My old English is rusty, not that I ever learned it in depth. The only line I understand in its entirety is the last one. I wasn’t overly impressed with Beowulf when I read it (in modern English) and I’m more inclined to think he was more a dola king than god; look at how many of his people got eaten when his plan backfired!
A decent book on the history of the English language is ** The Origins and Development Of the English Language** by Thomas Pyles and John Algeo. It covers everything from I-E to modern periods.
In a back-handed attempt to answer the OP, I’d say that the critical event in the development of English was the invention of the printing press. Therefore, as a number of people have mentioned Caxton, I’d say 1476.
It’s important to remember that many of the various old/ancient European “languages” are, in some measure, an academic fiction. Language in, say, Northern Europe, was really more of a continuum of dialects than it was a set of discrete, standardized languages. I can talk to the people in my village. The people in the next village over have a bit of an accent and use a couple of odd words. The people two villages over have a bit more of an accent, etc. Eventually, this accretion of dialects becomes a full-blown new “language,” at least as far as I’m concerned.
Even today, you see something similar in Italy. Italy, being a long and relatively narrow penninsula, has a great number of dialects that become more mutually incomprehensible the farther north or south you go. (Modern Italian is a very recent creation based on the dialect of Tuscany.) The dialect of Veneto in the north is almost completely incomprehensible to someone speaking the dialect of Sicily.
Printing allowed the creation of a “standard” English language. The London dialect became “English” while the rest of the country’s dialects became regional curiosities.
As a vaguely related but too fascinating to pass up bit of trivia, my understanding is that, while Chinese written language is standardized and comprehensible to all Chinese, the spoken language is anything but. People from two different cities may find themselves completely unable to communicate with each other. This is because written Chinese is, of course, not phonetic. There is, therefore, no link between the written “word” and the spoken word.
Old English has some pretty wild looking letters. My favorite is the one that looks kinda like a p except there is an extra stem thingie hanging above.
> As a vaguely related but too fascinating to pass up bit of trivia,
> my understanding is that, while Chinese written language is
> standardized and comprehensible to all Chinese, the spoken
> language is anything but. People from two different cities may
> find themselves completely unable to communicate with each
> other.
And this is why Chinese is not considered a single language at all but a set of about nine closely related languages. It’s as though you decided to write English, Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Yiddish, German, Plattdeutsch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, etc. using a single set of symbols for each word. For most such symbols, you could establish a phonetic correspondence between the different languages as to how you pronounce the word in each language, but for many symbols the pronunciation isn’t even close in the different languages (because the word for that concept in one of the languages isn’t related to the word for the same concept in the other languages). The word order in the different languages is slightly different, so to standardize the word order in writing, the word order of one of the languages is chosen to be what’s used for standard writing.
This isn’t quite a perfect analogy, since the Chinese languages are slightly closer than those of the Germanic subfamily of Indo-European, but it’s as good an explanation as I can think of.