History of the English

Language
Introduction

 Why is it important to learn about the history of the English

language?
 The Sociology of the Language
 A language is in perpetual evolution.

 Changes in pronunciation,

E.g. in French, the diphthong "oi" [wa],

 Changes in semantics (e.g. fortune, voiture),

 Changes in morpho-syntax (passé-simple, replacement of the future

tense by a periphrastic construction of aller + verbe) ...
 This is also true for English (examples from 1945 until the
present day)

 Development of sciences and techniques.

 Development of social media:
 Abbreviations and acronyms
 Other loans
 Literal translations
 American influence
 All living languages change.

 The pace of change can be different though.

 Example: Icelandic vs. English

 The history of a language is therefore made of evolutions and

not of revolutions.
 New English Bible (1961), Chap. XV of the Gospel according to
Luke:

Now the elder son was out on the farm; and on his way back, as
he approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He
called one of the servants and asked what he meant. The
servants told him, ‘Your brother has come home, and your father
has killed the fatted calf because he has him back safe and
sound.’
King James Bible (1611), Chap. XV of the Gospel according to
Luke:

Now his elder sonne was out in the field; and as he came and
drew night to the house, he heard musicke & dauncing and he
called one of the seruants and asked what these things meant.
And he said vnto him, ‘Thy brother is come, and thy father hath
killed the fatted calfe because he hath receiued him safe and
sound.
Wycliffe Bible (ar. 1380), Chap. XV of the Gospel according to
Luke:

Forsoth his eldere sone was in the feeld, and whanne he cam
and neiede to the hous, he herde a symfonye and a
crowde. And he clepide oon of the seruauntis, and axide
what thingis thes weren. And he seide to him. Thi brodir is
comen, and thi fadir hath slayn a fat calf, for he receyued
him saf.
Text anterior to the Norman conquest, 11th century

Soþlice his yldra sunu ws on cere; and he com, and þa he
þam huse genealthe, he gehyrde þne sweg and þt wre.
þa cwp he, þin broþor com, and þin fder ofsloh an ft cealf,
forþam Þe he hine halne onfeng.

Translated literally word for word, it runs as follows:

Indeed, his elder son was on field; and he came, and when he
the house approached, he heard the noise and the crowd.
Then he called he a servant, and he asked him what it was.
Then said he, Your brother came, and your father killed a fat
calf, because he him safe received.
 The English language of today reflects many centuries of
development.

 597: The Roman Christianizing of Britain → England into

contact with the Latin civilization → significant additions to
our vocabulary.
 The Scandinavian invasions → mixture of the two peoples
and their languages.
 The Norman Conquest → English→ the lower classes (fot two
centuries).
 When English regained supremacy → English had changed
in both form and vocabulary from what it had been in 1066.

 Other important events:

- The Hundred Years’ War
- The Renaissance,
- The expansion of the British Empire
- The growth of commerce and industry, of science and
literature.
b) Language and evolution

What is the difference between a dead language a living

language ?

 Vocabulary
Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words
change their meaning.

Much of Old English vocabulary → lost,

 These changes took place over a long period of time and did
not happen overnight.

 The evolution of a language through time must therefore be

understood as something that is both constantly evolving and
also as something that is constantly stable.
Reasons why English is considered a rather easy language to
learn ?

 Morpho-syntax (word order, tenses, inflections, gender)

 Vocabulary and Borrowings

English : classified as a Germanic language.

YET
More than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin.
 chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, and skunk,
 brandy, cruller, landscape, measles, uproar, and wagon
 balcony, canto, duet, granite, opera, piano, umbrella, volcano;
 alligator, cargo, contraband, cork, hammock, mosquito, sherry, stampede,
tornado, vanilla;
 acme, acrobat, anthology, barometer, catarrh, catastrophe, chronology, elastic,
magic, tactics, tantalize
 steppe, vodka, ruble, troika, glasnost, perestroika; from Persian, caravan, dervish,
divan, khaki, mogul, shawl, sherbet,
 jasmine, paradise, check, chess, lemon, lilac, turban, borax, and possibly spinach.
→
 Phonology
A slow but steady alteration, especially in the vowel sounds, has
characterized English throughout its history.

Old English stān → stone; cū → cow.

 Morphology and Syntax

Inflectional Simplicity
Within the Indo-European family of languages —Sanskrit, Greek, and
Latin—have inflections of the noun, the adjective, the verb.
English→ simplified inflections.
 Gender

English → natural (rather than grammatical) gender.

Grammatical gender disappeared during the Middle English

period.

 The 12th and 15th centuries were periods of particularly rapid

change in English.
 Evolution of the English Language: Chronology

 Three broad periods:

1) Old English, 450 to 1150,
2) Middle English, 1100 to 1500,
3) Modern English, 1500 to present day

 These periods are often subdivided,

 Late Old-English (c.900-1100),
 Early Modern English (c. 1500-1650)
These dates have been chosen for convenience. The
changes did not occur overnight. It was a gradual
process.

“Like all divisions in history, the periods of the English

language are matters of convenience and the
dividing lines between them purely arbitrary” (Baugh
and Cable, p. 46).
 Beginning of Middle English → a few years after the
Norman conquest,

 Beginning of Early Modern English → the English

Renaissance and the introduction of printing into England,

 Beginning of Present-Day English → on the heels of the

American Revolution.

 These parallels are neither accidental nor arbitrary. All of

these political events are important in the outer history of
English.
 What caused such changes?

 Fashion and prestige

 Influence of other languages
 The principle of ease, or minimization of effort.
 Chapter 1. Origins of the English Language

 I. Common Roots Between Different Languages

 From Sanskrit to Old English

The pre-history of English and of most European languages →

Proto-Indo-European.

 N.B.: No written records.

 Proto-Indo-European language (Proto-Indo-European) →
spoken perhaps as early as 5000 B.C. and probably as late as
3000 B.C.

 How do we know its probable geographical origin ?

Common words between many Indo-European languages.

F I G U R E 1: The Spread of Indo-European from Its
Hypothetical Homeland
 Discovery of Sanskrit

 Standardized in the 4th century BC and has since been the

learned language of India.

 System of declensions, and common features similar to

Greek, Latin and German→ suggest a common origin.
Example: similarities between different Indo-European
languages.

French English Latin Dutch German Irish Sanskrit

père father pater vader vater athir pitar

frère brother frater broeder bruder brathair bhrātar

Old English Gothic Latin Greek Sanskrit

Eom (am) im sum eimi asmi

eart (art) is es ei asi

is (is) ist est esti asti

sindon sind sunt eisi santi

(are)
 Compare Sanskrit and Greek verbal inflections for the verb to give:

Sanskrit Greek
dádāmi dídōmi
dádāsi dídōs
dádāti dídōsi
dadmás dídomen (dial. didomes)
datthá dídote
dáda(n)ti didóāsi (dial. dídonti)
 Numerals 1-10 in five ancient languages

Latin Greek Sanskrit Gothic Old English

1 unus heis eka ains an
2 duo duo dvau twai twegen,
twa
3 res treist trayas — Þrie
4 quattuor tettares catvaras fidwor feower
5 quinque pente panca fimf fif
6 sex hex sat saihs siex
7 septem hepta sapra sibun seofon
8 octo okto astau ahtau eahta
9 novem ennea nava niun nigon
10 decem deka dasa taihun tien
 N.B.: Some languages in Europe do not belong to the Indo-
European group

- Finno-Ugrian: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Lapp

- Altaic branch: Turkish and Mongol. (see Barber p. 54-55)

English German Swedish French Finnish Hungarian

One Eins En Un Uksi Egy

Two Zwei Två Deux Kaksi Kettö

Three Drei Tre Trois Kolme Három

II/ From Indo-European
to Germanic Languages
The Germanic Languages

 English belongs to the Germanic branch.

 No records of the language of that period.

 YET, we have some historical accounts of those people.

→ Source Roman authors → Tacitus in AD 98, description of

Germania.
 Common language of the Germanic branch → Proto-
Germanic.

 Other languages derived from this common root:

- Gothic,
- Current Scandinavian languages: Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian and especially Icelandic.
→ The common origin was Old-Norse.

Other Westic languages: Dutch, German, Franconian / Frankish.

 Characteristics of Modern English directly derived from the Germanic
languages:
1) Plurals in –s and –en
2) Common verbs such as have, be…
3) Weak forms in the past
4) Participles in –ing and –en
5) Personal pronouns, demonstratives
6) Interrogative and indefinite pronouns
7) Comparative and superlative forms in –er and –est
8) Numbers, except second et dozen
9) Prepositions
10) Conjunctions (except because)
11) Suffixes used to form adverbs and verbs.
 Geographical Origin

Probably → small area of Southern Scandinavia and northern

Germany between the Elbe and the Oder.
About 300 BC → expansion in all directions

Northwards → Scandinavian peninsula (Finns).

Westwards → into North-West Germany and the Netherlands.

Eastwards → Baltic Sea, into Finnish and Baltic-speaking regions.

Southwards → Bohemia, and later into South-West Germany.

 Result of this expansion

 Creation of three main branches:

 West Germanic (Low (Southern Germany)

 High Germanic (Dutch, Frisian and English),
 North Germanic (= modern Scandinavia)
 How did the Germanic languages develop from Indo-European
(IE)?

 Structural point of view

2.1 Prosody
- In IE: free pitch accent → accent could be found on any syllable
of the word.
Vs.
- Germanic languages → developed a strong fixed stress accent
bases on loudness rather than pitch.

- Primary stress: fixed on the root of the nuclear syllable

 Extremely important shift.

 Weakening of the unstressed syllables → loss of morphological

endings in English + reliance on word order for the marking of
syntactic relations.

 This shift from a synthetic to an analytic language.

 2.2 The Consonant System: Sound Shifts
 Grimm’s law

 1822, Jacob Grimm (German philologist) → codified the

correspondence between certain consonants in the
Germanic languages and those in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek.

1) Voiceless plosives  voiceless fricatives

Indo-European Latin Greek Germanic

/p/ /p/ (pēs) /p/ (pous) /f/ (foot)
/t/ /t/ (trēs) /t/ (treis) // (three)
/k/ /k/ (centum) /k/ (hekaton) /h/ (hundred)
2) Voiced stops voiceless stops
3) Voiced aspirated stops voiced stops
 The cause of the change ?

 Unknown.

 It must have taken place sometime after the segregation of

the Germanic from neighboring dialects of the parent
language.
 2.3 Morphology
 IE had 7 major classes for verbs, distinguished by their root
vowels and the following consonants.

 Germanic retained this same basic system and added a

new category of verbs, the dental (-t-) past tense or
dental preterite verbs.

 German inf. machen (make, do)  machte (made, did)

 Swedish inf. Göra (make, do)gjorde (made, did)
 Proto-Germanic retained a large number of words inherited from IE

 Yet, many lexical innovations: back, bless, blood, body, bone, bride, child,
dear, eel, game, gate…to name a few.

 Possible contact with non Indo-European tribes or generated

spontaneously ?

 Neologisms by the process of suffixing.

 Example: PG *iskaz (-ish) was added to other elements to create nouns and
adjectives denoting nationality.

 N.B.: no Proto-IE available so linguists use earlier Greek, Latin and Sanskrit
texts to represent IE, while OE, Old Norse and Gothic texts are used to
represent Germanic.
  Key points to remember

 Chronology of the English Language: Main historical periods

 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the development of Germanic
Languages
 Phonology: Grimm’s law
 Morphology and syntax: common points between Proto-
Germanic Languages and PIE
 Certain characteristics of modern English directly derived from
the Germanic languages