Aim:

To give students a first impression of the changes that have taken place in the English language from Old English to the present-day.

Method:

The same short text in Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English is examined for evidence of changes in spelling & pronunciation, vocabulary, word forms and grammatical structure, and of the sources of the language in Old English, Old Norse and French.

Aim:

To discover some of the differences between the English language today and as it was written a thousand years ago in the 900s.

Method:

An extract in facsimile from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is examined for some of the linguistic features by which it can be contrasted with present-day English.

Aim:

To discover something about the past written and printed forms of the language.

Method:

Facsimiles of manuscripts and early printing are examined and contrasted with present-day conventions of writing.

Aim:

To discover some of the differences between the English language today and as it was written six hundred years ago in the 1390s.

Method:

Two MS facsimiles of the same extract from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are compared and contrasted. Part 1 contains a series of activities involving an “editorial”approach to the texts, designed to assist in an empirical approach to discovering features of Chaucer’s English. Part 2 is a commentary on the activities.