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Traditionally the history of the development of the English
language is divided into three main periods:

1. The Old English Period (OE) 449 – 11 century (1066);

2. The Middle English Period (ME) 11 century – 15 century;
3. The Modern English Period (ModE) 15 century – up to

now.

Each of these periods can be divided into two small periods, ex. OE –
Early OE and Late OE.

1. Old English (450-1100 AD)
The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages,

which in Britain developed into what we now call Old English.
Old English did not sound or look like English today. Native

English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding
Old English. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly

used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The

words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old
English.

From the point of view of the political and social
characteristics the OE period was the period of the tribal system.

That is the people lived in large clans headed by the leaders. It
was the period when they only began to learn to cultivate land.

From the point of view of the linguistic characteristics of

the period there was no uniform language. When we speak of
the OE language we mean the community of related tongues

spoken by the OE tribes. If we consider the language system of

the OE period we find that the language of that time was
typically synthetic: like all old languages. Each notional part of

speech had a great number of grammatical markers (affixes):
thus, the noun had nine declensions; the verb had several

conjugations. Word order in the sentence was much more free
than it is now.

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