In this talk we will look at how English linguistic communication from the Germanic household of linguistic communications through different ages. It besides looks at the different cultural and historical developments that helped English make the manner it is spoken now. This concluding subdivision looks at the different English that are spoken universe broad and the major differences between British, Indian and American English. “ Language in its spoken and written signifier at a given clip plays a important portion in the civilization of its talkers at that clip, that feelings of group individuality or national individuality were frequently forged in a decisive manner by the bond of a common linguistic communication. In the early periods, lingual phenomena may associate to political state of affairss, or to a scholarly and/or political involvement taken in the province of a linguistic communication, to a grade that these phenomena can non be sufficiently understood in footings of strictly lingual standards. ”[ 1 ]
Old English ( 450 – 1066 ) : The earliest dwellers of the Island were Celts. The linguistic communications spoken in Britain at that of which we have any cognition are the Celtic linguistic communications which survive in modern Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic. The debut of Christianity among the Celts with the reaching of Romans ( 43 – 410 Before the Common Era ) , Latin was in general usage. After the domination of the Roman encroachers diminished the Saxon encroachers from beyond the North Sea who were invariably assailing the east seashore of England gained prominence. We get a glance of these developments from the Ecclesiastical History of England, written by St. Bede ( a monastic from Jarrow composing in the late 8th century ) around 730 AD. “ In the class of the following century, the fledglings began to settle for good. Harmonizing to Bede they belonged to three folks, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. They are now by and large referred to as the Anglo- Saxons and their linguistic communication English. Finally they conquered the whole of what is now England, and English replaced the Gaelic linguistic communication spoken by the mass of the population. ”[ 2 ]The first grounds of English come from the Anglo- Saxon poesy and prose of the seventh Century that outlines the characteristic characteristics of Old English. English that was so used autumn into four different idioms viz. Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish. A major cultural development in Old English was the enterprise taken by King Alfred of Wessex ( 871- 899 ) to interpret Latin texts into English. Most of the texts written during that period is written West Saxon. The following in the West Saxon version of the C?dmon ‘s ( the foremost named English poet ) anthem:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
now allow us praise the heavenly-kingdom ‘s defender
meotodes meahte and his modge?anc,
the Godhead ‘s might and his intent
weorc wuldorf?der, swa he wundra gehw?s,
the work of the glorious-father as he every admiration
ece drihten, or onstealde.
the ageless Godhead the beginning established
He ?rest sceop eorA°an bearnum
He fi rst created for the kids of work forces
heofon to hrofe, halig scyp pend ;
heaven as a roof the sanctum Godhead
?a middangeard moncynnes weard,
so middle-earth the defender of world
ece drihten, ?fter teode
ageless Godhead subsequently created
fi rum foldan, frea ?lmihtig.
for work forces the universe the Godhead Godhead
Before the Anglo- Saxons came to England, they had borrowed some Latin words: vino ( Latin vinum ) , street ( Latin strata ) , mile ( Latin mille ( passum ) , “ 1000 ( gaits ) ” ) , pan ( Latin panna ) , wall ( Latin vallum ) . Once they had arrived, the Anglo-saxons were non speaking much to the occupant Celts – more frequently, killing them – and, as swayers, were surely non talking Briton. Hence merely a few loanwords from Celtic linguistic communications entered English at this clip. Bin and Druid are a twosome of illustrations that have made it to Modern English ; others were borrowed and subsequently lost. Lots of British topographic point names are Celtic, though: Avon, Thames, Wight, etc. Though we do n’t cognize much about the faith of the Anglo- Saxons, the names of their Gods Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Frig/ Freya are still enshrined in our yearss of the hebdomad as Tiw ‘s twenty-four hours ( Tuesday ) , Woden ‘s twenty-four hours ( Wednesday ) , Thor ‘s twenty-four hours ( Thursday ) , Freya ‘s twenty-four hours ( Friday ) severally.
What differentiated old English from Modern English is the sound system. The harmonic bunchs in Old English have been simplified in later signifiers of the linguistic communication. The initial bunch fn- , as in the word fnastian ( “ sneezing ” ) , has become sn- . Initial hw- ( as in hw?t ) has become wh- ( “ what ” ) . Initial hl- ( as in hlud ) has become merely l- ( “ loud ” ) . Initial hr- ( hring ) has become r- ( “ ring ” )
One of the major developments in this period is the Winchester vocabulary. Get downing with two plants which likely originated in the 940s and which are attributed to one of the chief advocates of the Benedictine reform, ?thelwold, bishop of Winchester ( 963-84 ) , a group of texts shows a marked inclination in a figure of semantic Fieldss to prefer certain words, the “ Winchester words, ” to their equivalent word. Standard Old English refers to the phonological and morphological signifiers of Late West Saxon, happening in a regularized writing system in manuscripts dating from the late ten percent to the early 12th century, and arising in all parts of England, non merely the West Saxon dialect country.
“ The English talkers were themselves subjected to farther foraies from across the North Sea, this clip from Danes. The first foraies day of the month from 797, and finally the Danes conquered a big portion of England North and E of a line stretching from Chester to the Thames. At the clip of King Alfred, merely the land South and West of this line remained in Anglo-Saxon custodies. The Danish invasion and subsequent colony had a considerable influence on the English linguistic communication, and many words were borrowed into English, particularly into the idioms of the North. ”[ 3 ]The Danes remained in power until they were overthrown by the Wessex swayers in the 954. under the male monarch of Wessex the England was given the modern name. from so on authors had referred to the angelcynn ( ‘Angle-kin ‘ ) , englaland ( ‘land of the Angles ‘ ) . Edgar, nephew and replacement of Eadred, issued mintage bearing the name and rubric Adgar king Anglorum ( ‘Edgar, male monarch of the English ‘ ) . And above all the Wessex idiom became the standard signifier of English for
Some of the adoptions from Old Norse during this period include aloft, choler, bag, knock, nine, dice, level, gift, hubby, ailment, knife, leg, criminal, sky, tegument, accomplishment, until, cut. Apart from the above mentioned content words, English besides borrowed map words from Old Norse. “ The 3rd individual plural pronouns in Old English began with an /h/ , non with/i?„/ . OE masculine topic pronoun he, its object variant hine, its indirect object discrepancy him and its genitive discrepancy his. Similarly, it had a feminine capable pronoun heo, a feminine object pronoun hiere ( the beginning of ModE her ) , and a feminine genitive hie. All the Old English third individual plural pronouns besides began with /h/ as in hello, heora and hem. The ground we now have they, them, their, alternatively, is because the original Old English third individual plural pronouns were replaced sweeping by their Old Norse opposite numbers, which began with the interdental continuant /i?„/ . The old signifier hem survives in the weak signifier ’em. Similarly, on the manner to ME, the feminine singular capable signifier heo was replaced by the Old Norse she, although English kept the object signifier her. ”[ 4 ]“ Unlike the other Germanic linguistic communications ( except Old Norse ) , Old English had voiced and voiceless interdental consonants ( the sounds represented by the Modern English spelling Thursday ) . These were represented by the letters ? ( called “ thorn ” ) and A° ( called “ edth ” ) taken from the older Germanic runic system of composing. Such sounds did non be in Latin or the Romance linguistic communications, and therefore Anglo-Saxon Scribes had to borrow missive signifiers from the runic alphabet in order to stand for such sounds non available in the Roman alphabet ( other sounds that distinguished Old English from Latin were the ? , or “ ?sch, ” a sound kindred to the vowel in the modern American pronunciation of “ cat, ” and the sound of the tungsten, frequently written with a runic missive known as a “ wynn ” ) . ”[ 5 ]
This difference in the form of adoptions helps us in understanding the contact between Norse talkers and English talkers and English talkers and Latin, French or Gaelic talkers. “ Latin and Celtic adoptions, before the Norse came, were limited reasonably much to things the English did n’t hold words for: topographic point names and spiritual constructs, that is, to borrow content words for fresh constructs. English merely took what it needed in those instances. The Old Norse adoptions, on the other manus, seem to reflect a history of two similar linguistic communications blending, merchandising mundane footings and map words because both linguistic communications were in usage by people in mundane contexts. Because many of the Danish colonists intermarried with the English, Old Norse and Old English both became family linguistic communications, used in an frequently bilingual environment. ”[ 6 ]
Middle English ( 1066 – 1485 ) : “ After the Norman conquering ( William the Conqueror ) in 1066, Gallic became the spoken linguistic communication of the nobility in England, while Latin was adopted as the chief written linguistic communication. English was still spoken by the lower orders of society, but the old written tradition finally collapsed, and few English written records survive for 200 old ages after about 1150. Gallic remained in usage for 300 old ages, until it was bit by bit replaced by English after the center of the 14th century. The sort of English that emerged, nevertheless, was strongly influenced by French, and contained a big figure of Gallic words and looks. The Gallic influence can be seen in the linguistic communication of Chaucer, who died in 1400. ”[ 7 ]
“ The Gallic adoptions include words from authorities – parliament, curate, district, counselor, council, people, power ; from finance – hoarded wealth ; from rubrics – duke, crowned head, royal, sovereign, prince, count, princess, princedom, baron, baroness, baronial ; from the military – sergeant, peace, conflict, admiral, captain, lieutenant ; from the jurisprudence – justice, legal power, advocator, jury, tribunal, jurisprudence, prison, offense, accuse ; from the humanistic disciplines – calamity, comedy, lay, creative person, critic, dance ; from medical specialty – sawbones ; from culinary art – dinner, supper, sauce ; from the Church – faith. In fact, the really words authorities, finance, military, jurisprudence, art, medical specialty, and culinary art are themselves all adoptions from Gallic during this period. Some other illustrations of general adoptions from Norman French include soft, incrimination, gimmick, clemency, puny, mountain, moonstruck, acetum, mustard, salad. ”[ 8 ]“ The category differentiation between Gallic people and English at this clip is frequently illustrated with the undermentioned list of French-origin/English beginning word braces:
Meat Animal
beef cow
veau calf
mouton sheep
porc hog
venison cervid
The words for the meats come to us from the French-speaking people who got to eat it ; the words for the animate beings come to us from the English-speaking people who had to raise them. Most linguistic communications use the same name for both the meat and the animate being, as English does with poulet and lamb. ”[ 9 ]
Apart from single words, a figure of collocations and looks were borrowed from French. A twosome of them are deserving observing prefer I ‘oreille ( ‘to lend an ear ‘ ) ; sans faille ( ‘without fail ‘ ) . The prototypically English look as Shakespeare ‘s lend me your ears has its beginnings in French.
This period saw the completion of an of import alteration in English: the about entire loss of the rich inflectional system ( individual, figure, gender, tense, temper, facet ) that is so characteristic of most Germanic linguistic communications. The 3rd individual remarkable -eth stoping and the 2nd individual remarkable -est stoping hung around in spiritual texts for a piece. In the infinite of 200 old ages, English went from being a extremely inflected linguistic communication with comparatively flexible word order to being an about wholly isolating linguistic communication with quite fixed subject-verb-object word order.
The extremist propaganda of the reign of James I the Normans set out to destruct the English linguistic communication but resulted in the resurgence of written English. The re-emergence of English can be traced back to 1258 at the clip of the Barons ‘ rebellion. The battle chiefly concerned the arbitrary exercising of royal power, but a peculiar issue was the assignment of Frenchmen to prominent places in church and province.[ 10 ]The development of a new in-between category of makers, bargainers and merchandisers was another ground for the re- outgrowth of English. From the 1380s the London clubs began to utilize English for their records instead than Latin that was used boulder clay so. It was the economic growing of these in-between category that led to the development of towns and subsequently the prominence of London and the idiom used in London as the preferable 1. During the earlier decennaries of the 15th century, a new London idiom was cultivated at Chancery for the production of governmental paperss. The debut of printing in England in the 1470s by Caxton helped in the standardizing English linguistic communication that chiefly used the London Dialect. Written texts became much more widely available than earlier. Some of the major facets of the Chancery English was the penchant given to the Northern signifier -ly, instead than the Midlands form-lich, for the adverbial stoping ; the stoping -s, alternatively of -eth, for the stoping of the 3rd individual singular of verbs and the saving of historical signifiers in composing even in the face of alterations in pronunciation ( for illustration, spellings such as high, ought, slaughter, right, though, and nought )
Early Modern English ( 1485 – 1660 ) : This clip period saw an unprecedented growing of English linguistic communication. The figure of English talkers doubled. New words and neologies came into the linguistic communication as a consequence of the development of scientific discipline and other countries of acquisition. The first monolingual lexicon, A Table Alphabeticall, was published in 1604 to explicate hard words in apparent English. The Renaissance was a period of renewed involvement in classical Greek and Roman civilization, and the immense aggregation of larning they had amassed. It is from about this clip that scholars began to compose in English alternatively of Latin, and as a consequence many Latin words were borrowed into English. English literature flourished at the terminal of the 16th century, the clip of Shakespeare ( 1564-1616 ) . The Authorized Version of the English Bible was published in 1611.[ 11 ]English writing system was stnadardised by 1595.
“ Chaucer ‘s English, ” does non merely imply the inside informations of London Middle English of the ulterior 14th century but the personal transmutation of those inside informations into an inventive, lingual infinite. Nowhere is that transmutation more brightly accomplished than in the celebrated gap of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which virtu engendred is the flour ;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with unfastened ye
( So priketh hem nature in hir corages ) ,
Than longen common people to goon on pilgrim’s journeies,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes ;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
( 1.1-18 )
The enlargement of English as the linguistic communication of the faith was another of import development in the modern age. A big figure of footings such as Jehovah, Passover, whipping boy, and expiation and phrases such as my brother ‘s keeper ( Genesis 4 ) , the salt of the Earth ( Matthew 5 ) , and a jurisprudence unto themselves ( Romans 2 ) ( McGrath 2001: 75, 79 ) came into the linguistic communication as a consequence of Tyndale ‘s interlingual rendition of the Bible in 1520 ‘s. The undermentioned extract comes from the King James Bible.
7 Marueile non that I saide vnto
thee, Ye must be borne againe.
8 The winde bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst non tel whence it commeth,
and whither it goeth: So is euery one
that is borne of the Spirit.
( The New Testament ; John 3:7-8 )
During this period a big figure of Greek and Latin words were introduced to English. They were largely proficient footings to mention to concept that English did n’t hold name for. These words were frequently called “ Inkhorn Footings ‘ . Some of the inkhorn footings that were borrowed or coined during this period and are still used are: expend, celebrate, extol, mildness, relinquish, contemplate, sleight, refine, barbarian, instruction, dedicate, obscureness, confidant, insinuate, explicate, disposition, politician, parlance, map, star, asteroid, catastrophe. “ There had been borrowing from far-off linguistic communications during the Middle English period, due to importing of new trade goods: cinnamon ( Hebrew ) , musk ( Persian ) , lemon ( Arabic ) , silk ( Chinese ) , Piper nigrum, sugar, anil, ginger, sandal ( Hindi ) , and damask ( from Damascus ) are a few illustrations. Because ships from Spain and Portugal were universe travelers, conveying back trade goods from all around the universe, English acquired some words from other, non-European linguistic communications via Spanish and Portuguese, which had borrowed them foremost: yam, chocolate, canoe, knoll, hurricane, murphy, maize, baccy, cocoa, tomato, banana, alligator pear. ”[ 12 ]The terminal of the Middle English period is set, once more symbolically, in 1485 when the Wars of the Roses concluded with the Ascension of the fi rst Tudor male monarch, Henry VII. Henry was besides the first Welshman to presume the English throne.
Modern British English ( 1660 – the present ) : The “ Modern Standard English can be traced to about the clip of Chaucer, but was for a long clip variable in spelling, in the usage of words, and in the inside informations of English grammar. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, there was considerable involvement in repairing the linguistic communication, and in 1712 Jonathan Swift proposed the puting up of an Academy to make this. By default, nevertheless, it was left to bookmans to make up one’s mind on what should be included in Standard English. Johnson ‘s lexicon of 1755 did much to standardise spellings and repair the significances of words. Several grammars were produced, among the more influential being Lowth ‘s grammar of 1762. From the 1760s there was increasing involvement in repairing a criterion of English pronunciation, which resulted in a tradition of articulating lexicons, of which the most influential was Walker ‘s lexicon of 1791. It was non until the present century that a standard pronunciation was described in item. This is Daniel Jones ‘s Received pronunciation, which was adopted by the BBC in the 1920s as a criterion for broadcast medium. ”[ 13 ]
“ In the late 19th century, the geographically nonlocalized assortment of English spoken by the educated work forces and adult females across Britain was dubbed Received Pronunciation ( RP ) . Virtually a category idiom, RP quickly gained acknowledgment and assumed the voice of authorization when it was adopted by the BBC. ”[ 14 ]The chief purpose of Standardization was therefore to supply a individual ( and finally fixed ) , national speech pattern for all talkers. Despite all these attempts speech pattern has continued to work as a complex form of individuality – societal, geographical, and cultural. RP however remained the common mention theoretical account in lexicons and in the instruction of English as a foreign linguistic communication.
“ During this period, the different Englishes of the different English settlements began to diverge slightly. The English in India brought home several Hindi words: curry, cottage, chintz, denim, clout, mongoose, hard currency, pyjama, fingerstall, pagoda, tattoo, Polo, booty, steamroller, besides sahib, rupee, cooly. English talkers in America were interacting with the autochthonal population, and adoption words for the new topographic points, animate beings and workss they encountered: oppossum, raccoon, rotter, squash, hickory, American larch, pecan, moccassin, succotash, toboggan, prairie wolf, totem, groundhog, quahaug, Mohawk, Ohio, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Connecticut. But in neither India nor America did the civilizations interact in such a manner that the English talkers borrowed big measures of words. The encroachers had the upper manus, so like the Romans and Anglo-saxons in Celtic Britain, the Vikings in England and the first coevals of Norman French in England, the vanquishers spoke their ain linguistic communication and disdained to larn more than a necessary smattering of words from the linguistic communications of the subjugated indigens. ”[ 15 ]
