English terms with diacritical marks
The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 9th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted (on a printing press or computer) in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:
History of English grammars
It was during the nineteenth century that modern-language studies became systematized. In the case of English, this happened first in continental Europe, where it was studied by historical and comparative linguists. In 1832, Danish philologist Rasmus Rask published an English grammar, "Engelsk Formlære", part of his extensive comparative studies in the grammars of Indo-European languages. German philologist Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, included English grammar in his monumental grammar of Germanic languages, "Deutsche Grammatik" (1822–1837). German historical linguist Eduard Adolf Maetzner published his 1,700 page "Englische Grammatik" between 1860 and 1865; an English translation, "An English grammar: methodical, analytical and historical" appeared in 1874. Contributing little new to the intrinsic scientific study of English grammar, these works nonetheless showed that English was being studied seriously by the first professional linguists.