17 - a brief history of the english language

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A Brief History of the English Language by Douglas F. Hasty

Old English, until 1066

Immigrants from Denmark and NW Germany arrived in Britain in the 5th and 6th Centuries A.D.,speaking in related dialects belonging to the Germanic and Teutonic branches of the Indo-European language family. Today, English is most closely related to Flemish, Dutch, and

German, and is somewhat related to Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. Icelandic,unchanged for 1,000 years, is very close to Old English. Viking invasions, begun in the 8 th

Century, gave English a Norwegian and Danish influence which lasted until the NormanConquest of 1066.

Old English Words

The Angles came from an angle-shaped land area in contemporary Germany. Their name"Angli" from the Latin and commonly-spoken, pre-5th Century German mutated into the OldEnglish "Engle". Later, "Engle" changed to "Angel-cyn" meaning "Angle-race" by A.D. 1000,changing to "Engla-land". Some Old English words which have survived intact include: feet,geese, teeth, men, women, lice, and mice. The modern word "like" can be a noun, adjective,

verb, and preposition. In Old English, though, the word was different for each type: gelica as anoun, geicas an adjective, lician as a verb, and gelice as a preposition.

Middle English, from 1066 until the 15th Century

The Norman Invasion and Conquest of Britain in 1066 and the resulting French Court of Williamthe Conqueror gave the Norwegian-Dutch influenced English a Norman-Parisian-French effect.From 1066 until about 1400, Latin, French, and English were spoken. English almostdisappeared entirely into obscurity during this period by the French and Latin dominated courtand government. However, in 1362, the Parliament opened with English as the language ofchoice, and the language was saved from extinction. Present-day English is approximately 50%Germanic (English and Scandinavian) and 50% Romance (French and Latin).

Middle English Words

Many new words added to Middle English during this period came from Norman French, ParisianFrench, and Scandinavian. Norman French words imported into Middle English include: catch,wage, warden, reward, and warrant. Parisian French gave Middle English: chase, guarantee,regard, guardian, and gage. Scandinavian gave to Middle English the important word of law.English nobility had titles which were derived from both Middle English and French. Frenchprovided: prince, duke, peer, marquis, viscount, and baron. Middle English independentlydeveloped king, queen, lord, lady, and earl. Governmental administrative divisions from Frenchinclude county, city, village, justice, palace, mansion, and residence. Middle English wordsinclude town, home, house, and hall.

Early Modern English, from the 15th Century to the 17th Century

During this period, English became more organized and began to resemble the modern versionof English. Although the word order and sentence construction was still slightly different, EarlyModern English was at least recognizable to the Early Modern English speaker. For example, theOld English "To us pleases sailing"became "We like sailing."Classical elements, from Greek andLatin, profoundly influenced work creation and origin. From Greek, Early Modern Englishreceived grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Also, the "tele-"prefixmeaning "far" later used to develop telephone and television was taken.

Modern English, from the 17th Century to Modern Times

Modern English developed through the efforts of literary and political writings, where literacywas uniformly found. Modern English was heavily influenced by classical usage, the emergenceof the university-educated class, Shakespeare, the common language found in the East

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Midlands section of present-day England, and an organized effort to document and standardizeEnglish. Current inflections have remained almost unchanged for 400 years, but sounds ofvowels and consonants have changed greatly. As a result, spelling has also changedconsiderably. For example, from Early English to Modern English, lyfbecame life, deelbecamedeal, hoom became home, mone became moon, and hous became house.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Modern English

Modern English is composed of several languages, with grammar rules, spelling, and wordusage both complimenting and competing for clarity. The disadvantages of Modern Englishinclude: an alphabet which is unable to adequately represent all needed sounds without usingrepeated or combined letters, a limit of 23 letters of the 26 in the alphabet which caneffectively express twice the number of sounds actually needed, and a system of spelling whichis not based upon pronunciation but foreign language word origin and countless changesthroughout history. The advantages of Modern English include: single consonants which areclearly understood and usually represent the same sounds in the same positions, the lack ofaccent marks found in other languages which permits quicker writing, and the present spellingdisplays European language origins and connections which allows European language speakersto become immediately aware of thousands of words.

Modern English Words

British English, known as Standard English or Oxford English, underwent changes as thecolonization of North American and the creation of the United States occurred. British Englishwords changed into American English words, such as centre to center, metre to meter, theatreto theater, favourto favor, honourto honor, labourto labor, neighbourto neighbor, cheque tocheck, connexion to connection, gaolto jail, the storeyof a house to story, and tyre for tire.Since 1900, words with consistent spelling but different meanings from British English toAmerican English include: to let for to rent, dual carriageway for divided highway, lift forelevator, amberfor yellow, to ring for to telephone,zebra crossing forpedestrian crossing, and

pavementfor sidewalk.

American English, from the 18th Century until Modern Times

Until the 18th Century, British and American English were remarkably similar with almost novariance. Immigration to America by other English peoples changed the language by 1700.Noah Webster, author of the first authoritative American English dictionary, created manychanges. The "-re" endings became "-er" and the "-our" endings became "-or". Spelling bypronunciation and personal choice from Webster were influences.

Cough, Sought, Thorough, Thought, and Through

Why do these "ough" words have the same central spelling but are so different? This is a

characteristic of English, which imported similarly spelled or defined words from differentlanguages over the past 1,000 years.

Cough - From the Middle High German kuchen meaning to breathe heavily, to the French-OldEnglish cohhian, to the Middle English coughen is derived the current word cough.

Sought- From the Greek hegeisthaimeaning to lead, to the Latin sagire meaning to perceivekeenly, to the Old High German suohhen meaning to seek, to the French-Old English secan, tothe Middle English sekken, is derived the past tense soughtof the present tense of the verb toseek.

Thorough - From the French-Old English thurh and thuruh to the Middle English thorow is

derived the current word thorough.

Thought- From the Old English thencan, which is related to the French-Old English word hoht,which remained the same in Middle English, is derived the current word thought.

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Through -From the Sanskrit word tarati, meaning he crossed over, came the Latin word, transmeaning across or beyond. Beginning with Old High German durh, to the French-Old Englishthurh, to the Middle English thurh, thruh, or through, is derived the current word through.

A History of the English Language by Lauralee B. York

Past Changes Precipitate Worldwide Popularity.

The history of the English language is of significance because English is spoken more frequentlythan any other language except Chinese, according to the International Encyclopedia ofLinguistics (410). A Germanic language, English is spoken by an estimated 1,500,000,000people, and that number is ever increasing, according to An Encyclopedic Dictionary ofLanguage and Languages (121).

English is the chief language of world publishing, science and technology, conferencing, andcomputer storage as well as the language of international air traffic control (121). English isalso used for purposes of international communications, and international politics, businesscommunications, and academic communities (122).

The history of English can be traced to the colonization of people from a family of languageswhich spread throughout Europe and southern Asia in the fourth millennium BC, (185). It isthought that a seminomadic population living in the steppe region to the north of the Black Seamoved west to Europe and east to Iran and India, spreading their culture and languages (186).According to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, the European languages and Sanskrit,the oldest language of the Indian sub-continent, were tied to a common source. When asystematic resemblance was discovered in both roots and verbs and in grammar forms, bycomparing similar features of the European languages and Sanskrit, a common source languagewas reconstructed named Proto-Indo-European (298).

The Proto-Indo-European language was more complex than English today. According to TheCambridge Encyclopedia of Language, It is possible to reconstruct three genders (masculine,

feminine, and neuter) and up to eight cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative,ablative, locative, instrumental). Adjectives agreed in case, number, and gender with the noun.The verb system was also rich in inflections, used for aspect, mood, tense, voice, person, andnumber. Different grammatical forms of a word were often related by the feature of ablaut, orvowel graduation: the root vowel would change systematically to express such differences assingular and plural or past and present tense, as is still the case in English foot/feet ortake/took (Crystal 299).

The Proto-Indo-European language is thought to have been spoken before 3,000 BC, and tohave split up into different languages during the following millennium (298). The languagesfamilies include Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Armenian, Anatolian,Albanian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Slavic languages. Yiddish, German, Afrikaans, Dutch,

Flemish, Frisian, and English make up the West Germanic subgroup of the Germanic Branch(Crystal 186).

Scholars renamed the language group the Indo-European family after 3,000 BC (298).Theorists suggest that the horse was a major element of the Proto-Indo-European and theIndo-European family of languages. They conjecture that the culture was spread by warriorswho conquered from horse-drawn chariots. Others discount this theory, according theDictionary of Languages (273). The Indo-European languages have been marked by asuccession of changes affecting different languages. One change of note includes thecentum/satem split. K followed by a front vowel became s or sh in Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit sata),Iranian (Persian sad), Slavonic (Russian sto), Baltic (Lithuanian simtas), Albanian (qind,pronounced chind) and Armenian. It remained k in Celtic (Welsh cant), Italic, Tocharian (kant),

Greek (hetaton) and Germanic (with a subsequent move to h, English hundred).

A sound shift in consonants occurred that differentiated the Proto-Germanic languages fromother Indo-European languages. It included several consonants that were changed from the

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first example to the second example in the following consonants: p>f, t>0, k>x, b>p, d>t,g>k, bh>b, dh>d, and gh>h. The sound shift was named Grimms Law, after the man whodescribed it, according to Contemporary Linguistics (332).

The Proto-Indo-European, the Indo-European, and specifically the Germanic language, of whichEnglish is a derivative, influenced the early history of the English Language. The early history ofthe English language began in Britain and with several groups of people. At first peoplemigrated to the placed now called England. Several invading groups joined the original settlersof England, bringing with them their language and culture. English became a mixture oflanguages that adapted to the circumstances and the needs of the people. England eventuallycommanded an empire, thus, spreading the language around the world. When the empire,diminished the Americas continued to spread the English language because of their politicalpower and wealth. The history of the English language is fascinating and follows as events andlanguage changes are pointed out.

The Celts were the first Indo-European people to spread across Europe, according TheCambridge Encyclopedia of Language (304). They emerged from south central Europe andspread throughout most of Europe, reaching the Black Sea and Asia Minor. They migrated tosouth-west Spain, central Italy, and throughout Britain in a series of wave-like migrations. Theirculture was named after a Swiss archaeological site called La Tene.

The first group of Celts went to Ireland in the 4th century and later reached Scotland and theIsle of Man. The second group went into southern England and Wales, and later to Brittany,producing a type of Celtic know as British.

During the greatest days of the Roman Empire, their law ruled all men from Britain to Egypt,from Spain to the Black Sea, according to A History of Knowledge, (67). The Romans had afierce respect and love of the law. Everywhere the Romans governed, they took their laws andadministered them over the peoples they ruled. In fact, Roman law continues to this day to bean influence upon almost all legal systems in the Western world. The Romans adopted theGreek alphabet, Greek ideas, images and world views. They copied the Macedonian order ofbattle and Spartan steel weapons and armor. They conquered everywhere they went, buildingroads, establishing cities, trading, and sharing their culture. The Romans build a transportationnetwork with hundreds of miles of roadway. The roads the Romans built still exist today, aftertwenty centuries of continuous use.

Britain was acquired as a province of the Roman Empire during the century after 14 AD,following the death of Augustus. Words from Latin and Greek languages were adopted into thelanguage. The Greek alphabet, with a few minor changes, is used in the English language today(25). Eventually, the Romans also brought Christianity to Britain. English became a distincttongue about 449 AD when Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who spoke Germanic dialects, arrived inCeltic-speaking Britain. Groups of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came to aid the Romanized Britonswho were besieged by Picts and Scots after the Roman military withdrew in 410 AD (Bright410). English owes its origin to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who crossed the sea and settledin Britain, according to the Dictionary of Languages, (166). The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms coveredmost of what is now England by around 600 AD.

The West Saxons were the most powerful of the new kingdoms, and the only one able towithstand the Viking invasion in the 9th century AD. It was also in Wessex or the West Saxonkingdom that a written language first flourished. The International Encyclopedia of Linguisticsdivides the history of English into three periods: Old English, Anglo-Saxon from 700 to 1100AD, Middle English from 1100 to 1500 AD, and Modern English or New English from 1500 to thepresent (410).

Old English (OE) was a highly inflected language. There were suffixes on nouns, verbs,adjectives, and demonstratives. It had an elaborate system of personal interrogative andrelative pronouns. The four dialects during the Old English period were Kentish in thesoutheast, West Saxon in the south and southwest, Mercian in the Midlands, and Northumbrianabove the Humber River. West Saxon was the written standard during the reign of Alfred theGreat from 871 to 899 AD.

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Old English morphology included noun forms of singulars and plurals, with five cases, and threegenders. Old English personal pronouns have been retained, and have transferred into NewEnglish, more of their morphological variations than any other form class.

With the influx of the Christian religion at the end of the 6th century, some Latin words wereadded. About 2,000 Danish words and phrases were also added to Old English. At that time, thecombining of native elements in prefixing, suffixing, and compounding was the mostcharacteristic way of expanding the word stock. (Bright, 412)

Britain was invaded again during the Viking age of about 750 to 1050. This invasion was mostlyby Danes who then settled in central and southern England. Throughout Britain, most of thepeople spoke Old English and few words from the Celtic influence remained. Middle Englishbegan with the 1066 Norman Conquest. French-speaking Normans carried out government andeducational duties. The Norman invasion caused a bilingual environment with the middle classspeaking both French and English. It brought approximately 10,000 Norman French words intoMiddle English. The Normans exerted a great influence in food, fashion, education, religion,government, law, and the military.

Social and linguistic upheaval changed the language climate in 1215 when King John of England

was forced to acknowledge the Magna Carta. According to The Heritage of World Civilizations,this monumental document was a victory of feudal over monarchical power in the sense that itsecured the rights of many the nobility, the clergy and the townspeople over the autocraticking; it restored the internal balance of power that had been the English political experiencesince the Norman conquest. Now the English people could be represented at the highest levelsof government. This eventually brought English back into use as the countrys language (446-447).

Modern English developed when Caxton established his printing press at Westminister in 1476.New English is a derivative of the dialect of medieval London. It is in the same dialect used byCha cer and Chancery. During this time Johannes Gutenberg, a German printer invented typemolds for casting individual letters. His first book using movable type was printed about 1450and was printed on rag paper. (The Chinese government is credited with the discovery of paperin 105 AD, however, Arabs also discovered how to make paper.) Gutenbergs invention mademovable type practical because he could produce any quantity of letters and words and placethe timeype in a frame. He used rag paper in his printings. His most famous printing is theGutenberg Bible (Van Doren 154).

According to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, all vowels were systematically raised,and the highest were dipthongized between 1400 and 1564. Also, there were 333 strong verbsin Old English. Half of the verbs are still used, although, only 68 are inflected as strong verbs(414). The most important phonological event in modern times is the so-called Great VowelShift. It began in late middle English and continued until the eighteenth century. The longvowels of Middle English came to be pronounced in a higher position, while the highest vowelsbecame diphthongs, according to The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1125).

With the approach of the 18th century, English became an analytical language. Its richinflectional system weakened, causing a great increase in the use of prepositional phrases, innew phrasal prepositions (e.g. in spite of, with regard to, on the basis of), and in periphrasticverb construction. For example, did say is the periphrastic past tense of say, and said is theinflected past tense of say. During this period, there was a reduction of inflectional distinctions(Asher 1125). Also, Old English had used both SVO and SOV sentence word orders withoutrequiring a grammatical subject. Middle English used SVO and the subject was obligatory(Bright 413).

During the Renaissance, English displaced Latin as the language used in philosophy, science,and other learned arenas. Since English was lexically deficient, it borrowed Latin and Greekwords for nouns and adjectives. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics estimated thatduring the first 150 years of New English, more than 10,000 words from 50 languages wereborrowed. It also asserted that the current English language has borrowed foreign words frommore than 75 languages with French as the principal donor. The Old English method of using

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affixes and compounding to form words was displaced in New English by borrowing words asthe favorite way of enlarging the English word stock. According to the Dictionary of Languages,the history of Modern English has three important themes. The themes include the extension ofEnglish into new subject areas, the spread of English to many parts of the world, and thegrowth of English into Standard British English.

The extension of the language began with the first printed English translation of the Bible in1525. The Authorized Version of the English Bible was translated in 1611. Finally, the revisedBook of Common Prayer was published in 1662. The Bible and the prayer book were ineveryday use in Anglican churches until the 1970(s), where they influenced the speaking andwriting of English for over 300 years. English took the place of Latin during the 16 th century inreligion, science, and scholarship. To make this transition possible, vast numbers of loan wordshave been added to the English language.

English has spread to many parts of the world. It became a native language for English-speaking colonies, which are now independent and powerful states. English was spread byBritish trade and influence. It is the second language of many other states because the ex-colonial countries have no better choice of a national language. English is currentlyacknowledged as the universal language of diplomacy and science. It is also the language thatpeople usually speak when addressing foreigners, and it is the most popular secondlanguage(167).

Standard British English is the widely accepted standard language, the language of London andits elite. It is sometimes called the Kings (or Queens) English, BBC English, and ReceivedPronunciation. This standard use of English has been helped by the spread of education andliteracy, the extension of printing and publishing, and recently the influence of radio andtelevision. All these factors have increased the standardization of pronunciation, spelling, andspoken and written style.

English shares linguistic features with other Indo-European languages. However, the lexicon,morphology, and phonology are characteristically Germanic. One example of this is that pasttense inflections are a Germanic characteristic. Another distantly Germanic characteristic is thefixed primary stress on the first syllable, as expressed in the word brother (Bright 410).

An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Language and Languages (AEDLL) describes English as spokenworldwide by a large and ever-increasing number of people. The English language has officialstatus in more than 60 countries. Two diagrams called A Family of Languages and English: theworld language follow the bibliography. One shows that English is listed with languages in theWest Germanic subgroup, and the other illustrates the use of English in countries around theworld today. A summary of the trends allows the prediction that English may become thelanguage of universal communications.

Bibliography

Asher, R.E. and J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 10 Vols. NewYork: Pergamon Press, 1994. 1125.

Bright, William. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. 4 Vols. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992. 410-415.

Craig, Albert M., et al., eds., et The Heritage of World Civilizations. 2 Vols. New York: MacmillanPublishing Company, 1986. 446-447.

Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd Ed. New York: The PressSyndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1997. 298-299.

Crystal, David. An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Language and Languages. USA: BlackwellPublishers, 1992. 121-122, 134, 185-186.

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Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to more than 400 Languages.London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1998.166-179.

OGrady, William, Michael Dobrovolsky and Mark Aronoff. Contemporary Linguistics. 3rd Ed. NewYork: St. Martins Press, Inc., 1992. 332.

Van Doren, Charles. A History of Knowledge Past, Present, and Future. New York: Ballantine

Books, 1992. 154.

History and Structure of the English Language

General Considerations

English Language that originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It isthe primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland,New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It isalso an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa,

including South Africa. English is a member of the western group of the Germanic languages(itself part of the Indo-European language family) and is closely related to Frisian, German, andNetherlandic (Dutch and Flemish).

In the 16th century, English was the mother tongue of only a few million people living inEngland, but owing to that nation's colonization of other parts of the globe and other historicalfactors, English was the native language of more than 350 million people by the late 20thcentury. It is thus the mother tongue of more people than any other language except MandarinChinese. English is the most widely taught foreign language and is also the most widely usedsecond language--i.e., one that two people communicate in when they cannot understand eachother's native speech. It became the international language of scientific and technical discoursein the 20th century and was also widely adopted for use in business and diplomacy. In the

entire world, one person in seven speaks English as either a primary or secondary language.

English is an analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected) language, whereas Proto-Indo-European, theancestral tongue of most European, Iranian, and North Indian languages, is synthetic, orinflected. (Inflections are changes in the form of words to indicate such distinctions as tense,person, number, and gender.) Over thousands of years, English has lost most of its inflections,while other European languages have retained more of theirs. Indeed, English is the onlyEuropean language in which adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from determiners andendings denoting degrees of comparison.

Another characteristic is flexibility of function. This means that one word can function as variousparts of speech in different contexts. For example, the word "book" can be an adjective in

"book review," a noun in "read a book," or a verb in "book a room." Because other Europeanlanguages retain more inflectional endings than does English, they almost never have thischaracteristic. A third feature, openness of vocabulary, allows English to admit words freelyfrom other languages and to create compounds and derivatives.

In England, British Received Pronunciation (RP) is the usual speech of educated people. In theUnited States, Inland Northern (popularly known as General American) is commonly used. Inboth countries, however, other pronunciations are acceptable.

British Received Pronunciation and American Inland Northern show several divergences: (1)After some vowels American has a semiconsonantal glide. (2) The vowel in "cod," "box," and"dock" is pronounced like "aw" in British and a sound similar to "ah" in American. (3) The vowel

in "but," "cut," and "rung," is central in American but is fronted in British. (4) The vowels in theAmerican "bath" and "bad" and in the British "bad" are all pronounced the same, but the vowelin the British "bath" is pronounced like "ah," since it is before one of the fricatives s, f, or th (as

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in "thin"). (5) When a high back vowel is preceded by t, d, or n in British, a glide (consonantaly) is inserted between them (e.g., "tulip," "news"); in American the glide is omitted.

The 24 consonantal sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, th(as in "thin"), th (as in "then"), s, z, sh (as in "ship"), zh (as in "azure"), and h; twoaffricatives, ch (as in "church") and j(as in "jam"); the nasals m, n, and ng (as in "young");the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the semivowels y and w. American and Britishconsonants have the same pronunciation with two exceptions: (1) When roccurs after a vowel,it is dropped in British but pronounced in American. (2) A tbetween two vowels is pronouncedlike tin "top" in British, but in American the sound is close to that of a d.

English is a strongly stressed language, with four degrees of stress: primary, secondary,tertiary, and weak. A change in stress can change the meaning of a sentence or a phrase.Although in comparison with other languages English stress is less predictable, there is atendency toward antepenultimate (third syllable from the last) primary stress. This is apparentin such five-syllable words as equanmity, longitdinal, and notorety. French stress is oftensustained in borrowed words, e.g., bizrre, critque, and hotl.

Pitch, or musical tone, may be falling, rising, or falling-rising. Word tone, which is also called

pitch, can influence the meaning of a word. Sentence tone is called intonation and is especiallyimportant at the end of a sentence. There are three important end-of-sentence intonations:falling, rising, and falling-rising. The falling intonation is used in completed statements,commands, and some questions calling for "yes" or "no" answers. Rising intonation is used instatements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in certain questions answerableby "yes" or "no." The third type of intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used insentences that imply concessions or contrasts. American intonation is less singsong and stays ina narrower range than does British.

The words of the English language can be divided according to their function or form intoroughly eight categories, or parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs,prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Modern English nouns, pronouns, and verbs areinflected, but adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are not. MostEnglish nouns have the plural inflection (-e)s, though some remain unchanged (e.g., deer). Fiveof the seven personal pronouns have separate forms for subject and object. English verbs arenot complex. Regular or weak verbs have only four forms, strong verbs have five, and "to be"has eight. Some verbs ending in tor dhave only three forms.

Besides employing inflection, English exhibits two other main morphological (structural)processes - affixation and composition - and two subsidiary ones - back-formation and blend.Affixes, word elements attached to a word, may either precede as prefixes (pre-, dis-) or followas suffixes (-able, -er). They can be native (over-, -ness), Greek (hyper-), or Latin (-ment).English makes varied use of affixes; often, many different ones have the same meaning, or thesame one has many meanings. Suffixes are attached more closely to the stem than are prefixesand often remain permanent.

Composition, or compounding, describes putting two free forms together to form a new word.The new word can differ from the previous forms in phonology, stress, and juncture. Five typesof compounds are defined by describing the relationship of the free forms to each other: (1) acompound in which the first component noun is attributive and modifies the second noun ( e.g.,cloverleaf, beehive, vineyard); (2) one made up of a noun plus an agent noun, itself consistingof a verb-plus-agent suffix (e.g., icebreaker, landowner, timekeeper); (3) a verb plus an object(e.g., pastime, scarecrow, daredevil); (4) an attributive adjective plus a noun (e.g., bluebell,grandson, shorthand); and (5) a noun and a present participle (e.g., fact-finding, heartrending,life-giving).

Back-formation, the reverse of affixation, is the analogical formation of a new word falselyassumed to be its derivation. The verbs "to edit" and "to act" have been formed from the nouns"editor" and "actor," respectively. Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as "bash"from "bang" and "smash," and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as"motorcade" from "motor cavalcade."

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In English syntax, the main device for indicating the relationship between words is word order.In the sentence "The girl loves the boy," the subject is in initial position, and the object followsthe verb; transposing the order of "boy" and "girl" would change the meaning. In contrast tothis system, most other languages use inflections to indicate grammatical relationships. In

puerumpuella amat, which is the Latin equivalent of "The girl loves the boy," the words can begiven in any order (for example, amat puella puerum) because the -um ending on the form for"boy" (puerum) indicates the object of the verb regardless of its position in the sentence.

English sentences generally start with the subject first, followed by the verb and then by theobject. Adjectives or other single words that modify nouns are placed before the noun, whilewhole phrases acting as modifiers are usually placed after the noun. Adverbs are normally moremobile than adjectives, and they can occur either before or after the verb they modify. As theiretymology implies, prepositions usually precede nouns, but there are a few exceptions, e.g.,"the whole world over." Because of the laxity of syntactic principles, English is a very easylanguage to speak poorly.

English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, chiefly because of itspropensity for borrowing and because the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th centuryintroduced vast numbers of French words into the language. The vocabulary of Modern Englishis thus approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Romance or Italic(French and Latin), with copious importations from Greek in science and borrowings from manyother languages. Almost all basic concepts and things come from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon,as do most personal pronouns, all auxiliary verbs, most simple prepositions, all conjunctions,and almost all numbers. Many common nouns, adjectives, and verbs are of Scandinavian origin,a fact due to the Scandinavian invasions of Britain. The English language owes a great debt toFrench, which gave it many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine, politics, law, society,literature, and art. Comparison between French and English synonyms reveals the former to bemore intellectual and abstract, and the latter more human and concrete. Many of the Greekcompounds and derivatives in English have Latin equivalents with either similar or considerablydifferent meanings.

The English adopted the 23-letter Latin alphabet, to which they added the letters W,J, and V.For the most part, English spelling is based on that of the 15th century. Pronunciation,however, has changed greatly since then. During the 17th and 18th centuries, fixed spellingswere adopted, although there have been a few changes since that time. Numerous attemptshave been made to reform English spelling, most of them unsuccessful.

The history of the English language begins with the migration of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxonsfrom Germany and Denmark to Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their Anglo-Saxonlanguage is known as Old English. The formation of separate kingdoms in Britain to someextent coincided with the development of the Old English dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian,West Saxon, and Kentish. Northumbrian was in a position of cultural superiority until thedestructive Viking raids of the 9th century caused cultural leadership to pass to the West Saxonkingdom of Wessex.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 set in motion the transition to Middle English. For the firstcentury after the Conquest, a vast number of loanwords entered the English language from thedialects of northern France. The Conquest also served to place all four Old English dialects onthe same cultural level and to allow them to develop independently. So West Saxon lost itssupremacy, and the centre of culture gradually shifted to London. During this Middle Englishperiod the Northumbrian dialect split into Scottish and Northern, and Mercian became East andWest Midland. Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was the adoption of the Carolingianscript, then in use on the European continent, and changes in spelling.

The transition from Middle to Modern English started at the beginning of the 15th century. Thiscentury witnessed three important developments: the rise of London English, the invention ofprinting, and the spread of new learning. The Renaissance in England produced many morescholars who were knowledgeable in foreign languages, especially Greek and Classical Latin.Their liberal attitude toward language made possible the introduction of a great number ofwords into English. Scholars generally date the beginning of the Modern English period at 1500.

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The language was subsequently standardized through the work of grammarians and thepublication of dictionaries, and its vocabulary underwent another vast expansion in the 19thand 20th centuries to accommodate developments in the sciences and technology.

Origins and Basic Characteristics

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely

related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and isnow widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, theUnited Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations inthe Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines,and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most otherlanguages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, calledProto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamedthe southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from thisancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian,Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and

West (German, Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, English). Though closely related toEnglish, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaboratesystem of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland andthe islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to ModernEnglish. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living languagemost nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, theancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian,Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English wordshave been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German andChinese words for "man" are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne,Mnner, Mnnern. Chinese has one form:jen. English stands in between, with four forms: man,man's, men, men's. In English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives haveno inflections aside from the determiners "this, these" and "that, those." (The endings -er, -est,denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as noninflectional suffixes.) English is theonly European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., "the tall man," "the tallwoman," compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the ModernEnglish word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and ModernGerman, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden),whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16 forms. In addition to thissimplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function andopenness of vocabulary.

Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss ofinflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms arenow often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of "planning a table" or"tabling a plan," "booking a place" or "placing a book," "lifting a thumb" or "thumbing a lift." Inthe other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns andverbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. InEnglish, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns;adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaksin English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -erto the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In Frenchone has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire duLivre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier),

as in "wages board" and "sports editor"; or even a conjunctional group, as in "prices andincomes policy" and "parks and gardens committee."

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Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and theready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (withslight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some newprocess. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms fromClassical Greek word elements. English possesses a system of orthography that does notalways accurately reflect the pronunciation of words; this is discussed below in the sectionOrthography .

Characteristics of Modern English

Phonology

British Received Pronunciation (RP), by definition, the usual speech of educated people living inLondon and southeastern England, is one of the many forms of standard speech. Otherpronunciations, although not standard, are entirely acceptable in their own right onconversational levels.

The chief differences between British Received Pronunciation, as defined above, and a variety ofAmerican English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and its

derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation ofcertain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes havesemiconsonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y). Asidefrom the final glides, this American dialect shows four divergences from British English: (1) thewords cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-long) low front soundas in British "bard" shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer to the position of thetongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced with a central vowel as inthe unstressed final syllable of "sofa"; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f, and (the last ofthese is the th sound in "thin") the long low back vowel a, as in British "bath," is pronounced asa short front vowel a, as in British "bad"; (4) high back vowels following the alveolar sounds tand dand the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew, and news are pronounced without aglide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like the British "two lips," "do," and "nooze"

in "snooze." (In several American dialects, however, these glides do occur).

The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, (as

in "thin"), [eth] (as in "then"), s, z, (as in "ship"), (as in "pleasure"), and h; two affricatives: t

(as in "church") and d (as thejin "jam"); the nasals m, n, (the sound that occurs at the endof words such as "young"); the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the semivowelsj(oftenspelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern American differs from BritishEnglish in two respects: (1) rfollowing vowels is preserved in words such as "door," "flower,"and "harmony," whereas it is lost in British; (2) tbetween vowels is voiced, so that "metal" and"matter" sound very much like British "medal" and "madder," although the pronunciation of thistis softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than the dof British English. Like Russian, English is astrongly stressed language. Four degrees of stress may be differentiated: primary, secondary,

tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated, respectively, by acute ( ), circumflex (), and grave() accent marks and by the breve ( ). Thus, "Tll m the trth" (the whole truth, and nothingbut the truth) may be contrasted with "Tll m the trth" (whatever you may tell other people);"blck brd" (any bird black in colour) may be contrasted with "blckbrd" (that particular birdTurdus merula). The verbs "permt" and "recrd" (henceforth only primary stresses aremarked) may be contrasted with their corresponding nouns "prmit" and "rcord." A feeling forantepenultimate (third syllable from the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllablewords as equanmity, longitdinal, notorety, opportnity, parsimnious, pertincity, andvegetrian, causes stress to shift when extra syllables are added, as in "histrical," a derivativeof "hstory" and "theatriclity," a derivative of "thetrical." Vowel qualities are also changedhere and in such word groups as priod, peridical, periodcity; phtograph, photgraphy,photogrphical. French stress may be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g., bizrre,

critque, durss, hotl, prestge, and technque.

Pitch, or musical tone, determined by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may be level,falling, rising, or falling-rising. In counting "one," "two," "three," "four," one naturally gives

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level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if a person says "I want two, not one," henaturally gives "two" falling pitch and "one" falling-rising. In the question "One?" rising pitch isused. Word tone is called pitch, and sentence tone is referred to as intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for meaning, and it therefore varies least. Three main end-of-sentence intonations can be distinguished: falling, rising, and falling-rising. Falling intonation isused in completed statements, direct commands, and sometimes in general questionsunanswerable by "yes" or "no"; e.g., "I have nothing to add." "Keep to the right." "Who toldyou that?" Rising intonation is frequently used in open-ended statements made with somereservation, in polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by "yes" or "no": "I havenothing more to say at the moment." "Let me know how you get on." "Are you sure?" The thirdtype of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences thatimply concessions or contrasts: "Some people do like them" (but others do not). "Don't say Ididn't warn you" (because that is just what I'm now doing). Intonation is on the whole lesssingsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of pitch. Americanspeech may seem more monotonous but at the same time may sometimes be clearer and morereadily intelligible. Everywhere English is spoken, regional dialects display distinctive patterns ofintonation.

Historical Background

Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly:the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrivalof St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; theViking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English); the setting up of Caxton'sprinting press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16thcentury; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611; the completion of Johnson's Dictionaryof 1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India,Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old English andScandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious and increasingimportations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings fromDutch, Low German, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names ofbasic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and earth, love andhate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat and cold, wayand path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the ordinalnumerals except "second" (Old English other, which still retains its older meaning in "everyother day"). "Second" comes from Latin secundus "following," through French second, relatedto Latin sequi "to follow," as in English "sequence." From Old English come all the personalpronouns (except "they," "their," and "them," which are from Scandinavian), the auxiliary verbs(except the marginal "used," which is from French), most simple prepositions, and all

conjunctions.

Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian:father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter;cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs--bring, come, get,hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full and wise; thecolour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive possessives mine and thine (but not oursand yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over andunder. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no and nay, yeaand ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt and skirt (both related to theadjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, "law" was borrowed early, whence"bylaw," meaning "village law," and "outlaw," meaning "man outside the law." "Husband" (hus-

bondi) meant "householder," whether single or married, whereas "fellow" (fe-lagi) meant onewho "lays fee" or shares property with another, and so "partner, shareholder." FromScandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait,gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift, and window; the

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adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong;and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp,glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.

The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president, representative,legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke, marquis,viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village,court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall,house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English and French synonymsshows that the former are more human and concrete, the latter more intellectual and abstract;e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love andaffection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. The superiority ofFrench cooking is duly recognized by the adoption of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill,roast, souse, and toast. "Breakfast" is English, but "dinner" and "supper" are French. "Hunt" isEnglish, but "chase," "quarry," "scent," and "track" are French. Craftsmen bear names ofEnglish origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller, shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright,and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans, however, are French: carpenter, draper,haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and tailor. Many terms relating to dress andfashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and diplomacy, drama and literature, art and balletcome from French.

In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek throughFrench or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as akind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By prefixingthe Greek adverb tele "far away, distant" to the existing compound photography, "lightwriting," they create the precise term "telephotography" to denote the photographing of distantobjects by means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- "small" into this samecompound, they make the new term "photomicrography," denoting the electronicphotographing of bacteria and viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have beenunintelligible to Plato and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latinequivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning.

At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as "metamorphosis" and"transformation," are sufficiently synonymous to make one or the other redundant. In fact,however, "metamorphosis" is more technical and therefore more restricted than"transformation." In mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes apostembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a cocoon into a silkworm, or achrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other hand, means any kind of change fromone state to another.

Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East Anglia,Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low German was usedby seafaring men in North Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use include buoy, deck, dock,freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New Amsterdam (later New

York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie, dope, snoop, and waffle toAmerican speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms apartheid, commandeer,commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.

The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th centuries itlay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to literature,philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been indirect."Unclear" and "meaningful" echoed German unklarand bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll. "Ring road"(a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated Ringstrasse;"round trip," Rundfahrt; and "the turn of the century," die Jahrhundertwende. The terms"classless society," "inferiority complex," and "wishful thinking" echoed die klassenlseGesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.

Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of music.The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and technicaldirections are all Italian. Many of the latter--allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo,

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diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato--are also usedmetaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto, pedestal, pergola,piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto, extravaganza,stanza, and many more are used.

From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla,matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to the16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of animalsand plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish: "potato" throughSpanishpatata from Taino batata, and "tomato" through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl.Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, andCalifornia; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang, pueblo, and rodeo.Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally denoting "goodness," came throughminers' slang to mean "spectacular windfall, prosperity"; maana, "tomorrow," acquired anundertone of mysterious unpredictability.

From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin, oroccasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra,alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir, naphtha, sugar,syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently borrowed the term loofah(also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come the terms amen,cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph; jubilee, leviathan,and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz.

English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring themsometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. Thefollowing lists indicate the origins of a number of English words: Welsh--flannel, coracle,cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish--gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and Irish--shamrock, brogue,leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid, slogan, sporran,cairn, whisky, pibroch; Breton--menhir; Norwegian--ski, ombudsman; Finnish--sauna;Russian--kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka, samovar, tundra (fromSami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish),borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz, salyut, lunokhod; Polish--mazurka; Czech--robot;Hungarian--goulash, paprika; Portuguese--marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port(wine), dodo; Basque--bizarre; Turkish--janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha,odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi--nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink),

juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra,loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian--paradise, divan, purdah, lilac, bazaar, shah, caravan,chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil--pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny;Chinese--tea (Amoy), sampan; Japanese--shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang,

judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma, No (the dance drama), karate,Kabuki; Malay--ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck, orangutan, compound (fenced area),raffia; Polynesian--taboo, tattoo; Hawaiian--ukulele; African languages--chimpanzee, goober,mumbo jumbo, voodoo; Inuit--kayak, igloo, anorak; Yupik--mukluk; Algonquian--totem;

Nahuatl--mescal; languages of the Caribbean--hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana;Aboriginal Australian--kangaroo, corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta,budgerigar.

Old English

The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, beforesettling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English people, thefirst Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449; and the Juteslater settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons occupied the restof England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles eventuallytook the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the future Edinburgh

and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common Germanic the Angles' name was Angli,later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative) and Engla (genitive). "Engla land"designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and both King Alfred (known as Alfred theGreat) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian, subsequently referred to their speech as

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Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained theirdistinctive dialects.

The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed twospeech groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian, orMercian. There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish (seeFigure 13). In the 8th century, Northumbrian led in literature and culture, but that leadershipwas destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrianmainland, in 793. They landed in strength in 865. The first raiders were Danes, but they werelater joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western Isles who settled in modernCumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and the Isle ofMan. In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed fromNorthumbria to Wessex. During King Alfred's reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century,Winchester became the chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian PaulusOrosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated; and there thenative poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon dialect. Thisresulted in West Saxon's becoming "standard Old English"; and later, when Aelfric (c. 955-c.1010) wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, thehegemony of Wessex was strengthened.

In standard Old English, adjectives were inflected as well as nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Nounswere inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular andplural. Five nouns of first kinship--faeder, modor, brothor, sweostor, and dohtor ("father,""mother," "brother," "sister," and "daughter," respectively)--had their own set of inflections.There were 25 nouns such as mon, men ("man," "men") with mutated, or umlauted, stems.Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture of noun andpronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal, possessive,demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full inflections. The pronounsof the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:

There were two demonstratives: se, seo, thaet, meaning "that," and thes, theos, this, meaning"this," but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for"that" or not expressed at all. Thus, "the good man" was se goda mon or plain god mon. Thefunction of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral an "one" in an mon "a man," bythe adjective-pronoun sum in sum mon "a (certain) man," or not expressed, as in thu eart godmon "you are a good man."

Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, andimperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). Therewere two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectionalchanges--changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.--are added.) One type of verb stem,called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for "sing":singan, singth, sang, sungon, gesungen. The word for "deem" is an example of the other, called

consonantal: deman, demth, demde, demdon, gedemed. Such verbs are called strong andweak, respectively.

All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the consonantaltype. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words "be," "shall," "will,""do," "go," "can," "may," and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.

Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say derFuss, die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for "the foot," "thehand," and "the eye"), so, for these same structures, Aelfric said se fot, seo hond, and thaeteage, also masculine, feminine, and neuter. The three words for "woman," wifmon, cwene, andwif, were masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Hors "horse," sceap "sheep," andmaegden "maiden" were all neuter. Eorthe "earth" was feminine, but lond"land" was neuter.Sunne "sun" was feminine, but mona "moon" was masculine. This simplification of grammaticalgender resulted from the fact that the gender of Old English substantives was not alwaysindicated by the ending but rather by the terminations of the adjectives and demonstrative

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pronouns used with the substantives. When these endings were lost, all outward marks ofgender disappeared with them. Thus, the weakening of inflections and loss of gender occurredtogether. In the North, where inflections weakened earlier, the marks of gender likewisedisappeared first. They survived in the South as late as the 14th century.

Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today. Thesequence of subject, verb, and complement was normal, but when there were outer and innercomplements the second was put in the dative case after to: Se biscop halgode Eadred tocyninge "The bishop consecreated Edred king." After an introductory adverb or adverbial phrasethe verb generally took second place as in modern German: Nu bydde ic an thing "Now I ask[literally, "ask I"] one thing"; Th ilcan geare gesette Aelfred cyning Lundenburg "In that sameyear Alfred the king occupied London." Impersonal verbs had no subject expressed. Infinitivesconstructed with auxiliary verbs were placed at the ends of clauses or sentences: Hie nedorston forth bi thre ea siglan "They dared not sail beyond that river" (siglan is the infinitive);Ic wolde thas lytlan boc awendan "I wanted to translate this little book" (awendan is theinfinitive). The verb usually came last in a dependent clause--e.g., awritan wile in gif hwa thasboc awritan wile (gerihte he hie be thre bysene) "If anyone wants to copy this book (let himcorrect his copy by the original)." Prepositions (or postpositions) frequently followed theirobjects. Negation was often repeated for emphasis.

Middle English

One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was to place all four Old English dialects more orless on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy and the centre of culture and learning graduallyshifted from Winchester to London. The old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scottishand Northern, although little is known of either of these divisions before the end of the 13thcentury (Figure 14). The old Mercian dialect was split into East and West Midland. West Saxonbecame slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South Westerndialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South Easternaccordingly. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, SouthWestern, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own characteristics. Theso-called Katherine Group of writings (1180-1210), associated with Hereford, a town not farfrom the Welsh border, adhered most closely to native traditions, and there is something to besaid for regarding this West Midland dialect, least disturbed by French and Scandinavianintrusions, as a kind of Standard English in the High Middle Ages.

Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the clearand easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian script then in use onthe Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman scribes wroteOld English yas u, as ui, u as ou (owwhen final). Thus, mycel("much") appeared as muchel, fr("fire") as fuir, hus ("house") as hous, and hu ("how") as how. For the sake of clarity (i.e.,legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w; and iwas sometimes writtenybefore and after m and n. So sunu ("son") appeared as sone and him ("him") as hym. OldEnglish cwwas changed to qu; hwto wh, qu, or quh; cto ch or tch; scto sh; -cg- to -gg-; and-ht to ght. So Old English cwen appeared as queen; hwaetas what, quat, or quhat; dicasditch; scip as ship; secge as segge; and mihtas might.

For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy, butwith the extension south to the Pyrenees of the Angevin empire of Henry II (reigned 1154-89),other dialects, especially Central French, or Francien, contributed to the speech of thearistocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch, leal, real, reward,wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the corresponding formschannel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee, from Francien. King Johnlost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the Capetian kings of Paris, Franciengradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood intact as the language of learning. For threecenturies, therefore, the literature of England was trilingual. Ancrene Riwle, for instance, a

guide or rule (riwle) of rare quality for recluses or anchorites (ancren), was disseminated in allthree languages.

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The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels hadbeen lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before allother consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels ofwhatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An opensyllable is one ending in a vowel. Both syllables in Old English nama "name," mete "meat,food," nosu "nose," wicu "week," and duru "door" were short, and the first syllables, beingstressed, were lengthened to name, mete, nose, weke, and dore in the 13th and 14thcenturies. A similar change occurred in 4th-century Latin, in 13th-century German, and atdifferent times in other languages. The popular notion has arisen that final mute - e in Englishmakes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the lengthening of the vowel that has caused e tobe lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old English long vowels were shortened in the firstsyllables of trisyllabic words, even when those syllables were open; e.g., haligdaeg "holy day,"rende "message, errand," cristendom "Christianity," and sutherne "southern," became holiday(Northern haliday), errende, christendom, and sutherne. This principle still operates in currentEnglish. Compare, for example, trisyllabic derivatives such as the words chastity, criminal,fabulous, gradual, gravity, linear, national, ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the simple nounsand adjectives chaste, crime, fable, grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and table.

There were significant variations in verb inflections in the Northern, Midland, and Southerndialects. The Northern infinitive was already one syllable (sing rather than the Old Englishsingan), whereas the past participle -en inflection of Old English was strictly kept. Theseapparently contradictory features can be attributed entirely to Scandinavian, in which the final-n of the infinitive was lost early in singa, and the final -n of the past participle was doubled insunginn. The Northern unmutated present participle in -andwas also of Scandinavian origin.Old English mutated -ende (German -end) in the present participle had already become -inde inlate West Saxon, and it was this Southern - inde that blended with the -ing suffix (German-ung) of nouns of action that had already become near-gerunds in such compound nouns asathswering "oath swearing" and writingfether "writing feather, pen." This blending of presentparticiple and gerund was further helped by the fact that Anglo-Norman and French - antwasitself a coalescence of Latin present participles in -antem, -entem, and Latin gerunds in-andum, -endum. The Northern second person singular singis was inherited unchanged fromCommon Germanic. The final t sound in Midland -est and Southern -st was excrescent,

comparable with the final t in modern "amidst" and "amongst" from older amiddes andamonges. The Northern third person singular singis had a quite different origin. Like the singisof the plural, it resulted almost casually from an inadvertent retraction of the tongue inenunciation from an interdental -th sound to postdental -s. Today the form "singeth" survivesas a poetic archaism. Shakespeare used both -eth and -s endings ("It [mercy] blesseth himthat gives and him that takes," The Merchant of Venice). The Midland present plural inflection-en was taken from the subjunctive. The past participle prefix y- developed from the OldEnglish perfective prefix ge-.

Chaucer, who was born and died in London, spoke a dialect that was basically East Midland.Compared with his contemporaries, he was remarkably modern in his use of language. He wasin his early 20s when the Statute of Pleading (1362) was passed, by the terms of which all

court proceedings were henceforth to be conducted in English, though "enrolled in Latin."Chaucer himself used four languages; he read Latin (Classical and Medieval) and spoke Frenchand Italian on his travels. For his own literary work he deliberately chose English.

The history of England from the Norman invasion encapsulates all the major trends of thetimes.

Politically, the Norman kings and their heirs are the primary locus in European history wherefeudalism is converted into a working model of a centralized monarchy. The history of Englandall throughout the Middle Ages is one, long, almost uninterrupted set of conflicts engendered by

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the attempt to convert feudalism into monarchy. On the one hand are attempts to consolidatethe power of the monarch over the power of feudatories; on the other hand is the resistance tomonarchical aggrandizement and the subsequent assertion of privileges by feudatories over themonarch. The high point of monarchical power was attained during the reign of Edward I(1272-1307); the low points of monarchical power were scattered all throughout medievalEnglish history: the reigns of John, Edward II, and Richard II being the bleakest.

From a cultural standpoint, the history of England involved a gradual absorption into a larger,European culture. While Anglo-Saxons had been fairly insular and unique culturally andpolitically, medieval England came increasingly dominated by continental culture. By the time ofChaucer and Richard II in the late fourteenth century, when England emerges as a majorcultural force in Europe, very few indigenous Anglo-Saxon cultural practices remained in the"high" culture of England. The German language of England, Anglo-Saxon, still remained insome of its most essential aspects, but for the most part, the language of England, MiddleEnglish, had more in common with continental languages, particularly French. This culturaltransformation occurred from the top down, so to speak. The Normans brought with themNorman culture, institutions, and social practices, but did not largely impose these on thenative Anglo-Saxon populations. Beginning in the 13th century, however, almost all educatedpeople in England had learned Norman, French, and Latin cultural modelsonly a feweccentrics still attached themselves to Anglo-Saxon cultural practices.

The Norman Kings

William and the Norman kings who followed him had as their principle objective the breaking ofthe power of the Anglo-Saxon earls and the importation of Norman feudalism. They had,however, to make one important modification to feudalismthe overlord would be the kingrather than a duke. They followed the same model that had been developed in Normandytheking owned the land under him either directly or indirectly. Land was enfeoffed, that is,granted as a "fief," to individual tenants who collected the revenues from this land. Inexchange, the tenants-in-chief (called "barons") entered into certain obligations with theoverlordthese included revenues and a certain amount of military forces. This system had acomplicated set of "privileges": on the one hand, the tenants-in-chief enjoyed a certainautonomy in the administration of lands and its revenuethis included rights of inheritance,that is, a feudatory was granted to a family rather than to an individual. On the other hand, themonarch directly or indirectly owned the land so had a certain claim to the revenues, the land,its inheritability, and to the services and obligations of its tenants.

The challenge to the Norman kings was to convert this system into a working monarchy. Inorder to maintain centralized authority over the more or less independent tenants, Williamretained as monarch the right to collect taxes, coin money, and to oversee the administration of

justice. But William did not have a wealth of professional administratorssince Anglo-SaxonEngland largely consisted of a series of independent earldoms, there were very few peoplecapable of carrying out the centralized functions he needed. Power, then, slowly devolved tothe barons he had created.

It fell to Henry I (1100-1135), William's successor, to create a professional class ofadministrators for the crown. The only real administrators that William had relied on were theindividuals filling the Anglo-Saxon office ofsheriffwho served as the local representative of theking. Henry I, however, turned his court into an administrative bureaucracy by creating specialoffices. These court offices would each serve a limited and specialized set of functions so thatthe office-holders would themselve become efficient administrators in that one area. Mostsignificantly, one of these specialized offices was the Exchequer, which oversaw the acquisitionand dispersal of revenues for the crown.

Henry II -In the development of the English monarchy, the most dramatic events occurredduring the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), the grandson of Henry I. The monarchy had fallen ontroubled times, enduring a civil war and contrary claims to the throne. When Henry II came tothe throne, he instituted a series of measures designed to consolidate power around the king.The most significant of these measures was the narrowing of privileges granted to the church

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and to the clergy. While William and Henry I had managed to gain privileges from the nobility,the church still remained relatively autonomous.

Henry's problem with the Roman church was that it existed outside of the legal system that theEnglish monarchs were trying to impose across England. When a member of the clergycommitted a crime, that criminal fell under the jurisdiction of the church rather than the king.The criminal would be tried in an ecclesiastical ("church") court using canon law of the Romanchurch, rather than tried in a manorial or state court using the king's laws. The ecclesiastical

judicial system of the Roman church was by and large highly corrupt (as its remnants in thepresent day still are)even the most heinous crimes, such as murder, resulted in minorpenalties imposed by the church court.

This not only rankled the king, it threatened the social order and the peace that the king wastrying to establish by centralizing the judicial system. Henry's biggest fight, then, was with thechurch. Henry tried to limit the church courts in 1164 by allowing the church courts to try aclerical criminal but demanding that the criminal be sentenced in a royal court. The Archbishopof Canterbury, Thomas Becket, refused to yieldhe would later be assassinated by four ofHenry's knights.

Despite his failure to bring the church under a centralized judiciary, Henry was one of the mostsuccessful kings in European medieval history to consolidate monarchical power and developthe institution of monarchical government. He greatly expanded the role of the judiciary in thelife of the English. In particular, he charged the sheriff of each region to call before itinerant

judges any local person that he pleased in order to question them before the judge. The sheriffwould ask these people if they knew of any crimes that had occurred since the last visit of the

judge. This practice would eventually evolve into the judicial practice we know as the grandjury. He also introduced the original form of jury trials. In Henry's time, jury trials were onlyapplied to civil cases involving property. When someone made a complaint of dispossession, thesheriff was empowered to bring before the judge twelve men who were familiar with the case.These men would then tell the judge what they knew of the case and would give their opinionas to the truth of the complaint or the defense. This twelve man testimonial would eventuallydevelop into the civil andcriminal jury trial.

These were significant innovations in many ways. First, they equalized the law in a profoundway. People with little power could make complaints against more powerful people and prevailthis made the judicial something that people supported and sought after. In addition, the useof the twelve men expanded participation in the judiciary and in government to more than justthe monarch, his ministers, and the powerful barons. Government was now partly in the handsof common peoplethus would begin a growing interest among more and more classes in theconduct of government. Finally, Henry's innovations created a more or less independentbureaucracy that, in the hands of a well-trained administrative staff, could run the centralgovernment no matter who was king.

And that's what happened when Henry II died. He was succeeded by his son, Richard I (1189-1199), who, because of his interest in the Crusades, spent all of six months in England duringhis ten year reign. Even in his absence, the government ran efficiently. In fact, it got even moreefficient as the administrative beauracracy was able to develop without the interference of theking.

Magna Carta - It was during the reign of Richard's successor, John (1199-1214), that thesteady development of monarchical authority was partly checked. As with his predecessors,John ruled not only England as a monarch, but he also ruled much of France as a vassal of theFrench king. This rankled the French kings all during the reigns of the early Norman kings. By1204, the French king, Philip Augustus, retook for France the lands that John ruled inNormandy. In Philip Augustus, John faced one of the most capable military and administrativekings in French historyhe was dealt defeat after defeat in his attempt to first defend and thenregain his lands.

Fed up with his war in France, John's nobles resented the power of the king to raise money forwhat they felt was a losing war. In the famous Magna Carta of 1215, they forced the king to

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sign a charter that renounced much of his power. The Magna Carta was not really a documentabout rights, it was a document about limiting monarchical government and the power of theking. First and foremost, it revoked the right of the king to raise revenues independentlyinorder to raise revenues, the king first had to obtain permission from his vassals. The documentalso limited the power of the king's judges arbitrarily to try and sentence free men; all free mencould only be tried and sentenced by their equals. Finally, it created a council of vassals thatcould approve or disapprove of the king's revenue raising; this council would eventually developinto the Parliament. The great experiment with monarchy in Europe was entering a new phasethe first involved the creation of monarchical power and the institutions to run it; the secondphased involved the creation of institutions to check and limit the growing power of themonarch. Everything was in place now for the subsequent history of government in Europe.

Edward I - The most powerful king in medieval English history was Edward I (1272-1307), anaggressive, warrior king that not only consolidated power in England but through wars ofconquest became the first king of all of Britain, albeit briefly.

Of all the medieval monarchs in Europe, Edward was perhaps the most brilliant at consolidatingpower. The institution he invented to achieve this end was Parliament, or "Talking." Thepurpose of Parliament was to gather all the major vassals of the king in one place, explain tothem the reasons for collecting taxes, get their approval, and then discuss methods ofcollection. While this may seem to be an expansion of the role of the barons in government, itwas actually the opposite. The entire purpose of the development of Parliament was efficiency,the rapid generation of consensus among the nobility, none of whom really were in a position tochallenge the king. Eventually, however, after the reign of Edward, the Parliament woulddevelop as a powerful check on the monarch's powerthis was not Edward's intention orpractice.

Edward's Parliament included more than nobilityhe had the genius to include knights andother commoners to represent local counties at the Parliament. These commoners probably hadno role at all in the Parliament, but the practice was enormously effective as propaganda. Localcommoners were not only presented with an awe-inspiring theater of power at the court, butthey also were being given propaganda and reasons for taxation on themselves and the peoplethey represented. Commoners would eventually become an integral part of Parliament anddevelop their own independence from the nobility in Parliamentsuffice it to say here, though,that the inclusion of commoners was part of the trend of increasing participation in themonarchical and local government by more people begun by the earliest Norman kings.

Edward made the most determined assault on baronial power among all the English kings. Heinstituted a series of proceedings called quo warranto proceedings ("by what warrant")theseproceedings would systematically question by what warrant nobles had certain privileges andrights from the king. If there was no warrant for these privileges, they were revoked andgranted to the monarch. The result was a massive consolidation of power in the king's hands.Among other innovations was Edward's practice of issuing statutes, which were pieces ofpublic legislation arbitrarily imposed on the entire kingdom by the will of the king.

Edward needed an efficient system for raising revenues for his constant warfare. On thecontinent he fought against the French king for Gascony, a territory under his control that hadbeen seized by the French king. It was a useless war fought from 1294-1303 that simplyresulted in Gascony being returned to Edward as a vassal. His most significant wars, however,were against Wales and Scotland. Bo

17 - a brief history of the english language

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