Language change over time

• combination of Germanic languages -Angles, Saxons
• modern nouns like 'fadre' still in use
• inflections, preifxes and suffixes showed person, mood and tense
• regional variation

• loss of inflections
• subject placed in different positions
• huge spelling variations e.g. meadow 'medwe' ,meede' or 'medou'

• 1476 - Caxton's printing press
• chose an appropriate punctuation system
• East Midland Dialect - assosciated with political authority
• Elementarie 1582 - 8,000 words recommended spelling
• 1400-1600 - Great Vowel Shift - major phonological changes e.g. naam became name
• double negatives
• subject verb inversions to form questions
• third person inflections added to verb forms

• more standardisation
• prescriptivism emerged
• 18th century grammarians such as Robert Lowth - against the decay of English
• Johnson's dictionary 1755 - 40,000 words
• laid down rules for spelling and meaning
• helped standardise
• grammar - second person pronouns depended on a person's status

• late modern - science and medicine introduced new words such as penicillin
• new inventions e.g. motor car 1895 and podcast 2008
• conflict and war - blitz 1939

• Borrowing - taking from another language e.g. spaghetti Italian
• Scientific progress - penicillin, fertilisation
• Affixation - new prefix/suffix added e.g. hyperactive, hypersensitive
• Compounding - combining two seperate words e.g. -hand-bag
• Blending - two seperate words merged together e.g. netiquette is net and etiquette
• Conversion - change word class e.g. 'text' was a noun, now a verb

Different forms of shortening:

• Clipping - drop a syllable to create an abbreviation e.g. demo - demonstration
• initialism - when first lett of a word stands for a word itself - OTT over the top
• Acronyms - letters combine to form a new word e.g. NASA
• Back formation - suffix removed to create new term - word processor became word process

• Amelioration - more positive meaning
• Pejoration - more negative meaning