Languages and the History of English

English 112

Indo-European Languages

• English is an Indo-European language

• It’s part of the Germanic subfamily of Indo-European languages

• What does that mean?

…Babel?

Dissemination

Indo-European Family Tree

Indo-European Languages Today

When did English appear?

• About 600 A.D. or so, when the Anglo-Saxons, or Angles, conquered Britain

• At the time, Britain was called Britannia by the Romans, and Prydain by the local peoples, who were driven north into Ireland and Scotland

• The Anglo-Saxons gave the southern part of Britain the name England (“Angle-land”)

Anglo-Saxon (Old English)

• Spoken from about 600 A.D. to 1066 A.D.

• Bore strong resemblance to the German of the time

• Featured a slightly different alphabet, with letters such as thorn (Þ, þ) and eth (Ð, ð)

• No longer comprehensible to most Modern English speakers

Caedmon and Bede

Beowulf

Middle English

• 1066 A.D.-1500

• Middle English is much more similar to Modern English

• It consists of Old English, plus Middle French, some Arabic, and some Latin

• …how did those languages get in there?

The Norman Conquest

French Vs. English

–Animals (Old English Origins)

•Cow

•Swine

•Chicken

–Meats (Middle French Origins)•Beef•Pork•Poultry

Guess where the word comes from!(French, Old English, Latin, Arabic)

•Alcohol

•Timber

•Heaven

•Govern

•Stone

•Candle

•Orange

•CourtArabic - naranj

French – cohors, “an enclosed space”French - governer

OE - heofonah

OE – timbrod, “build”

OE - stan

Latin - candelarius

Arabic – al-kol, “spirit”

Chaucer, Mallory, Langland, the Pearl Poet

Early Modern English

• Standardization of grammar and spelling occurred slowly

• In the interim between Chaucer and our modern English, people spoke EME, which is archaic, but comprehensible to the modern speaker

• 1500-1799

Shakespeare, Milton, KJV, Austen

Standardization of Spelling

Modern English

• Modern English is the English that we speak today

• It’s been roughly the same since 1800• Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Darwin