What is English?
A short history of the origins and development of English The history of the
English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who
invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons
and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern
Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But
most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly
into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Angles came from Englaland
and their language was called Englisc - from which the words England and
English are derived.
Germanic invaders entered Britain on the east and south coasts in the 5th
century. 5
Old English (450-1100 AD) The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar
languages, which in Britain developed into what we now call Old English. Old
English did not sound or look like English today. Native English speakers now
would have great difficulty understanding Old English. Nevertheless, about half
of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots.
The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Old
English was spoken until around 1100.
Part of Beowulf, a poem written in Old English.
Middle English (1100-1500) In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of
Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered England. The new
conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which
became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes.
For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the lower
classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the 14th century
English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added.
This language is called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet
Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it would still be difficult for native English speakers
to understand today.
An example of Middle English by Chaucer. 6
Modern English
Early Modern English (1500-
1800) Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in
pronunciation (the Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced
shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had contact with many
peoples from around the world. This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning,
meant that many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of
printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books
became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought
standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect
of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604
the first English dictionary was published.
Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" lines, written in Early Modern
English by Shakespeare.
Late Modern English (1800-Present) The main difference between Early
Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English
has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial
Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British
Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English
language adopted foreign words from many countries.
Varieties of English From around 1600, the English colonization of North
America resulted in the creation of a distinct American variety of English. Some
English pronunciations and words "froze" when they reached America. In some
ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern
British English is. Some expressions that the British call "Americanisms" are in
fact original British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost
for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of
lend, and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into
Britain through Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on
American English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon,
ranch, stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered
English through the settlement of the American West. French words (through
Louisiana) and West African words (through the slave trade) also influenced
American English (and so, to an extent, British English). Today, American
English is particularly influential, due to the USA's dominance of cinema,
television, popular music, trade and technology (including the Internet). But
there are many other varieties of English around the world, including for
example Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, South
African English, Indian English and Caribbean English.
Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" lines, written in
Early Modern English by Shakespeare. 7
The Germanic Family of Languages
English is a member of the Germanic family of languages.
Germanic is a branch of the Indo-European language family.
Lectures and seminar topics
Lecture № 1.
Plan: Introduction.
The English Language as a chief medium of communication West Germanic
language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian,
German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now
widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States,
the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various
small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an
official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan
Africa, including South Africa.
Origins and basic characteristics English belongs to the Indo-European
family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in
Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-
Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have
roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups
descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three
regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North
(Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and West (German,
Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, English). Though closely related to
English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of
a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the
Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is
the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has
changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly
resembling Old English in grammatical structure. Modern English is analytic
(i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue
of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian,
Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years,
English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms
found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms,
as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for “man” are
exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern.
Chinese has one form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms: 10 man,
man's, men, men's. In English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected.
Adjectives have no inflections aside from the determiners “this, these” and
“that, those.” (The endings - er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better
regarded as non inflectional suffixes.) English is the only European language to
employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., “the tall man,” “the tall woman,” compared
to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English
word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and
Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride,
rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern
German reiten has 16 forms. In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English
has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of
vocabulary.
Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence
of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by
differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can
speak, for example, of “planning a table” or “tabling a plan,” “booking a place”
or “placing a book,” “lifting a thumb” or “thumbing a lift.” In the other Indo-
European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and
verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb
endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can
also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns,
and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but
in German one must add the suffix -er to the placename and put attributive and
noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no
choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du
Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as
adjunct (modifier), as in “wages board” and “sports editor”; or even a
conjunctional group, as in “prices and incomes policy” and “parks and gardens
committee.”
Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other
languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts
(without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name
some new object or to denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and
Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word
elements. English possesses a system of orthography that does not always
accurately reflect the pronunciation of words. 11
Orthography The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English
alphabet minus J, K, V, W, Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use
in abbreviations and Y and Z in words transcribed from Greek. After its
adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed W as a ligatured
doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I and U. The
resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or capital, and lowercase, or
small, letters. (See also alphabet.) English spelling is based for the most part on
that of the 15th century, but pronunciation has changed considerably since then,
especially that of long vowels and diphthongs. The extensive change in the
pronunciation of vowels, known as the Great Vowel Shift, affected all of
Geoffrey Chaucer's seven long vowels, and for centuries spelling remained
untidy. If the meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual
words seemed unimportant. In the 17th century during the English Civil War,
compositors adopted fixed spellings for practical reasons, and in the order-
loving 18th century uniformity became more and more fashionable. Since
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), orthography has
remained fairly stable. Numerous tacit changes, such as “music” for “musick”
(c. 1880) and “fantasy” for “phantasy” (c. 1920), have been accepted, but
spelling has nevertheless continued to be in part un phonetic. Attempts have
been made at reform. Indeed, every century has had its reformers since the 13th,
when an Augustinian canon named Orm devised his own method of
differentiating short vowels from long by doubling the succeeding consonants
or, when this was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a superimposed
breve mark (˘). William Caxton, who set up his wooden printing press at
Westminster in 1476, was much concerned with spelling problems throughout
his working life. Noah Webster produced his Spelling Book, in 1783, as a
precursor to the first edition (1828) of his American Dictionary of the English
Language. The 20th century has produced many zealous reformers. Three
systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, are actually in use for different
purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented Roman) Alphabet (ITA) of 44
letters used by educationists in the teaching of children under seven; (2) the
Shaw alphabet of 48 letters, designed in implementation of the will of George
Bernard Shaw; and (3) the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), constructed
on the basis of one symbol for one individual sound and used by many trained
linguists. Countless other systems have been worked out from time to 12 time,
of which R.E. Zachrisson's “Anglic” (1930) and Axel Wijk's Regularized
English (1959) may be the best. Meanwhile, the great publishing houses
continue unperturbed because drastic reform remains impracticable,
undesirable, and unlikely. This is because there is no longer one criterion of
correct pronunciation but several standards throughout the world; regional
standards are themselves not static, but changing with each new generation;
and, if spelling were changed drastically, all the books in English in the world's
public and private libraries would become inaccessible to readers without
special study.
Questions to lecture 1:
1. Which family of languages does the English language belong to? What
relalationship
does it have with other languages spoken in Europe, Asia etc?
2. What is the most striking feature of the orthography of the English
language?
3. What has contributed to the flexibility of the lananguage?