History of English: Difference between revisions

People who might want to hear what Old English sounds like can watch the DVD of Benjamin Bagby's recitation of ''[[Beowulf]]''; keep the subtitles on if you want to follow the action. Michael Drout has also made recordings of all surviving Old English poetry available free at [https://web.archive.org/web/20160110112449/http://fredacadblogs.wheatonmawheatoncollege.edu/wordpressmu/mdrout/ his site]{{broken link}}. The excellent Seamus Heaney translation of ''[[Beowulf]]'' is printed in Old English and modern English on facing pages.

As a written language, Modern English until only relatively recently (we're talking into the 1700's) did not have standardized spelling rules--the same word might be written differently within even the same sentence. This can be seen in any text of the time that has not been edited to make the spellings consistent. Many of the standards people are familiar with were not set until the first dictionaries were printed, and even a good number of those have morphed over time. This also accounts for various spelling differences between British English and American English (and, to a lesser extent, Canadian English), with the two sides of the Atlantic mostly--apart from Webster's meddling--standardising (or, for Americans and Canadians, standardizing) their orthography around different variant spellings of the same words. [[Separated by a Common Language|Vocabulary differences]] tend to describe inventions or institutions with their origins in the 19th or early 20th centuries; as late as just before [[World War OneI]] it was the thought that American and British English would ultimately evolve into completely separate languages. Then came mass telecommunications.