History_or_origin_of_English_language

 Prof.  Abdelhamid Fouda 

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#History_or_origin_of_English_language

1500 years ago, a gang of German mercenaries arrived in Britain at the invitation of the local king, then rebelled and seized power. Over the next few generations many of their compatriots made the dangerous voyage across the North Sea, lured by the promise of riches. Their numbers grew, and they established many small kingdoms for themselves at the expense of the local British inhabitants, who had been ravaged by plague and economic collapse and so could put up little organised resistance.

These incomers spoke a Germanic language called Englisc, related to modern Frisian, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. They found themselves a minority in a country where the population spoke various Brythonic dialects, related to modern Welsh. However the local inhabitants were subjugated and oppressed, and forced to speak the language of their invaders rather than the invaders learning their language. As far as we can tell, eventually the Brythonic speakers of England were assimilated by their conquerors, intermarried with them and adopted their language. There are not many words of Brythonic that survive in English, except for place names; but its influence may have had some small effect in moving the language away from its Germanic roots.

In about 730 CE, the historian Bede wrote that there were five languages spoken in Britain: English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin. By 'British' he meant the language that is the ancestor of modern Welsh, and by 'Irish' the ancestor of modern Scottish Gaelic, which was brought to Britain by Irish colonists. Pictish is an extinct language, as also, of course, is Latin. As for English, or the lingua Anglorum, Bede claimed that it was the language spoken by the 'nations of the Angles, or Saxons', who inhabited south-eastern Britain from the Straits of Dover to the Firth of Forth. In fact, today linguists distinguish four main dialects of Old English - those of Kent, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria - which had distinct differences between them.

The earliest known written work in Old English is from about 670 CE; a religious poem known as Caedmon's Hymn. It was probably originally an oral work, later written down, in the Northumbrian dialect.

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard

metudæs maecti end his modgidanc

uerc uuldurfadur swe he uundra gihwaes

eci dryctin or astelidæ

he aerist scop aelda barnum

heben til hrofe haleg scepen.

tha middungeard moncynnæs uard

eci dryctin æfter tiadæ

firum foldu frea allmectig.

Here's someone reciting it:

While it appears unintelligible at first glance, some of the words can be seen to be ancestors of modern English, especially if you listen to the pronunciation rather than just looking at the spelling. 'Hefaenricaes uard', for example, is pronounced, more or less, as Heaven-rich's ward'; 'heaven' is still a word in modern English, 'ric' isn't, but is related to the German word Reich or the Dutch word Rijk, both meaning 'Kingdom' or 'State'; and 'ward' is related to 'warden' or the verb 'to ward'.

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English was changed substantially by the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and the subsequent Danish colonisation of much of northern England. The influence of Norse on the development of English has only recently been recognised – it's less famous than the later influence of French via the Normans, but may have been even more far-reaching. The Norse language was apparently close enough to Old English that people didn't need translators to speak to each other, but far enough apart that they had to develop a simplified dialect that dropped most of the complicated grammar and inflections of formal Anglo-Saxon. A huge amount of vocabulary was adopted from Norse, even words for very basic things. The following words (among hundreds more) were all imported into English from Norse:

anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, they, them, their, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.

However, the influence didn't stop there. Even the grammar was altered; the syntax and sentence structure of modern English is much closer to Scandinavian languages than it is to either German or even pre-Viking Old English. For example, in modern English and Scandinavian the word order is 'I have read the book', in German and previously in Anglo-Saxon it is 'I have the book read'.

(The above examples were originally given by Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, who concluded that modern English might be better classed as a North Germanic language.)

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The second major influence affecting the development of English, as mentioned above, was the Norman Conquest in 1066. Unlike the Vikings, who could still communicate with the English if both sides spoke slowly and clearly, the Normans spoke a completely different language: French. (Or at least a Norman dialect of French, which was significantly unlike the French spoken in Paris.) The result was that rather than the two languages merging, as Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse had done to create a fusion, they remained separate, but the language of the elite strongly influenced the language spoken by ordinary people. About 28% of English vocabulary (including the word 'vocabulary') comes from French.

The borrowed words largely concerned matters of war, law, politics and religion, where the French elite dominated and imposed their own terminology. Government, parliament, sovereign, majesty, state, administration, royal, tax, chancellor, treasurer and bailiff are all Norman words; so are priest, prayer, clergy and parish. Court, judge, jury, justice, accuse, evidence, felony, villain, adultery, embezzle, fraud, libel, perjury and dungeon are all Norman words.

One notable feature of the Norman influence is that often, the new word did not replace the old one, but sat alongside it with a slightly different meaning. The most famous example is how the French words boeuf, mouton and porc – which mean 'cow', 'sheep' and 'pig' –  came into English not as the names of animals, but as the names of the meat prepared from that animal: beef, mutton and pork. English peasants worked long hours in the fields tending their beasts, while the Norman barons feasted on roast meat. More generally, it is because of the Norman influence that modern English contains so many synonyms and near-synonyms. 'Freedom' comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, 'liberty' from a Norman French word. Brotherly and fraternal, buy and purchase, belief and faith, ask and enquire, weep and cry, answer and reply, forgive and pardon, worthy and valuable: all of these synonyms (and many more) are the result of Norman words being adopted alongside an already existing English word. It's why modern English has such a huge and flexible vocabulary compared to many other languages.

Another consequence of the Norman Conquest was that for 300 years, English was the language only of the poor, uneducated and illiterate. This led to a considerable simplification of its grammar. The idea of gendered nouns was dropped. Adjectives were no longer declined to agree with their nouns. With a few exceptions (such as child/children) irregular plurals were abandoned. Word order rather than inflections and suffixes became the primary method of bringing meaning to a sentence. Tracking the changes is almost impossible because so few written texts were created during this period; but it's clear that between about 1100 and 1400 the English language changed dramatically; a far faster and more sweeping change than in all the years since 1400 until now.

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By the 14th century the nobility of England had become assimilated, and most of them now spoke English as their mother tongue. French was still prestigious, but it was a language learned in school rather than in the cradle. From this date onwards, the changes to English were less far-reaching than before, though still significant; this is because education and literature tend to freeze a language into a 'standard' form which is deliberately taught to children, even if they also speak a local dialect at home. Publication of the Bible in an English translation was especially important, since this was a book that everybody was encouraged to read and even memorise.

Nevertheless, there were still changes to the English language in the years since 1400. One of these is well-documented, though the reason for it is not necessarily understood: the so-called Great Vowel Shift. This was a change to the pronounciation of English vowels, which occurred in stages between roughly 1400 and 1600. For example, the word 'bite' was once pronounced in English as /biːt/ ('beet') as it still is in French; but during the Great Vowel Shift it became /baɪt/ as it is today. Some of the peculiarities of modern English spelling can be traced to this: the spelling was fixed back when the word still had its old pronunciation, but when the sound changed, the spelling was not updated to match.

Another change can be traced to the malign influence of grammarians. Now that English was once again a language spoken by the educated, some of them wanted to formalise and regularise its grammar, usually basing it in the Latin that they were familiar with. It is from this influence that the so-called rules such as "don't split infinitives", "don't end sentences with a preposition" and "don't use 'they' as a singular pronoun" are derived.

Finally, English has continued to absorb words wholesale from other languages. As well as the Norman French words from the mediaeval period, an entire army of French words (such as 'entire' and 'army') was introduced in more modern times. This includes a great number of military terms, reflecting France's role as the leading military power of most of the last 500 years — soldier, marine, guard, officer, troops, platoon, company, battalion, regiment, division, corps, army, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, general, pistol, musket, artillery, barrage, camouflage, morale, logistics are all from French. Latin was also a major source of vocabulary, especially technical and scientific terms, with words being adopted directly as well as through the intermediary of French.

Other words were looted from the colonies (such as 'looted', from Hindi) or liberated from enemies in wartime, such as 'cruiser' and 'freebooter' from the Dutch or 'flak and 'panzer' from the Germans.

The need to distinguish British English from other forms of English that have developed over the years was, obviously, a product of colonial times. The first attested use of the phrase, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1867, in an article in The Galaxy magazine. However, the phrase 'English English' was used in 1783, in contrast to 'Irish English', in a comedy called 'The true-born Irishman' by the Dublin playwright Charles Macklin. The expression 'American English' was used by Noah Webster the introduction to his dictionary in 1806.