The historic development of the vocabulary of the English language is traditionally divided into the Old, Middle and Modern English periods. Each of them had its own contribution to the development of the lexis of the language. The Old English period (450-1066) The first Old English inscriptions were written around the fifth and sixth centuries in the runic alphabet brought by the Anglo-Saxons. These are, however, short texts which do not yield much information on the structure of old Germanic languages.