Language Timeline
This period of English lasted approximately 450–1150 CE
What is Old English?
This Germanic language contributed words such as egg, sister and take to English.
What is Norse?
This group invaded and settled parts of England during the 8th–11th centuries.
Who were the Vikings?
This invention allowed texts to be mass-produced and helped spread particular spelling conventions.
What is the printing press?
A word that shares a common linguistic ancestor with a word in another language is called this.
What is a cognate?
This period of English lasted approximately 1150–1500 CE.
What is Middle English?
These four Old English letters included thorn, wynn, eth and ash.
What are additional Old English letters?
This language became highly influential in English following the Norman Conquest.
What is French?
William Caxton introduced this technology to England in 1476.
What is the printing press?
These grammatical units can be added to words to indicate grammatical information, such as tense or number.
What are inflectional morphemes?
This period of English lasted approximately 1500–1750 CE.
What is Early Modern English?
This Old English letter represented the voiceless dental fricative /θ/
What is Thorn (þ)?
French had high ______ because it was associated with the ruling classes after the Norman Conquest.
What is prestige?
This famous dictionary was published in 1755 and contributed to the codification of English.
What is Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language?
The reason English lost many of its inflectional morphemes.
What is standard word order (syntax) and grammar?
This period of English began around 1750 and continues today.
What is (Late) Modern English?
Old English relied heavily on these grammatical markers to indicate grammatical roles.
What are inflectional morphemes?
The Norman influence affected English at these four linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax and ______.
What is lexis and/or semantics?
Dictionaries contribute to language ______ by recording and establishing language forms and conventions.
What is codification?
Name THREE factors that linguists should consider when identifying cognates.
What are Phonological changes, lexical borrowing and geographic connections?
Put these events in chronological order: Norman Conquest, Caxton’s printing press, Johnson’s dictionary, Viking invasions.
What are: Viking invasions → Norman Conquest → Caxton’s printing press → Johnson’s dictionary
This invasion in 1066 was a major catalyst for the transition from Old English to Middle English.
What was the Norman Conquest?
Why did sustained contact between Norse and Old English lead to linguistic change?
Speakers of the two languages interacted, resulting in linguistic influence and changes to features such as morphology and syntax.
Explain one way the printing press contributed to standardisation.
Mass production of texts increased exposure to particular spelling and language conventions, helping establish standard forms.
The reason the Norman Conquest is significant to the history of English.
What is French borrowing and influence?