Исстория английского языка

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The English language is third in the world when it comes to the number of native speakers, and for the overall number of speakers all over the world, it gets the top position. It’s the official language of 53 countries, institutions such as the UN and EU, and many world trade, maritime, aerial and other organizations. It’s often called the contemporary lingua franca – or global language. As for its origins, English is a Germanic language belonging to the Indo-European family. Deriving from Anglo-Saxon, English underwent a very specific kind of development resulting from a series of factors: the island situation of Great Britain, Norman influences and the impact of Latin, as well as the global diffusion of the language.

The history of English started in the 5th Century, when the Angles and Saxons from the region of Frisia (western Germany and the Netherlands) invaded England. Their dialects spread over the island and evolved to form the so-called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Some linguists claim that the dialects of Angles and Saxons interacted with the language of the local Celts to finally form a new language.

Old English was strongly influenced by the speech of the Normans. They invaded England at the end of the 10th Century and remained dominant until the beginning of the 13th Century, thus hugely impacting Old English and transforming it into so-called Middle English. Normans who spoke Old French and English at that time came to use a huge amount of French vocabulary in official terminology, and also common topics such as food, clothing, agriculture, etc. At that time, English adopted the Latin alphabet for its writing system.

A second period of strong influence from French was the Renaissance, when a great number of lexical units were re-adopted from the Romance languages through Latin or French once again.

Modern English is considered to have started its development in the Elizabethan period.

The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Angles came from Englaland and their language was called Englisc - from which the words England and English are derived.

The English language has had a remarkable history. When we first catch it in historical records, it is a language of none-too-civilized tribes on the continent of Europe along the North Sea. From those murky and undistinguished beginnings, English has become the most widespread language in the world, used by more peoples for more purposes than any language on Earth.

The early part of the Modern English saw the establishment of the Standard written English we know today. Its standardization was first due to the need of the central government for regular procedures by which to conduct its business, to keep its records and to communicate with the citizens of the land. Standard languages are often the by-products of bureaucracy, developed to meet a specific administrative need, rather than spontaneous developments of the populace or the artifice of writers and scholars. A standard language is spread widely over a the large region, is respected, because people recognize its usefulness and is codified in the sense of having been described so that people know what it is.

A standard language has to be described before it is fully standard. The purpose of the paper in question is to retrace development of the Standard English language formation as well as to study linguistic background of its establishment.

The purpose of the research stipulated the arrangement and consecutive solving of the following tasks:

1) to analyze linguistic situation in the different periods;

2) to consider the main factors contributing to the Standard English language development;

3) to examine changes in the English language on all levels during its standardization.

The subject of our work is the history of English language. The object is English language.

The topicality of the paper given can be explained by the following fact: in the course of its history the English language has changed a lot, in other words it has been globalized. Additionally, it gave birth to many regional varieties. And although most people nowadays speak a variety of regional English or an admixture of standard and regional Englishes, and reverse such labels as BBC English or “the Queen’s English” for what they perceive to be a pure Standard English it is still vitally important to know what the Standard English language represents as such and what is more important to use it to be able to communicate with English speakers of various ethnic backgrounds. The personal contribution to the research work lies in an attempt to integrate fundamental and modern sources on the English language formation to give a contrastive view of the issue.

The following methods were applied in the research:

1. Descriptive analysis.

2. Historical-philological analysis.

3. Comparative analysis.

This work consists of introduction, three chapters, conclusions, bibliography.

The research is founded on fundamental works of well-known scholars such as A.C. Baugh, K. Brunner, D. Crystal, O. Jespersen; Russian scientists: V.D Arakin, A.A. Rastorgueva, B.A. Ilyish and many others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

СНAPTER І. THE CHRONOLOGICAL DIVISION OF THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

1.1. The English Language as a chief medium of communication

 

West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the 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 is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.

Origins and basic characteristics English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have

roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral 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) [11, p. 93].

Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral 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 words have 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 and Chinese words for “man” are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. 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 have no inflections aside from the determiners “this, these” and “that, those.” (The endings - er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as non inflectional suffixes.) English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., “the tall man,” “the tall woman,” compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, 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 [4, p. 64].

In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now 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.” In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, 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 speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the placename and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre 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 and incomes policy” and “parks and gardens committee.”

Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements [1, p. 113].

English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words.

The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English alphabet minus J, K, V, W, Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use in abbreviations and Y and Z in words transcribed from Greek. After its adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed Was a ligatured doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I and U. The resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or capital, and lowercase, or small, letters.

English spelling is based for the most part on that of the 15th century, but pronunciation has changed considerably since then, especially that of long vowels and diphthongs. The extensive change in the pronunciation of vowels, known as the Great Vowel Shift, affected all of Geoffrey Chaucer's seven long vowels, and for centuries spelling remained untidy. If the meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual words seemed unimportant. In the 17th century during the English Civil War, compositors adopted fixed spellings for practical reasons, and in the order-loving 18th century uniformity became more and more fashionable. Since Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), orthography has remained fairly stable. Numerous tacit changes, such as “music” for “musick” and “fantasy” for “phantasy”, have been accepted, but spelling has nevertheless continued to be in part un phonetic. Attempts have been made at reform. Indeed, every century has had its reformers since the 13th, when an Augustinian canon named Orm devised his own method of differentiating short vowels from long by doubling the succeeding consonants or, when this was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a superimposed breve mark (˘). William Caxton, who set up his wooden printing press at Westminster in 1476, was much concerned with spelling problems throughout his working life. Noah Webster produced his Spelling Book, in 1783, as a precursor to the first edition (1828) of his American Dictionary of the English Language. The 20th century has produced many zealous reformers.

Three systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, are actually in use for different purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented Roman) Alphabet (ITA) of 44 letters used by educationists in the teaching of children under seven; (2) the Shaw alphabet of 48 letters, designed in implementation of the will of George Bernard Shaw; and (3) the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), constructed on the basis of one symbol for one individual sound and used by many trained linguists. Countless other systems have been worked out from time to 12 time, of which R.E. Zachrisson's “Anglic” (1930) and Axel Wijk's Regularized English (1959) may be the best [18, p. 35].

Meanwhile, the great publishing houses continue unperturbed because drastic reform remains impracticable, undesirable, and unlikely. This is because there is no longer one criterion of correct pronunciation but several standards throughout the world; regional standards are themselves not static, but changing with each new generation; and, if spelling were changed drastically, all the books in English in the world's public and private libraries would become inaccessible to readers without special study [27, p. 61].

1.2. The periods in the history of English

 

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 arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611;the completion of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.

Development of the language Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates from AD449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or 1500.

Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided into Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from about 1660 to the present time [4, p. 131].

Old English Period Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th century AD; the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449, according to tradition. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish, originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was primarily used for the greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and the contemporary elegiac poems.

Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well as “we”), two different declensions of adjectives, four declensions of nouns, and grammatical distinctions of gender. Although rich in word-building possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart, down, and mattock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have been in use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings [16, p. 43].

The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek that were introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical of these words are altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and pear. A few were probably introduced through the Celtic; others were brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders, who previously had come into contact with Roman culture. By far the largest number of Latin words was introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words included not only ecclesiastical terms but many others of less specialized significance.

About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by the Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late 8th century on. Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and battle, but shortly after the initial invasions other words used in the Scandinavian social and administrative system—for example, the word law—entered the language, as well as the verb form are and such widely used words as take, cut, both, ill, and ugly.

At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest of 1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period the relationship between the elements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or four grammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote the plural the noun ending -es had been adopted. The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the root vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and foot, feet, survive also [25, p. 143].

With the levelling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual number fell into disuse, and the dative and accusative of pronouns were reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them were substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural, and who, which, and that acquired their present relative functions. The conjugation of verbs was simplified by the omission of endings and by the use of a common form for the singular and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as egg, sky, sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility and clergy, although they had learned English, introduced from the French words pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, in addition to others proper to the arts, scholarship, and medicine. Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English, became important during the 14th century, when the counties in which it was spoken developed into centres of university, economic, and courtly life. East Midland, one of the subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the speech of the entire metropolitan area of the capital, London, and probably had spread south of the Thames River into Kent and Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use in the government offices of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of the 14th-century poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and ultimately by its adoption for printed works by William Caxton. These and other circumstances gradually contributed to the direct development of the East Midland dialect into the Modern English language.

During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle English dialects continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are still spoken in the 20th century. Lowland Scottish, for example, is a development of the Northern dialect [17, p. 60].

In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by the widespread use of one part of speech for another and by increased borrowings from other languages. The revival of interest in Latin and Greek during the Renaissance brought new words into English from those languages. Other words were introduced by English travellers and merchants after their return from journeys on the Continent. From Italian came cameo, stanza, and violin; from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator, peccadillo, and sombrero. During its development, Modern English borrowed words from more than 50 different languages. In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important grammatical changes occurred. The formal rules of English grammar were established during that period. The pronoun its came into use, replacing the genitive form his, which was the only form used by the translators of the King James Bible (1611). The progressive tenses developed from the use of the participle as a noun proceeded by the preposition on; the preposition gradually weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the simple ing form of the verb remained in use. After the 18th century this process of development culminated in the creation of the progressive passive form, for example, “The job is being done.” The most important development begun during this period and continued without interruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries concerned vocabulary. As a result of colonial expansion, notably in North America but also in other areas of the world, many new words entered the English language. From the indigenous peoples of North America, the words raccoon and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and quinine; from the West Indies, barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee and zebra; from India, bandanna, curry, and punch; and from Australia, kangaroo and boomerang. In addition, thousands of scientific terms were developed to denote new concepts, discoveries, and inventions. Many of these terms, such as neutron, penicillin, and supersonic, were formed from Greek and Latin roots; others were borrowed from modern languages, as with blitzkrieg from German and sputnik from Russian [12, p. 82].

In Great Britain at present the speech of educated persons is known as Received Standard English. A class dialect rather than a regional dialect, it is based on the type of speech cultivated at such schools as Eton and Harrow and at such of the older universities as Oxford and Cambridge. Many English people who speak regional dialects in their childhood acquire Received Standard English while attending school and university. Its influence has become even stronger in recent years because of its use by such public media as the British Broadcasting Corp.

Widely differing regional and local dialects are still employed in the various counties of Great Britain. Other important regional dialects have developed also; for example, the English language in Ireland has retained certain individual peculiarities of pronunciation, such as the pronunciation of lave for leave and fluther for flutter; certain syntactical peculiarities, such as the use of after following forms of the verb be; and certain differences in vocabulary, including the use of archaic words such as adown (for down) and Celtic borrowings such as banshee. The Lowland Scottish dialect, sometimes called Lallans, first made known throughout the English-speaking world by the songs of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, contains differences in pronunciation also, such as neebour (“neighbor”) and guid (“good”), and words of Scandinavian origin peculiar to the dialect, such as braw and bairn.