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History of English

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A (Very) Brief History of the English Language
Lingua Franca \ ˈliŋ-gwə-ˈfraŋ-kə \
vehicular language
bridge language
trade language
link language
interlanguage
6 official languages of the UN
Arabic
Chinese
English
French
Russian
Spanish
Spanish-speaking Countries
Russian-speaking Countries
Arabic-speaking Countries
English history timeline
Prehistoric Britain BC
Roman Britain 43 AD
Anglo-Saxon Britain 450
English language timeline:
Old English (449-1100),

Prehistoric Old English (c. 450 to 650)

Early Old English (c. 650 to 900)

Late Old English (c. 900 to 1170)
Viking Britain 793
Medieval Britain 1066
Tudor Britain 1485
Stuart Britain 1603
Georgian Britain 1714
Victorian Britain 1837
Modern Britain 1902 +
Middle English (1100-1500)
• Early Middle English (1100 – 1250)
• Central Middle English (1250 – 1400)
• Late Middle English (1400 – 1500)
Modern English (1500-).
• 1500 – 1775 – Early Modern English
• XVIII – XX – Late Modern English
• XXI Century – Contemporary English
Avebury Circle – 3000 BC
Stonehenge – 2800 – 2000 BC
Bell-Beaker culture – 2100 BC
The Celts – Britons
'Pretani,’ = the ‘painted’ or the ‘tattooed’ ones
= Britannia (Roman)
Celt – Keltoi (Greek) = barbarians
The Celts:
•the Goidelic Celts (Gaels or Gaelic, 700 BC):
Scotland,
Isle of Man,
Ireland
•the Brythonic Celts (Britons , 500 BC):
Wales,
Cornwall.
Celtic place-names: Thames, London, Dover, Kent,
Arden, Avon, Exe, Leeds, Severn, words with
components cumb/comb ‘deep valley’, dun ‘hill fort’,
lin ‘lake’; torr, pen, crug, bre ‘hill’. Berkshire, Bray,
Bredon, Cambridge, Carlisle, Cirencester, Doncaster,
Gloucester, Ilfracombe, Lancaster, Leicester, Lincoln,
Malvern, Manchester, Penkridge, Penzance, Wiltshire,
Winchester, Worcester.
Roman Britain 43 AD
Julius Caesar
55 and 54BC
Caligula
AD40
Claudius
AD43
Old English word
Modern English
Latin origin
belt
belt
balteus
butere
butter
butyrum
camp
camp = field, battle
campus
candel
candle
candela
catt
cat
cattus
ceaster
city
castra
cupp
cup
cuppa
cyse
cheese
caseus
draca
dragon
draco
mil
mile
mille
plante
plant
planta
sacc
sack
saccus
stræt
street
strata
weall
wall
vallum
The Venerable Bede (672-735)
Introduction of
Anglo-Saxons: 500 - 600
1st Anglo-Saxon Period:
600 – 850 AD
"Church" contribution
2nd Anglo-Saxon Period:
850 – 1066 AD
"Viking" contribution
Alfred the Great (849-899)
Alfred the Great
- chartered the Old English alphabet,
- translated classical works from Latin into English,
- set up public schools,
- began the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
"...if we have peace, that all the youth now in England
- revised and expanded the law code
may be devoted to learning." Alfred the Great
By the 11th Century – Late West Saxon = "Winchester standard" = "classical" Old English
Winchester - the capital city of the Saxon kings
inflectional language: 5 cases (for nouns, adjectives, pronouns): nominative, accusative, genitive, dative,
instrumental;
particles are added to words (etan = to eat).
Syntax: SVO (subject-verb-object); variation in sentence structure.
Certain letters derive from the runic alphabet:
used interchangeably to represent the "th" sound of "that" and "thin"
- that was a good king
=g
Beowulf /ˈbeɪ.oʊwʊlf/ - an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative lines (8- the early 11th century).
- alliteration in every line;
- compounding: feorhseoc (feorh = life, seoc = sick) – mortally wounded;
- kennings: metaphoric compoundings: banhus (ban + hus = "bone-house“) = human body; hronrad (hron + rad =
"whale's road“) = the sea; rodores candel = "sky's candle" = the sun
Anglo-Saxon humour – Poetic Riddles
Ic wiht geseah in wera burgum
seo pæt feoh fedeð. Hafað fela topa;
nebb bip hyre æt nytte, niperweard
gongeð
hippeð holdlice ond to ham tyhð,
wæpeð geond weallas, wyrte seceð
Aa heo pa findeð, pa pe fæst ne bip;
læteð hio p wlitigan, wyrtum fæste,
stille stondan on stapolwonge,
beohrte blican, blowan ond growan
I saw a creature in the towns of men
which feeds the cattle. It has many teeth;
its beak is useful, it points downward,
it plunders gently and returns home,
it searches along the slopes, seeks roots,
always it finds those that are not firm;
it leaves the fair ones fixed by their roots,
quietly standing in their proper place,
brightly gleaming, blowing and growing
(rakes)
Wrætlic hongað bi weres peo,
frean under sceate. Foran is pyrel.
Bið stip ond heard, stede hafað
godne;
ponne se esne his agen hrægl
ofer cneo hefeð, wile pæt cupe hol
mid his hangellan heafde gretan
pæt he efenlang ær oft gefylde.
A wondrous thing hangs by a man’s thigh,
full under the clothes. In front is a hole.
It is stiff and hard, it knows its proper
place;
when a young man lifts his tunic
above his knee, he wants to be able
to enter with the head of his hanging thing
the hole that it has often filled before.
(a key)
1066 – the Norman Conquest – Anglo-Norman language
Some of the Old English words replaced by French loans
Earlier version
Later version
(c. 1200)
(c. 1250)
æhte
boc-runen
bolle
gauel
heren
marmon-stane
milce
munuccliff
munstre
wisen
Tresur
Letter
Coupe
Truage
Serve
Marbre
Grace
Abbey
Nonnerie
Atyr
Modern English
Treasure
Letter
Cup
Tribute
Serve
Marble
Grace
Abbey
Nunnery
Attire
The Norman variety
calenge
prison
reward
The Parisian variety
challenge
prison
regard
Peterborough Chronicle (1122-1154) – 29 new
words:
religious words (abbat ‘abbot’, cardinal, miracle);
social position words
‘countess’, curt ‘court’);
(duc
‘duke’,
cuntesse
administrative words (canceler ‘chancellor’, concilie
‘council’, rent);
law and politics (iustise ‘justice’, werre ‘war’, pais
‘peace’).
1200 - Ancrene Wisse (Anchorites’Guide) – 250 new words:
religious terms (grace, letanie ‘litany’, sauter ‘Psalter’, scrowe ‘scroll’)
abstract words (chastete ‘chastity’, daunger ‘arrogance’, defaut ‘fault’, delice ‘pleasure’, deuout ‘devout’, kurteisie
‘courtesy’, largesse ‘generosity’).
everyday words (avancen ‘advance’, broche ‘brooch’, cite ‘city’, flur ‘flower’, jurneie ‘journey’, manere ‘manner’,
messager ‘messenger’, propre ‘suitable’, reisun ‘reason’, tendre ‘tender’)
Word formation
French (Latin-derived) prefixes: con-, de-, dis-, en-, ex-, pre-, pro-, and transFrench suffixes: -able, -ance/-ence, -ant/-ent, -ity, -ment, and -tion (at the time, usually spelled -cion).
The mix of French and Old English morphemes:
• Old English suffixes + Old French nouns (beautiful, graceful, merciful, faithful, pitiful).
• French affixes + Germanic words (knowable, findable, speakable, doable, makeable)
• French + Germanic suffixes in one word (unknowable, discovering)
Middle English – the beginning of literary language
1100 – 1250 Early Middle English – the Old English system of writing
1250 – 1400 Central Middle English: formation of literary dialects, change of orthography, the loss of
pronunciation of final unaccented -e, the borrowing of Anglo-Norman words; the rise of the London dialect
(John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer)
1400 – 1500 Late Middle English: the spread of the London literary dialect, the loss of the old system of
declensions in the noun, adjective and pronoun.
Geoffrey Chaucer – the Father of English literature (Canterbury tales)
Chaucer's poetic vocabulary = 8,000 words, of which about 4,000 are French. But Chaucer's
function words (pronouns, demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs) are
from Old English.
A KNYGHT ther was, and that a worthy man,
A knight there was, and he a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
Who, from the moment that he first began
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
To ride about the world, loved chivalry,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.
Truth, honour, freedom and all courtesy.
GRAMMAR
Major changes
• no separate noun declensions,
PRONUNCIATION
• new verbs get the weak (regular) conjugation
(-(e)d),
The Great Vowel Shift
All long vowels were raised and fronted/moved forward and
higher in the mouth:
Middle English
grene (pronounced grain)
name (pronounced nahm)
bone (pronounced bawn)
boot (pronounced boat)
Modern English
green
name
bone
boot
• future tense appeared (Old English expressed
futurity by context),
• fixed sentence order.
ORTHOGRAPHY
using g and th instead of p, and ð
High vowels became diphthongs:
Middle English
Modern English
mus (pronounced moose) Mouse
write (pronounced wreet) Write
The final -e was pronounceable (as ə, like the a in sofa)
PUNCTUATION
• a point
• a virgule (/) for comma
• a mark of interrogation
• a colon (:)
• a paragraph mark (¶).
• a double virgule (//) - word breaks at the end of a line
TRIGLOSSIA
LATIN
FRENCH
the primary language of religious
expression and the language of law
(Domesday Book)
the spoken language of the court and
the regional aristocracy, starting from
13th Century – of law, literature and
the arts
legal lexical doublets
Doublet
acknowledge and confess
breaking and entering
final and conclusive
fit and proper
give and grant
had and received
keep and maintain
lands and tenements
made and provided
new and novel
pardon and forgive
peace and quiet
shun and avoid
will and testament
wrack and ruin
ENGLISH
the second-class spoken language,
the language of the defeated.
Starting from the 15th Century –
the language of law
triplets
Sources
English/French
English/French
French/Latin
English/French
English/French
English/French
English/French
English/French
English/Latin
English/French
French/English
French/Latin
English/French
English/Latin
English/French
give, devise, and bequeath (English / French / English)
right, title, and interest (English / English / French)
Doubling regardless of language of origin:
French words:
null and void, cease and desist, heirs and assigns, aid and abet
English words:
have and hold, let or hindrance, each and every
!! Norse: give, call, knife, take
Stylistic choice/ lexical alternatives
Germanic
Ask
Climb
Clothes
Fast
Fire
Guts
Holy
House
Kingly
Rest
Rise
Sorrow
Wish
Weariness
French
Question
Attire
Firm
Flame
Entrails
Courage
Sacred
Mansion
Royal
Remainder
Mount
Distress
Desire
Latin
Interrogate
Ascend
The introduction of printing by Caxton in 1476
The beginning of standardized spelling
Secure
Conflagration
Problem: a huge variety of different spellings.
Consecrated
church - 30 different ways of spelling,
people - 22,
receive - 45,
she - 60,
though - 500.
Regal
Residue
Ascend
Lassitude
The “-ing” participle (e.g. running) = “-and” / “-end” / “ind” (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind).
The "-eth" and "-th" verb endings (e.g. goeth) = "-es"
and "-s" (e.g. goes)
Why England and not Saxonland?
7 Century – Angli, Anglia – Latin writers (the Angles opposed to the Saxons and
Jutes).
8 Century – Angli Saxones (as opposed to the ‘Old Saxones’ from the continent)
880 – English is opposed to Danish in Anglo-Danish Peace treaty (and further on)
11 Century – Domesday Book - Engla lande
Different spellings: Engle land, Englene londe, Engle lond, Engelond, Ingland
14 Century – England
• 1500 – 1775 – Early Modern English
The New Testament of William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), published in
1525–6, revised in 1534.
Problem: linguistic choices during translation: congregation or church,
repentance or penance, seniors or priests, charity or love.
Tyndale’s introductions: let there be light, the truth shall make you free,
am I my brother’s keeper?, let my people go, the powers that be,
blessed are the peacemakers, the signs of the times, and eat, drink, and
be merry.
120 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary have a first recorded use
attributed to Tyndale: fisherman, jesting, weakling, viper, betrayer,
busybody, castaway, childishness, excommunicate, matrix ‘womb’,
momentary, murmurer, prophesying, sanctifying (noun), sorcerer,
unbeliever, ungodliness, ungodly, whoremonger, and zealous;
compounds: broken-hearted, fellow-soldier, house-top, long-suffering,
rose-coloured, sea-shore, stumbling-block, two-edged, wine-press.
New grammatical uses: abrogate as a verb, beggarly as an adjective,
brotherly as an adverb, nurse as a verb (‘bring up’).
King James I (1566 – 1625)
*Choosing older word orders and verb forms,
*Introducing idiomatic expressions
(whited sepulchre, the signs of the times)
*Shortenings (straight and narrow from
‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the way’)
1604 – 1611 – King James’s Bible (8.000 lexemes)
Examples of commonly used words Shakespeare created
accommodation
aerial
amazement
apostrophe
assassination
auspicious
baseless
William Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616)
Vocab.: 20.000 lexemes
lexical innovation =
2,035 instances
bloody
bump
castigate
changeful
clangor
control
countless
courtship
critic
critical
dexterously
dishearten
dislocate
dwindle
eventful
exposure
fitful
frugal
generous
gloomy
gnarled
hurry
impartial
inauspicious
indistinguishable
invulnerable
lapse
laughable
lonely
majestic
misplaced
monumental
multitudinous
obscene
palmy
perusal
pious
premeditated
radiance
reliance
road
sanctimonious
seamy
sportive
submerge
suspicious
Examples of Introduced phrases
all that glitters isn’t gold
all the world’s a stage
break the ice
breathe one’s last
brevity is the soul of wit
clothes make the man
frailty, thy name is woman
et tu, Brute?
fair play
green eyed monster
heart of gold
catch a cold
cruel to be kind
disgraceful conduct
heartsick
hot-blooded
housekeeping
it smells to heaven
it’s Greek to me
live long day
long-haired
too much of a good thing
to be or not to be
wild goose chase
witching time of the night
the milk of human kindness
a dog will have his day
naked truth
English journalist, Bernard Levin:
“If you cannot understand my argument and declare it’s Greek to me, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you
claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than
in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are
quoting Shakespeare. If you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if
you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied – a tower of strength – hoodwinked or been
in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows – made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play – slept not one
wink – stood on ceremony – danced attendance on your lord and master – laughed yourself into stitches,
had short shrift – cold comfort, or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days, or lived in a
fool’s paradise, why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are as
good luck would have it, quoting Shakespeare. If you think it is high time, and that that is the long and the
short of it, if you believe that the game is up, and that the truth will out, even if involves your own flesh
and blood, if you lie low – till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set
on edge at one fell swoop – without rhyme or reason, then to give the devil his due if the truth were
known for surely you have a tongue in your head, you are quoting Shakespeare. Even if you bid me good
riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a doornail, if you think I am an eyesore – a
laughing stock – the devil incarnate – a stony-hearted villain – bloody-minded, or a blinking idiot, then by
jove – o lord– tut, tut! – For goodness sake – what the dickens! – but me no buts – it is all one to me, for
you are quoting Shakespeare.”
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) - 400 lexemes, including amorousness, appassionate, artist, beautified,
bookishness, counterbalance, harmfulness, hazardous, outflow, praiseworthiness, refreshing.
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) - 500 lexemes, incl. amenable, baneful, blandishment, cheerless,
chirruping, dismay, heart-piercing, heedless, indignant, jovial, lambkin, lawlessness, life-blood, suffused,
tambourine, thrilling, violin.
Thomas Nashe (1567 – 1601) - 800 lexemes, incl. adequation, apophthegmatical, baggagery, clientry,
collachrymate, confectionate, discernance, intermedium, oblivionize, chaucerism, conundrum,
grandiloquent, harlequin, impecunious, Latinize, Mediterranean, memorize, multifarious, plausibility,
seminary, silver-tongued, terminate, transitoriness, balderdash, earthling, helter-skelter, motherhood,
cum-twang (a term of contempt), ninny-hammer (‘simpleton’), temptress.
Dictionaries and Grammar
1604 – Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall – the first single-language English dictionary 130 pages, 2,543 words and their
definitions.
Aim: to create an in-depth guide for the lesser educated who might not know the “hard usual English wordes, borrowed
from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French.”
1702 – John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (included common words)
1721 – Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (included common words)
1755 – Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) – 40.000 words
Aim: to standardize the spelling of the words, illustrating the meanings by literary quotation
of authors like Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden.
In addition, Johnson added notes on a word's usage.
1762 - Bishop Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar
1774 - John Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary of English (1774)
Samuel Johnson
(1709-1784)
XIX Century
• Industrialization, urbanization, new technologies, scientific discoveries
• The changing pace of communication
• The introduction of mass education
• British empire has 20% of the world’s land surface, 400 million people. The number of speakers of English reached
over 126 million.
1828 - Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language
1857 – Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench: the dictionary-maker was to be ‘an historian, not a critic’. In future the
dictionary-maker should describe the objective facts of language rather than aiming to provide, as had often been the
case in earlier works, a range of subjective opinions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ usage.
1870 - the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison
1884 - Oxford English Dictionary (A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles), part 1, edited by James Murray
Aim: to ‘exhibit the actual variety of usage’- and to act as a neutral witness to language.
Grammar changes:
• the rise of the progressive passive (‘the ship is being built’)
• the decline of the subjunctive after ‘if’ or ‘unless’ (‘if I were’/ ‘if I was’; ‘unless I be’/ ‘unless I am’)
• the increasing use of got (‘it got broken’)
• the split infinitive
Development of Linguistics
dialectology,
phonology,
morphology,
lexicology…
Videos to watch:
1) History of English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s
1) Where did English come from?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEaSxhcns7Y
1) The Adventure of English (BBC documentary):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27mZUQfKnj
Episodes 1-8:
Episode 1 Birth of a Language
Episode 2 English Goes Underground
Episode 3 The Battle for the Language of the Bible
Episode 4 This Earth, This Realm, This England
Episode 5 English in America
Episode 6 Speaking Proper
Episode 7 The Language of Empire
Episode 8 Many Tongues Called English
1) History of the English Language (1943):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fJiHmR85cU
Movies:
Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary Man
Drama-documentary telling the story of Samuel Johnson's
creation of the first English dictionary, in an attic room just off
Fleet Street in Georgian London. The depressive writer-for-hire
with Tourette's syndrome did for the English language what
Newton had done for the stars, classifying words, fixing their
meaning and bringing order to the chaos of language. It took
him nine years, but in the process an anonymous writer
became a literary superstar.
The Professor and the Madman
The film is about professor James Murray, who in 1879 became director of an
Oxford University Press project, The New English Dictionary on Historical
Principles (now known as the Oxford English Dictionary) and the man who
became his friend and colleague, W. C. Minor, a doctor who submitted more
than 10,000 entries while he was confined at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic
Asylum at Crowthorne after being found not guilty of murder due to insanity.
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