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William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. [1] Its characters were presented in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time and also in Roman type.
The Latin-derived words noble and gentle (in its original English meaning of 'noble') were both borrowed into English around 1230. Compare with German edel, Dutch edel, English athel. ge-: a prefix used extensively in Old English, originally meaning 'with', but later gaining other usages, such as being used grammatically for the perfect tense.
In America in 1765, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson, founder and first president of King's College in New York City (now Columbia University) published An English Grammar; the First Easy Rudiments of Grammar Applied to the English Tongue. It "appears to have been the first English grammar prepared by an American and published in America."
The adverb well may be used in colloquial BrE only with the meaning "very" to modify adjectives. For example, "The film was well good." [37] In both British and American English, a person can make a decision; however, only in British English is the common variant take a decision also an option in a formal, serious, or official context. [38]
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order , and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German .
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) says of complex prepositions, In the first place, there is a good deal of inconsistency in the traditional account, as reflected in the practice of dictionaries, as to which combinations are analysed as complex prepositions and which as sequences of adverb + preposition.