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There is a 500 year old inscription on a wall in the Salisbury Cathedral. Nobody can read it, but it is one of the first examples of Old English written in a British Church.
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Approximate date of the earliest manuscript records of Old English.Old English literature (or Anglo-Saxon literature) encompasses literature written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period from the 7th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. A large number of manuscripts remain from the Anglo-Saxon period, with most written during the last 300 years (9th to 11th centuries), in both Latin and the vernacular
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The earliest surviving manuscripts in Middle English. Middle English is the term applied to many forms of English used between the 11th and the 15th centuries. Most manuscripts date from the late Middle Ages.
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The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in Southern England between 1450 and 1750. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
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William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His birthdate is unknown, so the date I used is the day he got baptised.
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The first grammar of English--William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar--is published. The Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar, written with the seeming goal of demonstrating that English was quite as rule-bound as Latin, was published in 1586. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534).
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A Table Alphabeticall is the abbreviated title of the first monolingual dictionary in the English language, created by Robert Cawdrey and first published in London in 1604.
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The Daily Courant was reputed to be the world's first regular daily newspaper, commencing in 1702 from premises in Fleet Street. It was first published on 11 March 1702 by Edward Mallet from his premises "against the Ditch at Fleet Bridge". The paper lasted until 1735 when it was merged with the Daily Gazetteer.
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The United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire.
