Interrelationships between Language and Literature from Old English to the Modern Period مقاله

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day. The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its organizing device is ‘alliteration’. The range of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. The writers of the Elizabethan period reshaped the literary language by borrowing foreign words and by coining new expressions and figures of speech. Shakespeare’s language and modern English have enough in common so that historians consider that they both belong to the same stage in the history of English. Milton attempted to reinvent the English language through his Paradise Lost. The writers of the seventeenth century developed a prose style that could bear the weight of the most serious and complex ideas. Then, the writers of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to developing out a formal, polished, and "correct" style of expression. Wordsworth and Coleridge intended to purify and renew the literary language and make it closer to the everyday speech of the ordinary people. Modernism tried to articulate a representation of the world and the way of seeing it through complexities of mind using the spoken rather than the formal language.

Interrelationships between Language and Literature from Old English to the Modern Period Esmail Zare Behtash Associate Professor, Chabahar Maritime University behtash@cmu. The geneticists have shown that "a large proportion of the genetic make-up of the population of the British Isles derives from Neolithic movement of people", a fact which supports the idea of the expansion of the Indo-European languages over a long time-scale of gradual expansion of agriculture (Barber, Beal, & Shaw, 2009, p. 2. The Old English Period The history of English as a separate language begins in the middle of the fifth century, when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain. The Celts retreated before the Anglo-Saxon invaders; the Germanic language of the incomers became the dominant one, and there are few traces of Celtic influence on Old English (OE); indeed, the number of Celtic words taken into English in the whole of its history has been very small and limited to a number of Celtic place names and geographical terms, including Kent, York, Thames, Dover, and Avon. 3. Chaucer and Middle English Departing from the Old English we move to the medieval ages, starting from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, when the official language of the court in London was French. Middle English vocabulary thus often has sets of words each with a different origin and each conveying more or less the same meaning but with different patterns of use (Carter & McRae, 2001). Historians of the language have suggested that between 1500 and 1650 around 12,000 new words were introduced into English (Carter & McRae, 2001).