Маъсул муҳаррир: Филология фанлари доктори, профессор: Г. Х. Боқиева Тақризчилар

Periods in the History of English
Traditionally, the history of the English language is divided into 3 periods, which were originally suggested by the English scholar Henry Sweet, author of a number of works on the English language and its history. They are Old English, Middle English and Modern English. His division was not arbitrary, of course as he took into consideration both intra- and extralinguistic factors, namely, phonetic and morphological, on the one hand, and sociocultural, on the other. Modern linguists, however, disagree with this division (V. Arakin, T. Rastorgueva, Ivanova) accounting for their disagreement by the following considerations.
For example, V. Arakin maintains, that the Old English period needs to be subdivided into 2, the Early Old English period and the Late Old English period, as the changes that had taken place from the beginning till the end of the period were very much pronounced and the language at its earlier stage was a lot different from its final stage. Rastorgueva extends this idea to the other periods and Ivanova, generally satisfied with the extralinguistic factors taken into consideration while dividing English into historical periods, argues whether phonetic and morphological criteria are sufficient for this purpose.
The table below illustrates the division proposed by Henry Sweet.

Periods	Intralinguistic factors	Extralinguistic factors
1^st period Old English/ OE 700AD - 1100	period of full endings; any vowel can be found in an unstressed ending