Triadomany.

Colin Gorrie (seen here in March) has a post called When will Modern English end? that is basically about the arbitrary nature of any periodization of language — nothing that will surprise any Hatters, but it’s a useful and well-done roundup of relevant thoughts; after novelistically describing the writing of the last entry in the Peterborough Chronicle in 1154, he continues: To linguists, the Peterborough Chronicle is the most interesting version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it spans what they consider two separate periods in the language’s history: the bulk of it is written in Old English, but the later continuations, such as the one I dramatized above, are written in early forms of Middle English. To the scribes who wrote down the continuations, however, they probably didn’t seem like two different forms of the language. For these 12th-century monks, English was English. It’s just that people used to write a bit differently in the old days. Properly. What we see today as a…

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