56. Development of the English vocabulary in MnE.

The twentieth century was marked by controversy over English usage. Impassioned critics of language change saw impending doom in every departure from Standard English, and groups of like-minded individuals were set up to try and stem the tide, from the Society for Pure English in 1913 to the Queen’s English Society in 1972. Meanwhile, the publication of Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926 provided a benchmark view on contentious topics such as the use of like as a conjunction and the ‘correct’ deployment of who and whom that remained influential for the rest of the century. Linguisticians, who for the most part are descriptivists, tend to be dismissive of prescriptivists, who seek to lay down standards of ‘correctness’, but there is no doubt that, given a sufficient head of steam, campaigns on particular topics can exercise an influence over the English language – as witness the fate of the so-called ‘split infinitive’, an entirely factitious solecism which has been so consistently and energetically condemned by self-appointed guardians of English grammar that generations of speakers and especially writers have been terrorized into avoiding it.

The most recent scare has arisen from the usage of English in electronic communications, such as emails and especially text messages, blogs and postings on social networks. This is certainly an area of the written language unconstrained by the usual norms of orthography, punctuation and grammar, and those particularly who do not communicate in these ways may fear that linguistic anarchy will ensue. But there is little to it that is truly novel, and anyway, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century there are signs that the popularity of textspeak is subsiding. English, in arguably its sixteenth century of existence, continues to thrive and grow.

57. Oe texts.

Old English literature encompasses literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period from the 7th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are Beowulf, an epic poem; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of early English history; the Franks Casket, an early whalebone artifact; and Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Caedmon.

The Old English Texts have been normalized into Early West Saxon. The punctuation of all texts in this section is editorial, since the originals were only irregularly punctuated. Texts taken from the OE translation of the Bible, and Text, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have been rewritten to remove obscurities or irregularities which may confuse beginners, in the same way that texts designed for foreign learners of PDE are frequently rewritten; they have also been accompanied by very literal translations. For normalized but otherwise unmodified versions of these texts, see Sweet 1953. Texts Cædmon’s Hymn and a selection of two passages from The Dream of the Rood, however, have not been rewritten, although they have been normalized; for easily-accessible, non-normalized versions of these texts, see H.Sweet (rev. D. Whitelock), Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Texts (7) and (8), a portion of a homily by Ælfric and a passage from the great OE epic poem Beowulf, have neither been rewritten nor normalized, and may act as “bridge” texts to more advanced work.