Download English and its Historical Development, Part 2

English and its
Historical
Development
English
• English is an Indo-European language.
• Indo-European was discovered to be the parent language of most
European, Anterior-Asian, and Indian languages.
• As a rule, according to prototypical features of some of these
languages, two main branches are defined in the Indo-European
language tree, namely an eastern branch and a western branch.
• However, scholars have disputes about where the divisions within
the Indo-European language family are to be placed.
• For example, in examining languages other than the prototypical, it
has been found that not all languages can be classified into one of
the two main branches, the eastern and western branches, of
language families.
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How do we recover features of languages which are so
old that no speakers live to tell us about them?
• Historical linguistics deduces that an abundant
occurence of features in a daughter language,
the presence of which cannot be explained by
language universals or by the assumption of
them having been borrowed, or adopted, from
another tongue, is likely to have been inherited
from the parent language.
• Thus, by inferencing from widespread
phenomena on a mother tongue from which
these phenomena came, linguists trace back
languages.
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How do we recover features of languages which are so
old that no speakers live to tell us about them?
• In Indo-European languages, for example,
obvious correlations can be found.
• The Latin (L.) and Sanskrit (S.) words for
"hundred",
namely L. "centum" and S. "satem", can
be traced back to a common root.
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How do we recover features of languages which are so
old that no speakers live to tell us about them?
•
Since these two languages were considered to be the most prominent examples for
the respective branches, the whole branches were named after them.
•
Also, former scholars believed that they should make judgments about the various
languages.
•
Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were commonly believed to be of a higher quality than the
modern languages.
•
Often scholars argued that these languages were more "pure" and praised their
"perfection" and "clarity".
•
Today we consider such notions to be outdated. There is no room in linguistics for the
approval or disapproval of a language.
•
If we look for the origin of a word, we call this the word's etymology (etymon = Greek
for "root").
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Germanic language family
• Within the Indo-European family tree and among the
centum languages, we find language families like the
Germanic, Celtic, or Latin families.
• Some authors refer to the early Germanic language as
"Proto-Germanic".
• The Germanic language family is again split up in the
West-, East-, and North-Germanic groups.
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Centum and Satem
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Languages in Britain before
English
• The first culture in England of which we
have definite knowledge is the Celtic
culture and language.
• It is assumed that the coming of the Celts
to England coincided with the introduction
of bronze on the island.
• There were - and still are - Celtic tongues
spoken on the British isles.
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Celtic Languages
• Celtic Languages in Britain are Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, Manx,
and Irish Gaelic.
• The main groups of Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic still exist, as does
Manx, and are even promoted in order to preserve the language
community.
• Cornish, however, became extinct 200 years ago when the last
recorded speaker died.
• Due to the above mentioned promotion, the rest of the Celtic
languages have a better chance of surviving.
• Other Celtic tongues are also still spoken in Brittany (France) and,
also on the verge of becoming extinct, are sponsored as well.
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Only a few traces of the Celtic or Roman languages have survived from
this period..
•
The first people in England about whose language we have definite
knowledge are the Celts. Celtic was the first Indo-European tongue to be
spoken in England and it is still spoken by a considerable number of people.
•
Whatever the original accents of the British Isles may have been, as laid
down by the prehistoric Celts, they were altered and revised by repeated
waves of invaders that crossed the Channel in historic time; such as, the
Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and finally the Normans.
•
There was one other language besides Celtic, which happened to be Latin,
that was spoken rather extensively for a period of about four centuries
before the coming of English. Latin was introduced when Britain became a
province of the Roman Empire.
•
Before the dawn of recorded history, the British Isles were visited, overrun,
and conquered by two separate groups of Celtic invaders, speaking tongues
which were the remote ancestors of present-day Gaelic and Welsh.
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Latin
• Another language in England was Latin. It was spoken
extensively for a period of about four centuries before
the coming of English.
• In 55 BC, Julius Caesar decided to invade Britain.
Because of the unexpectedly powerful resistance of the
Celts, however, a final conquest could not be
accomplished until about 100 years later.
• Almost all of what is now England was then subjected to
Roman rule.
• Naturally, the military conquest of Britain was followed by
the romanization of the province, as was the case in
other countries and provinces conquered by the
Romans, such as Gaul of present day France.
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Latin
• The Roman culture and the Latin language were
introduced.
• Note, however, that the Celts, who then inhabited the
whole of the British isles, withstood the Romans in the
other parts of the country.
• Hence, Latin did not spread further north or west of what
are roughly the present day English borders.
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Latin
• Latin did not replace the Celtic language in
Britain.
• Its use was confined to members of the upper
classes such as landowners and the
bureaucracy.
• Nevertheless, vocabulary for items not known to
the Celts prior to romanization infiltrated the
language of the, mainly lower class, Celts, to
some extent.
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Old English
• About the year of 449 an event occurred that profoundly
affected the course of history in Britain: the invasion of
Britain by certain Germanic tribes.
• These were the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who came
from regions of Northern Europe where natural disasters
and famine, due to overpopulation, had forced them to
leave.
• Since the Roman Empire was under heavy attack at
many of its borders at that time, no legions could be
spared to defend the British province.
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Old English
• The emperor in Rome, therefore, left the British population on their
own devices.
• The British inhabitants, bereft of a military force, subsequently failed
to defend themselves and what was once Roman Britain became
inhabited by the newcomers.
• The Celtic population was forced to leave and take refuge in other
areas of Britain.
• The struggle of the Celts against the Anglo-Saxons has been
preserved in the myth of the legendary King Arthur who led his
people in their resistance.
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English and England
• The names "English" and "England" were
then drawn from the name of the
predominant tribe of the Angles, who had
established their most powerful kingdom in
the former Roman province.
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Features of Old English
• Old English (OE) was spoken from 449 to 1100
AD. Characteristic features of Old English are
that the vocabulary is almost purely Germanic.
• OE is a period of full inflections: in form of
endings to the noun and pronoun, the adjective
and the verb.
• Since the grammar of such languages depends
on the synthesis of words and endings, we call
them synthetic languages.
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Features of Old English
 Nouns
It is impossible here to present the inflections of
the Old English noun in detail.
 Their nature may be gathered from two
examples of the strong declension and one of
the weak: (stone), a masculine a-stem; (gift), a
feminine o-stem; and (hunter), a masculine
consonant-stem.
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Nouns
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Verbs
 There are certain differences between OE verbs and
Modern English (ModE) verbs.
 Verbs are divided into two classes: regular and irregular
verbs. Regular verbs all follow the same inflection
pattern, while there are irregularities among the second
group.
 The latter consists of strong, weak, and anomalous
verbs. Strong verbs are called so because a change of
tense is there indicated within the word itself, by a
modification of the verb's root vowel, such as in sing,
sang, sung.
 In weak verbs, like walk, walked, walked, this change is
dependent on being indicated by an additional syllable.
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OE strong verbs can still be strong verbs in ModE:
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OE strong verbs may be regularized in ModE:
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OE weak verbs may be regularized in ModE:
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Scandinavian influence on Old English
• Invasions and conquests were quite common
during the first millennium AD in Britain.
• From 787 on, the Danes raided the English
coasts and the hinterland quite frequently. In
850, they started large-scale invasions.
• In this period, Ælfred the Great, king of Wessex,
gained recognition due to his long but successful
struggle against the Danes.
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Scandinavian influence on Old English
• In 878 he defeated them and saved his kingdom,
although the invaders still remained in the eastern
territories.
• The Danish rule in these countries was also called
Danelaw.
• To cut a long story short - after a lot of battles, defeats
and victories, the Danish king Svein became king of
England in 1014.
• The Danish rule lasted until 1042. Their language
naturally had some influence on the English tongue.
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Scandinavian influence on Old English
• This influence can be seen mainly with the English vocabulary, for
example word-borrowings.
• In Old English, the sound sk, which it had inherited from its
Germanic ancestors, had soon been changed to sh.
• The Danish rule introduced Scandiavian words, however, retained
their sk sound until today, helping us to to identify the Scandinavian
word-borrowings in English.
• This development also produced a range of word pairs - newly
introduced Scandinavian words then stood side by side with the
already existing alterated sh-version, such as skiff-ship; skirt-shirt.
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Scandinavian influence on Old English
• The words of these word pairs are thus closely
related on a semantic level, but serve to
designate different aspects or understanding of
the items.
• Word replacements also occurred. Several of
the new foreign words replaced OE ones, as
with take-niman; cast-weorpan; cut-ceorfan.
• In 1066, the Normans invaded England. Through
the influence of Norman French, the OE period
gradually ended.
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• END OF OLD ENGLISH
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