Sources of origin of the english language

THE CONTENTS 
 

Introduction……………………………………………………………….3 

I.  SOURCES OF ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

1. I PERIOD…………………………………………………………..………5 

1.1     Development of the language………………………………….……6

       1.2    Origin of English…………………………………………………….7

            1.3    The Scandinavian influence…………………………………….……9

    2. II PERIOD……………………………………………………….…..….…11   

         2.1    The Norman Conquest………………………………...…………….13

      2.2     The Latin influence…………………………………………………14 

      2.3     Development of a literary standard…………………………...….…15

  3. III PERIOD………………...…………………………………………..…..16

      3.1     Eighteenth-century movement to regularize the language…...…..…18

      3.2     After-effects of eighteenth-century grammatical theories…….....…20

       3.3     American English …………………………….……………………21

        3.4     Our days……………………………….……………………………23 

    3.5      From the history of some words……………………………………24

THE CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………...26

THE LIST OF THE USED LITERATURE…………………………………….27 

SUPPLEMENT………………………………………………………………….28  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

    Introduction 
 

    We have chosen this topic because we do not learnt a lot about the origin and historical development of the English language according to the school program. That’s why this topic is very actual in our days.   

    The English language is now the first language of about 350 million people, the native language of 12 nations and the official or semiofficial language of thirty-three more nations. That means one in every seven people in the world speaks English.

    Nobody knows what the first language was. But scientists feel sure that nobody speaks it today, because all languages change and keep on changing as long as people use them. One language may change in different ways in different places and grow into several languages.

    The English language has become the “new Latin”, a language used between peoples whose main languages are different of the century. In terms of scientific know-how and technological development, one must know English to be a part of the twentieth century. In this context it is not difficult to see in Italy, for example, English is a must for many technical jobs. In China, English is the chief foreign language learned at school.

    At present no other language on earth is better suited to play the role of a world language. There are many reasons for its popularity. First English is easier to learn than any other language. Second it easily borrows local words and phrases from the very countries into which it expands.

    English Is so widespread that it has become the standard language for all kinds of international communication. At present, 75% of the world’s mail is in English, 60% of the world’s telephone calls are made in English, 60% of the world’s radio stations broadcast in English and more than half of the world’s periodicals are printed in English.

    English is also the international language of businesspeople, pilots and air traffic controllers, diplomats and politicians, sports people scientists, doctors and students. Beyond a doubt, English is now the world’s top language.

    Except for all, it is also important to know emergence of the language, its roots. Therefore we have decided to write about historical development of the English language and its origin. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

    I. SOURCES OF ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 
 

    1. I PERIOD 
 

    The history of development of the English language is accepted for dividing into three periods: 1) old English - from the beginning of written monuments (VII century) up to the end of XI century; 2) middle English - approximately from the beginning of XII century up to the third quarter of XV century; 3) new English - from the end of XV century till now.

    The written monuments which have reached us of old English language enable to make clear enough representation about its sound system, a grammatical system and somewhat about its dictionary structure and word-formative means.

    The grammatical system of old English language differs from the modern language. So, names nouns had a category of a sort (man's, female and average), a category of number (unique and plural) and a category of a case (genitive, dative and accusative).

    Personal pronouns in old English language had the same four cases, as a noun. Some index and interrogative pronouns still kept the form of the tool case having a line of the common values with Russian instrumental language.

    Old English verbs were very original. One of their features was division into strong and weak verbs (so in linguistics it is accepted to name wrong and regular verbs). Strong (wrong) verbs were meant as verbs at which forms of past time and a participle II were formed by change, <alternations> public bases verbs. For example: singan, sang, singon, sungen.

    In old English language there were various types of alternations depending on which strong (wrong) verbs shared on 7 groups (classes). These features, that are alternation of vowels, were kept and till now though the number of strong (correct) verbs in modern English language has considerably decreased.

    Weak (correct) verbs in language of the ancient period formed the forms by addition a basis of a verb of suffixes -ed- or -od-, which the personal endings joined.

    The word order in old English language the offer was considerably freer, than in modern English language. The main parts of the sentence - a subject and a predicate - could be interchanged the position, if in the beginning of the offer there was the adverbial word indicating when or under what circumstances there was a given event. In questions the predicate, as a rule, also was located before a subject. In dictionary structure of language of the ancient period words, related to another Ancient German languages - German, Dutch, Swedish prevailed etc. 
 

    1.1 Development of the language

      

    If you looked at the French and Italian words for hundred—cent and cento respectively—you would easily guess that they are related, and they are. They both developed from the Latin word centum. And if you looked at the German word hundert you could recognize it as a close relative of the English word. You would be right again, but you could not prove it quite so easily, because we do not have any written records of the early form of Germanic from which modern English and German developed. We have to prove the relationship by other methods which are too complicated to go into here.

    You would probably not guess that hundred and centum are also related; but if you happened to think of these two words along with horn and corno, house and casa, and various other pairs that begin with h in English and с in Italian, you might suspect that these resemblances were systematic, and that English is also related to

Italian, although not nearly as closely as French is. Your suspicions would be justified. Experts can trace the relations among all four of these languages and a good many others. We can say roughly that French and Italian are sister languages, both born of Latin; that English and modern German are approximately second cousins; and that English and Italian are something like third cousins twice removed.

    Nobody knows for sure how language began, or even whether it began just once or at a number of different times and places. What we do know is that some languages, as we have just seen, show evidence of a common origin, while others do not. If our written records went back a few thousand years further it is possible that we might find signs of resemblance between the languages that we have just mentioned and Chinese or Arabic or Navajo. But if such resemblances ever existed, they disappeared a long time ago, and it seems most unlikely that we will ever find any evidence to prove them. We must therefore study them as separate families, though they may have had a common ancestor about which we now know nothing.

1.2 Origin of English

 
 

    English belongs, in a rather complicated way, to the Indo-European family, which includes most of the European languages and a few Asiatic ones. We do not know where the original speakers of the parent Indo-European language lived. Guesses about their homeland range all the way from northwestern Europe to central Asia. According to ail the early records they were a tall, blond, and warlike people. with a good deal of energy and intelligence. In their native land they had developed neither writing nor cities, so there is not much evidence about how they lived when they were at home. But when they left home and went out in search of new lands—which they did in various waves from about 2500 B.C. to about 1000 B.C.—the Indo-Europeans seem to have been generally successful in conquering the countries they came to.

    When a wave of them settled in a territory already crowded, they mixed with the original population. In time they lost their distinctive appearance by intermarrying with the earlier inhabitants, and sometimes they also gave up most of the features of their language. When a wave went to a more thinly settled territory, they naturally preserved their physical characteristics comparatively unchanged for a much longer time; and they were likely to preserve the distinctive features of their language also, though the two things did not always go together.

    The Slavic and Celtic languages, as well as Indian, Persian, and some others, are of Indo-European origin, but the three branches with which English is most concerned are the Greek, Latin, and Germanic, particularly the last. All languages are changing to some extent all the time; and before the invention of writing they seem to have changed faster. Since the various waves left at different times, they were speaking noticeably different varieties of Indo-European at the times of their departures; and the further changes that took place after they left made their languages more and more unlike. As they split up and settled (more or less) in different regions, the differences became so great that the Greeks, for instance, could not possibly understand the Germans; and a little later some of the Germans could not understand the others.

    Old Germanic split into North. East, and West Germanic. West Germanic split into High and Low German. And Low German split into further dialects, including those of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. There were differences in pronunciation, and even in word endings, between these last three; but most of the root words were enough alike to be recognizable, and the three tribes seem to have had no great difficulty in understanding each other. About 450 A.D. members of all three tribes moved into what is now called England (from Angle-land), and began to take it over. It is at this time that we usually say the English language, as such, began.

    It is worth noticing that even at the very beginning of English as a separate language there was no one simple standard. The Jutes undoubtedly thought that the Angles "talked funny," and vice versa. Efforts have been made for centuries to develop a set of standard practices, and there is much to be said in their favor; but they have never been quite successful, and they never will be. There is just no way to make millions of people talk exactly alike.

    These early English settlers do not seem to have made much of an effort to understand the language of the Britons who lived in England (then called Britain) before they came. The Britons also spoke an Indo-European language, but it belonged to the Celtic rather than the Germanic branch, and was by now completely unrecognizable to the newcomers. The English added only a handful of Celtic words to their language—not nearly as many as the Americans later picked up from the Indians.

    We can only guess about how the language would have developed if the descendants of these three tribes had been left to themselves. The fact is that two great invasions and a missionary movement changed the language enormously. The total result of these and other influences was that the English vocabulary became the largest and most complex in the world, and the grammar changed its emphasis from inflections (changes in the forms of words) to word order 

1.3 The Scandinavian influence

 
 

    Some three hundred years after the West Germanic tribes had settled in England, there was another wave of invasions, this time by Scandinavians. In the history books these people are usually referred to as "Danes," but there were Swedes and Norwegians among them, and their speech was probably no more uniform than that of the first wave. The dialects they spoke belonged to the Northern rather than the Western division of Germanic. They differed rather more from the dialects of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes than these differed from each other—roughly, about as much as Spanish differs from Italian. In spite of different habits of pronunciation, most of the root words were enough alike to be recognizable. The difficulty caused by differences in inflection was partly solved by dropping some of the inflections altogether and being broad-minded about the others. Spelling was not much of a problem, because most people could not read nor write, and those who could, spelled as they pleased. There were no dictionaries to prove them wrong.

    Although these Danes moved in on the English, and for a time dominated them politically, their conquest was nothing like as thorough as that of the English over the Britons. After the early fighting the two peoples settled down together without much attention to their separate origins, and the languages mingled. On the whole,

English rather than Danish characteristics won out; but many of the words were so much alike that it is impossible to say whether we owe our present forms to English or Danish origins, and occasionally the Danish forms drove out the English ones. Sometimes both forms remained, usually with a somewhat different meaning. Thus we have shirt and skirl, both of which originally meant a long, smock-like garment, although the English form has come to mean the upper part, and the Danish form the lower. Old English rear and Danish raise are another pair—sometimes interchangeable, sometimes not.

 
 
 
 

2. II PERIOD 
 

    The Middle English period in a history of development of the English language shared about four hundred years. For this time there were significant changes both in phonetic structure, and in morphological structure of the English language.

    Occurrence of weak vowels in unaccented syllables has resulted all over again to that the majority of case inflexions have become identical and, hence, have ceased to express case differences. Other means were required clearly to put into dependence between words in the offer. These means became pretexts which were put before the appropriate word. Wide use of pretexts in this function has predetermined the further destiny of case inflexions - they have started to die off. This process was finished in XV century.

    One of morphological designers of a plural number in Middle English language - the ending -es - has gradually superseded all others and during the Middle English period has become the basic morphological parameter of a plural number of nouns.

    In the Middle English period has ceased to exist a category of a grammatical gender as already any more there were no the morphological attributes, distinguishing nouns man's, female and average sorts from each other.

    Loss by a name by a noun of the majority of case inflexions has resulted in significant changes in system of adjectives which have ceased to change on numbers and cases.

    Thus, by the end of XV century in the English language case declination of nouns and adjectives and distinctions have ceased to exist on the basis of a grammatical gender.

    In the Middle English period have received a wide circulation and have specified the values the verbal forms, arisen in the old English period, - forms of a perfect (Present Perfect, Past Perfect and Future Perfect) and future time. Wide use of these forms has resulted in occurrence of the verbal form of new type - analytical which basic components were: an auxiliary verb with the lost lexical value and a semantic verb in the form of a participle II (in a perfect) or an infinitive (in future time).

    In the Middle English period the system of forms of the English verb has replenished with the new impersonal form combining in both nominal, and verbal attributes. It was the form of a gerund formed from a basis of an infinitive of a verb with the help of addition of a suffix -ing. However in this period the use of a gerund is very much limited also frameworks of its values are still poorly outlined.

    The changes which were having place in morphological structure of Middle English language, should be reflected on its syntactic structure and first of all in the order of the main parts of the sentence. Absence of morphological attributes of a subject and a direct object made impossible difference of them from each other in the offer. The similar phenomenon can be observed and in Russian in the offer Mother loves the daughter where owing to absence of case inflexions of both nouns not clear who whom loves, that is whether the noun mother a subject, and the daughter - a direct object, or, on the contrary, is a noun the daughter is a subject, and mother - a direct object.

    On those laws which were planned in Middle English language, the subject in increasing frequency took a place before a predicate, and the direct object - a place is direct after a predicate.

    In system of word-formation of Middle English language also there were changes. At the end of the Middle English period as a result of full dying off of case and other dependence there was a new way of formation of words without what participation or word-formative affixes. This way has received a wide circulation in the subsequent new English the period.

     Together with formation of the nations there is also a national English language in which basis the dialect of the economic, political and cultural centre of England - cities of London has lain. Formation of the English national language represents the long process proceeding about three centuries.