Language Change. From Ælfric to New American Standard Bible: A Morphological Analysis of Five Translations of Genesis 3:1-15 and Matthew 3:1-15

Abstract

Nobody can argue that language does not undergo changes. The only languages that are not prone to linguistic changes are dead languages. The scope of this survey is to emphasize the various changes in morphology found in the primary material, i.e. five different translations from the Bible written in different time intervals: Ælfric, Wycliffe, Tyndale, King James Bible and New American Standard Bible. The investigation aims to shed some light upon the inflectional modifications of pronouns, verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs that the English language has undergone during the last thousand years. The results of the study show that the English language has moved from being a highly inflective, synthetic language with many endings and cases, few prepositions and no real articles, to developing into a more analytic language with fewer inflectional markers and cases, and more grammatical words that substitute the old endings.