the use of words. The study of the meanings of words called Semantics and

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Semasiology must therefore be of particular importance to he student of literature.

It is clear then that compartmentalization of philology and literature would take us to distortion of meaning of a tford in the given text, misreading of the contextual relevance and finally taking a false view of the great masters of English literature such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and many others.

Philology also reminds the student that language is by its nature fluid, never static, a living organism which can be fully appreciated in relation to thought and feeling as well as form.

Questions

I.        Answer the following in about 500 words :

Describe the characteristic features of Old English, Middle English and Modern English.

or

Substantiate the characterization of Old English as a language of full inflections, Middle English as a language of levelled inflections and Modern English as a language of lost inflections.

Answer: Sections B, C and D, leaving out the features not directly relevant.

"•      Answer the following in about 200 words each :

1-       Discuss the characteristics of Old English/Middle Engiish/Modern English.