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Thabo and the Three Lions: Gr 1: Reader Book 5 (Our Voices: Magic and Meaning in Your Life Through Language)
Thabo and the Three Lions Gr 1 Reader Book 5 - Our Voices: Magic and Meaning in Your Life Through Language Author:D. Yule, L. Smith, L. Hendricks, B. Koni Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: English language, the happy marriage which it shows of North and South, or wish to deprive it of those foreign elements which go to make up its unparalleled rich... more »ness and variety. CHAPTER in MODERN ENGLISH The flooding of the English vocabulary with French words began, as we have seen, intheXIIIth Century, and reached very large proportions in the century that followed. At the same time Anglo-French, which had maintained itself for two hundred years or more as the language of the governing classes, / gradually fell into disuse, and in 1362 English - was adopted in the law courts, and at about the same time in the schools. And yet, properly speaking, there was before the latter part of the XIVth Century no English language, no standard form of speech, understood by all, and spoken everywhere by the educated classes. When such restraining and conservative influence as was exercised by the West-Saxon language of the court had been removed at the Conquest, the centrifugal forces, which are always present in language, and tend to split it up into varieties of speech, had begun to assert themselves; and the old dialects of England diverged, until the inhabitants of each part of the country could hardly understand each other. The dialects of this period can be roughly divided into three main divisions, which correspond to the divisions of speech in the pre-Conquest period, but are called by new names. In all the country south of the Thames, what is called the Southern dialect was spoken, and this was a descendant of the West-Saxon speech which, under Alfred the Great, had become the literary language of England. North of the Thames there were two main dialects: the Midland, corresponding to the Old Mercian; and the Northern, extending from the Humber to Aberdeen, and correspon...« less