Alfred the Great's most important contribution to Old English prose literature Content

1. The history of the formation of the English language

Modern English belongs to the western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

English belongs to the West Germanic group of Indo-European languages. About 200 million people speak English and also use it in public office work, literature and science: in Great Britain and Ireland (along with Irish), in the USA, Canada [1] (along with French), Australia, New Zealand, partially in South Africa and India. One of the five official and working languages adopted by the UN. The English language originates from the language of the ancient Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), who migrated from the continent to Britain in the 5th-6th centuries. The complex interaction of the ancient Germanic tribal dialects, brought to Britain, inhabited by Celtic tribes (Britons and Gaels), and developed in the conditions of the formation of the English people, led to the formation of territorial dialects on the old tribal basis. In the Old English period (7th-11th centuries), the language is represented by four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex and Kentish. Thanks to the economic and political influence of the Kingdom of Wessex in the 9th-10th centuries, the Wessex dialect acquired the greatest importance in the cultural life of England. After the penetration of Christianity into England in the 6th century, the Latin alphabet replaced the ancient Germanic runes, and the influence of the Latin language was reflected in the English vocabulary. From the language of the Celtic population of Britain conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, mainly geographical names have been preserved.²
The raids of the Scandinavians (end of the 8th century), which ended in the subordination of England to the Danish king in 1016, led to the creation of Scandinavian settlements in the country. [2] The interaction of closely related languages - English and Scandinavian - has affected the presence in modern English of a significant number of words of Scandinavian origin, as well as some phonetic features that characterize the dialects of northern England. Mixing with the Scandinavian languages contributed to the strengthening of a number of grammatical tendencies that existed in the English language. The conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 led to a long period of bilingualism, when English, which had three main territorial dialects (northern, central and southern), was preserved as the language of the people, but French was considered the state language. court and school led to the fact that after the displacement of the French language from these areas (by the XIV century), extensive layers of French vocabulary were preserved in the English language. [3]
In the process of the formation of the nation, the formation of a national English language took place, which developed on the basis of the London dialect, which combined southern and east-central dialect features. In the 2nd half of the 13th and 1st half of the 14th centuries, the displacement of southern dialectal features from the language of London and their replacement by features of the east-central dialect is noticed. The Middle English period (XII-XV centuries) of the development of the English language is characterized by a number of changes that sharply delimited the Middle English sound system from the Old English. Since all inflections were unstressed, the reduction of unstressed vowels also resulted in a significant simplification of the morphological structure of the English language.³ The introduction of printing in England (1476) contributed to the consolidation and spread of London forms, which was greatly helped by the popularity of the works of the great writer J. Chaucer (1340-1400), who wrote in the London dialect. However, typography recorded some traditional spellings that no longer reflected the pronunciation norms of the late 15th century. [4] Thus began the discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling so characteristic of modern English. In the XVI-XVII centuries, the so-called New English language was formed. Scientific and philosophical works began to be written in English, and not in Latin, and this required the development of terminology. The sources of replenishment were borrowings from Latin and Greek, partly from Italian and Spanish, and in the 17th century from French. In the field of grammar, modern English is characterized by an analytical structure, i.e., such a structure in which the main means of expressing grammatical meanings are word order and auxiliary words that show the relationship between words or groups of words. [ 5]
In the 2nd half of the 17th century, and especially in the 18th century, many manuals on orthoepy and normative grammars were published, the authors of which seek to streamline the grammatical norms of the language: some on the basis of rational grammar, others on the basis of the living use of language forms. The purist trend of the 18th century (J. Swift, J. Addison) was directed against the penetration of colloquial neologisms (for example, truncated words) and excessive borrowings into the literary English language. The colonial expansion of England in the 17th-19th centuries led to the spread of the English language outside of Great Britain and led to the emergence of some regional differences, mainly in vocabulary. ⁴The differences between American English and British English can be explained by the fact that the first settlers in North America (1607) came from London and its environs, while the later ones came mainly from northern Britain and Ireland. There are no such pronounced dialects in the US language as in the UK. On the basis of the "Linguistic Atlas of the USA and Canada" (1939) [6] published under the editorship of Professor H. Kurat, seven dialects are distinguished, including the dialect of the central and western regions of the USA - the most significant in terms of distribution area; it is considered in the United States the basis of the literary norm (General American). The difference between American and British English is most pronounced in vocabulary and to some extent in phonetics; grammar differences are minor. With a large number of neoplasms in the vocabulary of the English language of the United States, word-formation models also remain common with the English language of Great Britain. [ 7]
The Germanic languages are divided into three groups:

e.	East Germanic (dead languages - Gothic, Vandal, Burgundian);
2.	North German (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic);
3.	West German (German, Dutch, Flemish, Boer (Afrikaans), Frisian and English).

The history of the development of any language is closely connected with the history of the development of the people speaking this language. Therefore, it is impossible to study the formation and development of a particular language in isolation from a deep study of the history of the development of the state and the people. In this regard, the history of the English language is usually divided into three periods:

one.	Old English period (Anglo-Saxon) : VII-XI centuries, from the time of the invasion of the Germanic tribes in the British Isles until the conquest of Britain by the Normans (Normans) in 1066;
2.	middle English period : wars of the XI-XV centuries, before the feudal Scarlet and White Rose (1455-1485) and the introduction of printing in England (1477);
3.	New English lane and ode : XV century. – present tense.

Within the New English period, the Early New English period stands out: the 16th-17th centuries, before the Restoration period (p 1660 г.). The dates denoting the boundaries between the periods have only a conventional meaning and express the fact that there is an essential difference between the language of the 11th and 12th centuries, or between the languages of the 15th and 16th centuries. The English linguist Henry Sweet (1845-1912) [8] gave the following characterization of these three periods, based on a phonetic-morphological feature:

-	the Old English period is the period of full endings: sunu - "son", writan - "to write";
-	Middle English period - the period of leveled (weakened) endings: all unstressed vowel endings are equally leveled under a vowel like [ə] in spelling is indicated by the letter “e”) - sune, writen, singen;
-	New English period - the period of lost endings: a weak vowel sound disappears in the ending - son, write, sing.

The art of book-writing became known in England only after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The earliest and most productive school of Old English literature arose in Northumbria under the influence of the Celtic and Latin cultures, but it was brought to an end by the raids of Scandinavian pagan Vikings that began around 800. In the south, in Wessex, King Alfred (reigned 871-899) and his successors successfully resisted the Vikings, thereby contributing to the revival of science and literature. [ 9]

All this had two important consequences. Firstly, all surviving works in verse and prose, including those dedicated to pagan times, belong to Christian authors, mainly from the clergy. There is no direct evidence of oral creativity of the pre-Christian period. Secondly, almost all the manuscripts that have survived to this day were created later and mostly in the West Saxon dialect, regardless of what language they may have originally been written in. Thus, Old English is in fact a foreign language for England, since Middle English and modern English primarily go back to the dialect of J. Chaucer and his contemporaries that existed in the area centered in London.⁵

Unlike scholarly writings and translations, fiction was created in verse. The main part of the monuments of Old English poetry has been preserved in four manuscript codices; all of them belong to the end of the 10th - the beginning of the 11th centuries. [10] In the Old English period, the accepted unit of versification was a long alliterated line, divided by a distinct caesura into two parts containing two strong stressed syllables; in each part, at least one of them was alliterated. The earliest English poet known by name is the Northumbrian monk Caedmon, who lived in the 7th century. Historian Bada the Venerable wrote down his short poem about the creation of the world, the rest of Caedmon's writings are lost. From the poet Künewulf (8th or 9th century), four poems have come down that undoubtedly belong to him: in the last lines of each he put his name written in the letters of pre-Christian German runic writing. Like Kyunewulf, the unnamed authors of other poems combined elements of epic narrative with Christian themes and individual techniques of the classical style. Among these poems stands out the Vision of the Cross and Phoenix, in which the interpretation of the Christian theme is marked by the restrained, often harsh spirit of the pagan faith of the Germans, especially noticeable in the elegies of the Wanderer and the Seafarer, which reveal with great force the themes of exile, loneliness and homesickness.
The German spirit and German plots were embodied in heroic poems (songs) about great warriors and folk heroes. Among these poems, Widsid occupies an important place: a court narrator (skop) is shown here, who composed and performed such poems. He recalls the distant lands he has visited and the great warriors, including real historical figures whom he says he met. Fragments of two heroic works of the type that Widsid could well have performed have survived: the Battle of Finnsburg and Walder. The greatest surviving poetic work of that era, in which elements of Germanic heroic poetry and the ideas of Christian piety appear in absolute fusion and completeness, is the heroic epic Beowulf, probably created in the 8th century.⁶
The formation of Wessex and the accession of King Alfred marked the beginning of a revival of science and literature, which continued until the conquest of England by the Normans. Alfred personally supported and directed this process. Assisted by clerical scholars, he translated or commissioned translations of Latin texts important to the English understanding of European history, philosophy, and theology. These were Dialogues and Pastoral Care ( Cura Pastoralis ) of Pope Gregory the Great (6th century), compendium of world history by Orosius (5th century), Ecclesiastical History of the Angles of Beda the Venerable, and Consolation by the Philosophy of Boethius (6th century). Alfred supplied the translation of the Pastoral Guardianship with a preface in which he lamented the decline of learning and even literacy among the clergy of his day and suggested expanding education in Latin and English through church schools. Alfred came up with the idea of creating the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records historical events in fresh footsteps. After his death, the Chronicle continued to be kept in a number of monasteries; in the vault of Peterborough, events are brought to 1154. Poems were also recorded in it, for example, the Battle of Brunanburg - an excellent example of Old English heroic poetry dedicated to specific events.
The prose writers who succeeded Alfred made a valuable contribution not so much to artistic creativity as to the history of culture. Ælfric (died c. 1020) wrote several collections of sermons, the lives of the saints, and a number of works on grammar. Wulfstan (died 1023), Bishop of London, Worcester and York, also became famous as an author of sermons.