Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[26] Other books by Nesfield include A Junior Course In English Composition, A Senior Course In English Composition, but it was his A Manual Of English Grammar and Composition that proved to be greatly successful both in Britain and her colonies—so much so that it formed the basis for many other grammar and composition primers including but ...
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
The earliest known grammar of a Western language is the second-century BCE Art of Grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax, a grammar of Greek. Key stages in the history of English grammars include Ælfric of Eynsham's composition around 995 CE of a grammar in Old English based on a compilation of two Latin grammars, Aelius Donatus's Ars maior and ...
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order , and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German .
English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization). [23]
William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. [1] Its characters were presented in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time and also in Roman type.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
Once English became the language of administration of law in England, a form of late Middle English called chancery English became such a standard. [1]: 102 When William Caxton introduced printing with movable type into England, the norms of his grammar and spelling were taken largely from chancery English. [2]