Review of the historical facts

2 Old English
In the IX century. ne the name "English" ("englisc") was used to designate all closely related Germanic dialects common in the British Isles. In the 5th – 6th cc. ne Angles, Saxons, Utes, and Frisians sailed to Britain across the North Sea, whose languages ​​belonged to the western subgroup of the German group of the Indo-European language family. Today's English is closest to the Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, and German (West German subgroup) and somewhat distant from Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish (North German subgroup). In modern Icelandic language, some features of a thousand years old have been preserved, lost in modern English, due to which Icelandic is more similar to Old English than any other living language.
The early settlements in Britain are known mainly from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the Trouble of the Honorable, who completed his "Church History of the Angles" in 731, i.e. about three centuries after allegedly in 449 the Utah landed at Ebbsfleet on Tanet Island. Trouble does not mention the friezes, but he describes the invasion of Britain by three other related "nations" or tribes: the Utes who settled in Kent, in the south of Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight; the Saxons who occupied the rest of England south of the Thames; and the Angles, or the English, who established dominion over the territory north of the Thames. The Utahs came from Jutland, the Saxons from Holstein, and the Angles from Schleswig. Indeed, the English name owes its name to the corner (English "angle", from Lat. "Angulus") of the earth, which lies between modern Schleswig and Flensburg. Both in Latin and in the common German language, their name sounded like "Angli", and in Old English it turned into "Engle". Up to 1000 AD the word "Angel-cyn" ("race of angles"), and after this date, "Engla-land" ("the land of the Angles, or the English") was used to collectively designate all Germans settled in Britain: Angles, Saxons and Utes. Since the important geographical and linguistic boundary was the Humber (estuary of the rivers Uz and Trent), the territory inhabited by Angles was divided into Northumbria (i.e., "north of the Humber") and Southumbria (i.e., "south of the Humber") or merciu. Thus, in Old English there were four main dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex and Kent. In the 8th century Northumbria dominated literature and culture, but since the reign of King Alfred (871–899), Wessex has taken the lead. First, the capital of Wessex was Wilton, and then Winchester, which remained the main city of the kingdom until the time of King Knuth.
Although Old English was not as strongly an inflectional language as Sanskrit, Ancient Greek or Latin, it had a complex system of inclinations and conjugations. Since nouns had case endings, many relationships could be expressed without the help of prepositions, unlike modern English. For example, a simple dative could be used in Old English to denote a comparison (in modern English: "better than I"), a tool of the joint action (with a troop of friends "). actions ("he slew the dragon with a sword" ("he struck the dragon with the sword")), as well as a simple addressee of the action ("the book you gave (to) me" ("the book you gave me")).

In nominal declension, there were at least 25 plural forms with mutation, of which only seven survived to date: "feet", "geese" ("geese"), "teeth" ("teeth"), " men "(" men ")," women "(" women ")," lice "(" lice ") and" mice "(" mice "). The so-called "weak declination" (with the plural basis of "-n") was common, like the modern English words "brethren" ("brethren"), "children" ("children") and "oxen" ("oxen") . Such a weak plural became even more widespread in the southern dialect of Middle English, where forms like “treen” instead of “trees” and even “housen” instead of “houses” were quite common.

If this dialect were the basis of literary English, and not Eastern-Central (ie, London), then the forms in "-en" could now be regular plural forms. However, in reality, the most commonly used in Old English forms of strong male declination on "-s" of the type "stan - stanas" ("stone - stones"), (modern English "stone - stones") prevailed. While the noun inclined according to a “weak” or “strong” pattern, depending on the type of its primordial base, the adjective could appear in both forms — strong and weak — depending on its function and position in the phrase (as in modern German language); weak forms, very frequent even in Chaucer, after the 15th century, with rare exceptions, have not survived. Since that time, adjectives have lost all of their inflections, except for the demonstrative pronouns "this" ("this / this / this"), "these" ("these") and "that" ("that / that / that"), " those "(" those "), as well as endings" -er "," -est ", denoting medium and higher degrees of comparison, as, for example, in" greater "(" greater / ая / her / s "), greatest "(" the greatest / her / s "). In addition, only nouns, pronouns and verbs have inflections. In this respect, i.e. on the way from the synthetic to the analytical, English has gone further than any other Indo-European language. From this it follows that among the related English languages ​​there is not one in which it would be just as difficult to recognize by its external form an arbitrarily taken word its syntactic function. For example, the word "like" can now be used as an adjective ("as like as two peas"), a verb ("I like this"), adverb ("as like as not" ("not excluded" [length: just as likely as not "))) and the preposition (" to swim like a duck "(" swim like a duck "))), the noun (" We shall not see his like again "(" We don’t see a man like him again ")). It is worth remembering, however, that the precursors of this common form in Old English were different words, namely, adjective, verb, adverb adverb and noun. At the same time, throughout its long history, English has also shown a tendency to form new compound and derivative words.