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Language is a fundamental human faculty used for creative expression, face-to-face communication, scientific inquiry, and many other purposes. Most humans are born with the ability to acquire language automatically and effortlessly if provided the right input by their environment. It is estimated that there are 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. We differentiate among languages based on whether they are mutually understandable, but this distinction gets murky and many linguists consider a language to be a “dialect with an army (or navy),” i.e. a political construct.
Language is a fundamental human faculty used for creative expression, face-to-face communication, scientific inquiry, and many other purposes. Most humans are born with the ability to acquire language automatically and effortlessly if provided the right input by
their environment. It is estimated that there are 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. We differentiate among languages based on whether they are mutually understandable, but this distinction gets murky and many linguists consider a language to be a “dialect with an army (or navy),” i.e. a political construct. The number of languages is decreasing rapidly as some languages disappear and a few others — English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi — become more widespread as a result of globalization.
The focus of this book is the English language. The word ‘English’ has a number of widely different meanings. For instance, it describes the people from a particular part of Great Britain. It also refers to a particular language, the English language, and is used very broadly in this sense. English is Germanic in origin but roughly half of its words derive from contacts with French and Latin. As we will see, English has expanded from having a few speakers in one area to having many speakers in many geographic areas. One way to define English is through its origins and history and we will do so in this book, briefly in Section 1 and in more detail later on. We find Celtic and Roman presence in Britain before the coming of the Germanic tribes who brought with them what is to become English. Later, we also see Scandinavian, French, and Latin influences. Another way to define English is to compare it to other languages and earlier stages. In Section 2, we will apply this approach and compare Modern English to Old English and other languages. We will keep this approach in mind since we will see English changing from one type of language to another in fewer than 1,500 years.
As mentioned earlier, the meaning of ‘English’ can be defined through its origin and history.
The British Isles have been inhabited by different people for at least 50,000 years, but A History of the 2 English Language we know very little about the languages spoken until the coming of the Celts around 3,000 years ago. Celtic languages were spoken all over Europe and there were many tribes. One of these tribes may have been given a name such as pritaini ‘painted’ from which the names Britain and British may derive. In Britain, the Celtic languages survive to the present in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but they are not considered English. Irish English and Scottish English are varieties of English influenced by the Celtic languages. Just as the Celts displaced or mixed with the people inhabiting Britain before them, they and the languages they spoke were later displaced and pushed further west. Nowadays, some of these languages are being revitalized (e.g. Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland).
As is well-known, the Roman Empire ruled much of Europe until 476, when it collapsed (the troops were withdrawn from Britain around 410). Because of the political power of the Roman Empire, Latin was spoken in parts of Britain and the European continent and it exerted a strong influence on Celtic and Germanic languages. Words such as wall, kitchen, wine, mile and street were borrowed from Latin into Germanic (and through Germanic into English) during this time. The settlements and roads of the Romans were extensive and remained important even after they left the island in 410. The Latin influence continues through medieval and renaissance times, not through actual migrations but through the Catholic Church and intellectual developments such as Humanism and the Renaissance.
English officially starts when the Germanic tribes and their languages reach the British Isles, in 449. One account tells of Hengist and Horsa being invited by the Celtic king Vortigern to help fight the northern Picts and later turning against Vortigern. ‘reach’ and ‘migrate’ will be used in this book since scholars disagree about the degree of violence in these migrations.) There are of course earlier contacts between the continent and Britain. For instance, during the Roman occupation, many speakers of Germanic dialects served in the Roman army; there were many trade contacts as well. Slavery was also widespread in Europe, and it provided another means of contact between Celtic and Germanic speakers and Roman culture. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one version of which was completed in 1154, tells the history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to 1154 (available in Modern English. As the map above shows, several Germanic tribes — the Frisians, the Angles, the Saxons, and possibly the Jutes — occupied the British Isles. The word ‘English’ derives from one of these tribes — the Angles. The Germanic tribes (e.g. the Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons, Vandals, and Lombards) were different culturally, but it is not clear how distinct their languages were. They may have spoken a North Sea Germanic.
What started as a Germanic dialect spoken in a small part of England is now a language spoken by over a billion people in many parts of the world (as a first or second language). Even though it is a Germanic language, English has adopted a large number of words from other languages. We will examine the influence of other languages on English in Section 3, but it is estimated that half of the vocabulary of English comes from French and Latin. To get an idea for the level of borrowing, please look at the text below, where the loanwords are in bold, and the words of unclear origin in italics.
There are no potholes in the streets of Tucson, Arizona, just “pavement deficiencies.” The administration didn’t propose any new taxes, just “revenue enhancement through new user’s fees.” Those aren’t bums on the street, just “non-goal oriented members of society.” There are no more poor people, just “fiscal underachievers.” There was no robbery of an automatic teller machine, just an “unauthorized withdrawal.” The patient didn’t die because of medical malpractice, it was just a “diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude.” The U.S. Army doesn’t kill the enemy anymore, it just “services the target.” And the doublespeak goes on. As you can see, the most frequent words — the, a(n), did, it and of — are ‘native’, as are the plural -s and third person singular -s. Mostly, they are the shorter, more general words. The above text is a bit extreme in the number of French and Latin loanwords; almost half of the words are borrowings and many of them are euphemisms. Euphemisms make things seem better than they are: filing a property irregularity report means having to tell an airline that it lost your bags (the phrase was actually used by British Airways in 2004 and possibly later). French and Latin loanwords are also used in English to add formality to language. As we will see, some people prefer ‘native’ words or more archaic speech for this purpose (see e.g. Newman 1964 for special language in ceremonial Zuni).
The language we currently refer to as English is the partial result of the borrowings discussed above and it can be defined as the collection of words that were selected to appear in a dictionary. The collections of different dictionaries differ in number considerably: some contain 60,000, others 600,000 words. Most native speakers of English are said to have a vocabulary of 40,000 to 60,000 words (see Bloom 2002). (It is debatable whether pairs such as read and reader are two words or one, and that affects the numbers.) The Oxford English Dictionary (hence OED) is undoubtedly the best resource on the English language and its history. Many libraries nowadays have access to the OED online. We will use it often later on in this book.
However, even if we knew all the words in the OED (and many are archaic), we still would not ‘know’ the English language. We need rules to put the words together into sentences, i.e. a grammar. Grammar generates a language: the structure of the sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax) and the rules for understanding the meaning (semantics) and appropriate use (pragmatics). The goal of this book is to describe the structure of English and how its words and structures have emerged and changed over the last 1,500 years. In the next section, we briefly examine the structure of English by comparing Modern English and earlier stages of English; this examination of the structure of English will be revisited in more detail later.
450–1150
As discussed in Chapter 1, the English language had its start around 449, when Germanic tribes came to England and settled there. Eventually they would push some of the native inhabitants westwards, but initially they co-existed with them and even adopted some customs and possibly some linguistic features. During this period, there were Latin influences on English through missionaries from Rome as well as French influences after the Norman invasion in 1066.
The existing evidence about the nature of Old English comes from a collection of texts from a variety of regions: some are preserved on stone and wood monuments, others in manuscript form. The evidence indicates that Old English differs from Modern English in spelling, phonetics, morphology, and syntax.
This chapter will focus on the characteristics of Old English. In Section 1, we will examine some of the written sources in Old English, look at some special spelling symbols, and try to read the runic alphabet that was sometimes used. In Section 2, we will consider (and listen to) the sounds of Old English. In Sections 3, 4, and 5, we will discuss some Old English grammar. Its most salient feature is the system of endings. Old English vocabulary is very interesting and creative, as we will see in Section 6. Dialects will be discussed briefly in Section 7 and the chapter will conclude with several well-known Old English texts to be read and analyzed.
There were five declinable parts of speech in Old English1: the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the numeral, ‘the participle. The nominal paradigm in Old English was
characterized by the following grammatical categories. As we can see, the paradigms of different parts of speech had he same number of grammatical categories but these parts of
speech were different in the number of categorical forms composing a given grammatical category. Hence the system of forms of each part of speech requires special consideration.
The Old English noun paradigm was composed by the following grammatical categories: gender, number, case.
The category of gender was formed by the opposition of three gender-forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. All nouns, no matter whether they denoted living beings, inanimate things or abstract notions belonged to one of the three genders. The subdivision of Old English nouns in accordance with their grammatical gender is traditional, the correspondence between the meaning of the word and its grammatical gender being hard to trace.
Some nouns denoting animals were also treated as neuter, such as cicen (chicken), hors (horse), etc.
The grammatical gender did not always coincide with the natural gender of the person and sometimes even contradicted it (thus, for instance, the noun wifman (woman) was declined as
Masculine).
The following classes of pronouns were to be observed in Old English: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative and indefinite pronouns. The system of declension of the pronoun was not the same for all the classes. It has at least two subsystems that should be singled out: the declension of personal pronouns on the one hand and the declension of other pronouns. Although the grammatical categories of each subsystem were the same, i. e. gender, number, case, the number of the categorial forms composing those categories was different.
The Old English personal pronoun similar to the Old English noun had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case.
Gender
Three genders could be distinguished in the pronominal paradigm: masculine, feminine and neuter, but different forms for different genders were found only in the third person singular, the rest of the forms being indifferent to gender. The category of number differs from that of the noun as in the first and second person we find three categorial forms: singular, dual and plural, for instance:
Declension of adjectives
The paradigm of the adjective is similar to that of the noun and the pronoun, i.e. it comprises Gender, Number, Case. The grammatical category of case was built up by five forms: the Nominative, the Accusative, the Dative, the Genitive and the Instrumental.
There were two ways of declining Adjectives — the Definite and the Indefinite declension. The adjective followed the Definite declension mainly if the noun if modified had another attribute
The Adjective in Old English changed its forms not only to show the relation of the given adjective to other words in the sentence which was expressed by the gender, number and case of the adjective, but also to show the degree of the quality denoted by the adjective, i.e., the forms of the adjective in Old English could express degrees of comparison.
The verb-system in Old English was represented by two sets of forms: the finite forms of the verb and the non-finite forms of the verb, or verbals (Infinitive, Participle). Those two types of
forms — the finite and the non-finite — differed more than they do today from the point of view of their respective grammatical categories, as the verbals at that historical period were not
conjugated like the verb proper, but were declined like nouns or adjectives. Thus the infinitive could have two case-forms which may conventionally be called the “Common” case and the
“Dative” case. Cmmon case Dative case ritan (to write) to writenne (so that I shall write) epan (to keep) to cepenne (so that I shall keep) drincan (to drink) to drincenne (so that 1 shall drink)
The so-called Common case form of the Infinitive was widely used in different syntactical functions, the Dative case was used on a limited scale and mainly when the Infinitive functioned as an adverbial modifier of purpose, i.e. Ic 3a to drincenne (/ go to drink) The participle had a well-developed system of forms, the declension of the Participle resembling greatly the declension of adjectives. The one typically “verbal” grammatical category of the participle was the category of tense, for example:
All Old English verbs may be subdivided into a number of groups in accordance with the grammatical means with the help of which they built their principal stems.
There were two principal means for forming verb-stems in Old English: (1) by means of vowel interchange of the root vowel and (2) by means of suffixation. In accordance with these two methods of the formation of the verb-stems all the verbs in Old English formed two main
groups — the strong verbs and the weak verbs. There were other means of the formation of verb-stems in Old English as well, but the number of verbs belonging to those groups was not large.
The strong verbs are verbs which use vowel-interchange as the principal means of expressing different grammatical categories. They differ from weak’ ones not only in the manner of the building of their forms but also in the number of these principal forms. The strong verbs have four principal forms, the weak ones — three principal forms. These terms “strong” and “weak” were introduced into the science of philology by the famous German linguist Jacob Grimm who considered strong verbs to be of “a more noble nature” as compared with weak verbs, because strong verbs conjugated by means of vowel interchange better reflected the prehistoric «golden age” of the language. This vowel interchange, or “ablaut”, which was the principal grammatical means in the conjugation of the Old English strong verbs was of two kinds: qualitative and quantitative. The first five classes are mainly based on the qualitative ablaut; the sixth class — on the quantitative ablaut; verbs of the seventh class originally formed their principal forms by means ot the so-called reduplication of the root syllable, but in the course of the development of the language that means was obliterated. The Old English qualitative ablaut is akin to the Common Germanic ablaut and even Indo-European ablaut — its essence, as we remember, is the use of the gradation series consisting of a front vowel, back vowel and zero,
e — o — 0
i — a — 0
In Russian, for instance, they use two grades of the series, e/zero to form the category of tense: Present tense Past tense e — беру 0 — брал Classes of the strong verbs There were seven principal gradation series in Old English and there were seven classes of the strong verbs — from I to VII. As we have already said, the seventh class of the strong verbs stands apart from the rest of the classes, because it was the only class formed by verbs which originally used reduplication of the root-vowel as their principal grammatical means; the sixth class of the strong verbs shows a peculiarity that is also typical only of one class within the system of the strong verbs — original quantitative gradation; the rest-of the classes — from I to VII — are characterized by a certain similarity in their original grammatical means as all of them originally used the same type of qualitative ablaut, i.e. the interchange of a front vowel — back vowel — zero in the form of
i — a - ~ 0 .
The difference in the gradation series of each of the classes within the first five was mainly due to the splitting of that one gradation into variants under the influence of the vowel or the consonant of the stem that followed the vowel of gradation. Thus in the first class of the strong verbs the vowel of gradation was followed by the vowel -i, in the second — by the vowel -u, in the third, fourth and fifth — by a sonorous consonant
Regularity means conformity with some unique principle or pattern. It does not require any exact material marker. That is why it is said that most verbs in Old English were regular I in the or conjugation they followed one of the patterns typical of this or that class of strong or weak verbs. However, there were also a few irregular verbs, conjugated in some specific way. Irregular weak verbs The majority of the weak verbs belonging to the 1st and 2nd classes were regular. The weak verbs of the 3rd class are considered to be irregular, because the class consists of only three verbs, following their own individual patterns of form-building. However, among the Is1 class there were also some irregular verbs. This irregularity was inherent, but it was manifested in pre-historic times and in Old English differently. Here we may speak of such verbs as
tellan — talde — tald (to tell)
sellan — salde — said (to sell)
The sign of irregularity of the weak verbs in Old English was vowel interchange, a feature not typical of this group of verbs. The cause of it was the original absence of the sterrwforming suffix -i- in Past Singular and Past Participle:
the other two remaining unchanged, and as a result the verb acquired vowel interchange.
1150–1500
The previous chapter examined the influence of other languages on English, i.e. its external history. This chapter focuses on internal changes. Middle English is usually considered to begin around 1150, when the synthetic character of Old English starts to change. For instance, in Middle English, a number of case endings simplify and become -e. This change occurs at different times in different parts of Britain: in the North and East, it proceeds faster than in the South and West, probably due to Scandinavian influence. The many loans we discussed in the previous chapter and the loss of endings make Middle English look ‘modern’.
Several different points can be considered as the end of Middle English: 1400, when the Great Vowel Shift starts; 1476, when printing is introduced; or 1485, when Henry VII comes to the throne. Here, we will consider the year 1500, when the most radical morphological and syntactic changes are complete, as the end of Middle English. The organization of this chapter is similar to that of Chapter 4: Sections 1 and 2 discuss the sources, writing system, and sounds of Middle English, and Sections 3 and 4 examine its morphology and syntax (its grammar). Since Chapter 5 provided information about Old and Middle English vocabulary, Section 5 of this chapter is about general word formation, not loans, and Section 6 examines dialects. The chapter also provides texts for analysis.
1700–the present
This chapter outlines the changes that occur in English from the 18th century on. For practical purposes, the chapter only discusses general tendencies, and the examples come from relatively standard British and American English. Chapter 9 will focus on the changes that take place in English in the different geographical areas where it is spoken. After 1700, there are fewer major language internal changes than in the previous periods. However, there are many external developments as a result of colonialism: English branches out into American, Australian, African (e.g. Kenyan English), and Asian (e.g. South Asian English, Singapore English), with numerous varieties within each of these broad categories (e.g. South African Indian English and New York Puerto Rican English). The closer we get to Modern English, the better we can investigate the details of language use, such as differences due to the gender, age, region, and socio-economic status of the speakers, and there are many sociolinguistic studies devoted to these aspects. This chapter focuses on the overall changes in the sounds and grammar of English. Section 1 sketches some of the social, scientific, and political changes that influence the language and the types of texts produced in this period. Section 2 explores sound and spelling changes as well as the stigmatization of certain sound changes. Section 3 discusses the grammar, and Section 4 explores the sources of new vocabulary. Section 5 examines prescriptivism, the role of dictionaries, the status of dialects, and the further development of a standard. Section 6 focuses on the regional and register varieties of English, continuing where Section 2 left off.
Excellent resources on Old English grammar are Campbell (1959), Quirk & Wrenn (1958), and Traugott (1992). The emphasis in this chapter will be on showing that Old English is a synthetic language, using a lot of word endings or inflections to indicate grammatical functions. Section 4 discusses the endings on Old English words — the morphology — and Section 5 touches upon a few points on how to build Old English sentences — the syntax. Chapter 2 provided the basic information about the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases and we’ll now use that knowledge.
‘He swore oaths to King Alfred and gave hostages’.
First, notice the -e and -as endings. The -e ending is used for dative case (for which we now use the preposition to) on both ælfrede ‘Alfred’ and cyninge ‘king’. It means something was given to King Alfred. The -as ending shows that aðas ‘oaths’ and gislas ‘hostages’ are plural (accusative here). Sealde ‘give’ is broader in Old English than in Modern English where sell means ‘give in exchange for money’.