The history of the english language
РЕФЕРАТ НА ТЕМУ:
The history of the english language
PLAN
IntroductionHistory of the English Language Germanic to Old English and Influence: Romans, Celts, Danes, NormansDevelopment of Middle English Great Vowel Shift Present and Future of English
INTRODUCTION
is one of the greatest cultural accomplishments the humanity has made. It evolves and develops together with the nation that speaks it. Such historical events as wars, exploration, colonization, migration make the language change, borrow new elements or sometimes even disappear. So, we may say that the history of the nation is reflected in its language.English language is no exception. Throughout the centuries it experienced the influence of many other dialects and languages and evolved from Germanic to Old, Middle, and Modern English. On the way it had revolutionary language upheavals such as the ones brought about by the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift [2].makes us human. It is the use of language that differs us from animals, since the possession of abstract language is a uniquely human characteristic. The greatest cultural achievements are either made with the help of language or rely upon it for their accomplishment and dissemination. is the main medium of human communication. There exist over six thousand languages in the world today, though we are losing some of them. They die, because there remain no persons speaking those languages. Some languages are more difficult than the others. For example, Finnish has more than ten noun cases; the verb system of Spanish is exceedingly complex and so on. has a lot of rules and numerous exceptions to all of them, it rapidly adopts new vocabulary, and its rules of reading are so vague that one has a hard time learning how to read in English. However these rules dont seem so strange for those who know the history of the English language. As any living creature, a language changes constantly and many of its unexplainable features have logical historical explanations.
THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
origin of English, as any other human language lies in the very deep past. Scientists state that humans have had language from the dawn of their existence and that the development of language was a great evolutionary leap that separated us from animals. Unfortunately, we will never know for sure when the English language was born, because it existed long before people learned to write down the sounds. Thats why a lot of information conveyed orally and got lost on the way. Of course, oral tradition can preserve some information about old languages, but it not too much as the language changes constantly.proved that hundreds of languages in the world derived from one ancestor. They called it Indo-European language as its language family included European and Indian languages. Scholars figured out how most European languages related to each other and what their ancestors must have been. The Indo-European family can be divided into two branches: Satem and Centum.Satem group includes the Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic families. The Centum group includes the Tocharian, Anatolian, Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin), Celtic, and Germanic languages families. We are particularly interested in the Germanic branch, because it is the branch to which the English language belongs [3].Germanic branch in its turn is divided into three other branches: East Germanic, West Germanic and North Germanic. The English language belongs to the West Germanic group, which is in its turn divided into two parts, High and Low. High German was the language of uplands of Germany. The Low German languages include Old Saxon, Old Low, Old Frisian, and Old English.
GERMANIC TO OLD ENGLISH
earliest use of Old English date from approximately 700 A.D. Before that time, we must rely on Latin chronicles and the techniques of the comparative method, because writing reached the Germans only in the IV century. Even after, the West and North Germanic couldnt boast any significant texts for several hundred years.studying the history of the English language it is important to remember that the British Isles were originally settled by Celts, who spoke Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Gaelic, Manx). When Julius Caesar invaded Britain Latin became the dominant language in Britain for almost four hundred years. However after the withdrawal of the Roman legions the remaining Romano-British were sorely oppressed by the Celtic-speaking peoples whom they had dominated before. More over somewhere around 449 Germanic tribes started migrating to England and rapidly took over the island. They were the tribes of the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes. These tribes spoke a form of Old English, and this language rapidly replaced Latin and Celtic. Although England was divided into numerous small kingdoms, the people seem to have been able to communicate with each other without difficulty. Then in 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent the missionary Augustine of Canterbury to England. Augustine replaced the idols with the Christian cross, therefore allowing people to maintain many of their traditional customs in their traditional places. With Christianity came both Latin and writing, and it the first written records of language come from that time. One of them is The Lords Prayer in Old English, from the West Saxon Gospels [2].Lords Prayer (Old English)ure †u †e eart on heofonum;†in nama gehalgodbecume †in rice†e ∂in willaeor∂an swa swa on heofonum.gedaghwamlican hlaf syle us todagforgyf us ure gyltasswa we forgyfa∂ urum gyltendumne gelad †u us on costnungealys us of yfele so†lice.us examine several lines of the prayer in detail.ure †u †e eart on heofonum†in nama gehalgod
Fader is recognizable as father, and ure is close enough to our. ˇu means thou, †e is a relative particle which can be translated as who. Eart is art and on heofonum means in the heavens. Si is a form of the verb to be that is lost from Modern English. ˇin is thine and nama is name. [5]. English is West Germanic and rather close to Modern English. Closer than Celtic or Cothic, anyway. It has an additional set of sound shifts that makes the words sound more like Modern English. Its grammar is also evolving gradually toward that of Modern English.English, like Modern German, still has strong verbs in which the vowel of the verb stem is changed to indicate changes in number or tense: Modern English to bite, bit comes from Old English bitan, bat. Old English also had weak verbs, which added an ending to indicate the past tense. Just like modern regular verbs. modern English and German languages, Old English easily produced new compound words and was open to borrowing. It readily adopted Latin or Celtic words, for example. English started its life in the British Isles as an essentially Germanic language with a native vocabulary. At its early stages it had experienced little influenced from other languages. Later the Old English had to go through several very significant contact periods in which foreign language influences would radically change the language.
BORROWING AND INFLUENCE: ROMANS, CELTS, DANES, NORMANS
Languages tend to borrow words from one another, its a common practice, and English is no exception. Moreover it was especially prolific in its adoption of new words from outside sources. Even at the very beginning, it borrowed several Latin words. It is supposed that Anglo-Saxons took names from the Romans for things that did not exist in their own culture. For example,
win (wine) from Latin vinus;
popig (poppy); Old English sound g before and after front vowels is pronounced y
cytel (kettle),
pyle (pillow),
butere (butter),
weall (wall),
pytt (pit),
bisceop (bishop),
cirice (church), and so on.the communication with a Romano-British population of the British Isles Anglo-Saxons could pick up some Celtic words, however Celtic languages had surprisingly little influence on Old English. They influenced the Old English in the realm of place names, most of which are Celtic. For example, Wor in Worcester, Ex in Exeter, and Win in Winchester, were Celtic. Rivers and hill in England have a very high proportion of Celtic names. Beside place names Old English borrowed some other words, for example:
binn (bin),
crag (rock),
ass (donkey),
cursian (to curse).first wave of Latin borrowing took place while Anglo-Saxon tribes were still living on the continent, but a much greater influence of Latin on Old English came from Christians in the VI-VII centuries. Roman Catholic Church was an enormously important cultural presence in England. In the beginning of the Christian period, key Latin terms were translated into Old English. They were a sort of neologisms. Strictly speaking such words were not borrowings, but translations. One of written examples of such a translation is Cædmons Hymn. This poem was written in Latin, and than translated. Here is a part of it: sculon herian heofon rices weardmeahte ond his mod ge†ancwuldorfader swa he wundra gehwasdryhten or astealde….
[Now we must praise the keeper of the heavenly kingdom the might oflord and his mind-wisdom, the work of the wonder-father, as he,of wonders, the eternal lord, first established.] [4]decades later, Latin words were borrowed directly into English where they replaced their Old English translations. Many of the Latin borrowings were words for the church: angel, abbot, cleric, candle, hymn, chalice, mass, noon, nun, priest, temple etc. Among other borrowings were names of clothes, food and words relating to education, such as sock, sack, radish, beet, mussel, lobster, school, notary, grammatical. wave of borrowing happened in the VIII-IX centuries, when Vikings started their attacks on British monasteries and villages. Small-case attack turned into a full-blown conquest. Eventually they got almost all of northern and eastern England under control. In the end there was a treaty between the Viking and British kings in which, among other things, Alfred, the British king recognized that the Danes would stay in England. influence of Scandinavian on English was enormous. Hundreds of words from all parts of speech were borrowed. As a result some of the most common modern English words have Scandinavian origin. For example the pronouns they and them the verb are (a form of be), prepositions like to and many others. The influence of Scandinavian is obvious not only in lexicon, but in grammar as well. For example, the ending -s in the third person singular, present indicative form of verbs (she smiles, he talks) comes from Scandinavian. But far more significant was the influence of the Scandinavian languages on the inflectional system of Old English. There were many, many words in common between Old English and the language of the Danes (man, wife, mother, father, summer, winter, smile, stand, ride, spin, set, over, under, and so on). For the purpose of better understanding the speakers of the Old English and Scandinavian languages stripped away the inflections and relied upon such cues as word order, to indicate grammatical relationships. This elimination of the inflectional system was a one of the most important steps toward modifying English from a synthetic to the analytic language it is today (although it was the Normanwere a lot of common words in Old English and the Scandinavian languages, but some sound shifts occurred differently in North Germanic and West Germanic. For instance the distinction of combinations sk and sh. The voiceless velar stop k in the sk sound was, in early Old English, palatalizated, and entire cluster was pronounced sh. To indicate this sound, Old English writers used the cluster sc, as in scip (pronounced ship), fisc (fish). borrowing from Scandinavian languages was not limited to a few semantic fields. In fact Scandinavian borrowings spread throughout the language: bank, bull, birth, dirt, fellow, kid, leg, foot, sister, flat, loose, skill, want, crave gape, window, get, give, raise, snub, screech, and take all come from Scandinavian. As Otto Jesperson noted, you cannot thrive, be ill, or die without Scandinavian words, nor can you even eat bread and eggs. [1] The influence of Scandinavian languages on English is enormous. They enriched English but also primed the language for some of the major steps in its future evolutions.
I THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE ENGLISH
Old English had a long history of coexisting with Scandinavian languages. For some period that lasted about a century and a half, England and Normandy even was one kingdom. Old English turned into the language of common people. It was not spoken at the court, and most members of the aristocracy spoke Scandinavian languages better than Old English. However charters continued to be written in English and Latin, not French, for example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be updated, in Old English. The Katherine Group texts also prove the idea that Old English was spoken rather widely after the Conquest. The Katherine Group includes the Lives of three virgin martyr saints (St. Katherine, St. Juliana, and St. Margaret), Hali Mei ∂had (a discussion of the benefits of virginity), and Sawles Warde (a treatise on the care of the soul). These texts are also associated with Ancrene Wisse (a guide for nuns). a result, Old English was spoken by the lower classes, and rarely written, so its could evolve faster than it would have been if there was some written standard.
It was not until 1204, that English became once again the language of England. But the language now was different from the one that had been spoken a hundred and fifty years before. Here is an example of The Lords Prayer in Middle English. It is different fro the one in Old English discussed in the previous paragraph. fadir †at art in heuenes halwid be †i name;
†i reume or kyngdom come to be.†i wille don in her†e as it is doun in heuene.to us today oure eche dayes bred.foryeue to us oure dettis †at is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure†at is to men †at han synned in us.lede us not into temptacion but delyuere us from euyl.the prayer is quite understandable to a Modern English speaker, and almost all of its the words exist in Modern English. The biggest difference lies in the pronunciation of vowels is somewhat different. It is the result of enormous changes in vowel pronunciation that come at the end of the Middle English period. The change from Old to Middle English mostly didnt affect consonants. Only W was lost in position when it was followed by an o and preceded by another consonant. So the Old English swa became so, hwa - who, and sc -sh. pronunciation changes were not so significant but they affected greatly the Middle English grammar. In 1204, English was no longer a synthetic language, it became analytic. The system of inflections was almost completely eliminated, as well as the declensions of nouns and adjectives and the need for case agreement among nouns and adjectives. For example:e ending, became a part of the forms of the noun, resulting spellings like stone, robe. In a couple of centuries the final e stopped being pronounced, and the pronunciation became as it is today. plural ending of nouns -s remained in Modern English, but for a while it was balanced between another Old English plural form, -en (oxen, brethren). English lost grammatical gender. In the Old English period there were contradictions between grammatical and natural genders. So, the noun wif-mann (woman) had a masculine gender. pronouns were reduced. There remained only the and that, though the group was larger initially (se, seo †at), and another group of demonstratives was compressed to this, those, these. Dual forms of personal pronouns were lost, and the Old Englishalso suffered some changes, and the biggest one was the decay of the strong verb system. Some strong verbs disappeared, others were transformed into weak verbs. Middle English is grammatically almost the same as Modern English
THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT
major event that affected greatly the English language was the Great Vowel Shift. Its simplest description is that the seven long Middle English vowel shifted higher (it is are called high front vowel) with greater closing of the mouth. That now became diphthong. So, in the Great Vowel Shift, fif (pronounced feef) becomes five (with the iy diphthong). The mid front vowel moved to the now vacant high front vowel space, and became high front vowel, so: mede (pronounced maid - eh) became meed. The low front vowel in its turn moved to slot left by the mid front vowels breke (pronounced bray - keh) became break. The next vowel from the back of the mouth moved to this spot: name (pronounced nahm - he) became name. The high back vowel inEnglish mus (pronounced moose, (mouse)) became a diphthong, mouse. The sound that had been a mid back vowel jumped into that vacant high back vowel place: roote (pronounced row - teh) became root. A mid back vowel in tis turn moved to the slot of the previous low back vowel moved: goote (pronounced gaw - teh) becomes goat.one can see, this shift is only applicable to the long vowels. The short vowels were not affected and almost didnt change at all. Word elements that were not stressed did not undergo vowel changes.explanation of the Great Vowel Shift is rather controversial and sound as follows: at the time of the Shift England experienced a major demographic change. There was mass immigration from the north to the south of England after the Black Death and a shift from rural to urban living patterns.suppose that the sudden arrival in the south of many individuals with northern accents or the arrival of many rural dwellers in urban areas triggered, a major pronunciation change.Great Vowel Shift was the most significant factor in changing Middle English into the language that we now speak, but not the only one. following grammatical changes happened:plural ending -n continued to lose ground and finally