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History of the English Language

History of the English Language. (Baugh & Cable, 2002) “The diversity of cultures that find expression in it is a reminder that the history of English is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1.500 years”

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History of the English Language

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  1. History of the English Language (Baugh & Cable, 2002) • “The diversity of cultures that find expression in it is a reminder that the history of English is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1.500 years” • English entered England in 5th, but the island had been inhabited for at least 50,000 years. • Celtic languages – Gaelic and Brythonic branch – entered the island during the Bronze age. • Latin was spoken for a period of four centuries (invasion under Claudius AD 43)

  2. AD 449 – beginning of the Germanic tribes invasion – Jutes, Saxons and Angles – Anglo-Saxon civilization. • Early Latin writers, following Celtic tradition, called them Saxons and their land Saxonia. After the recognition of the king by Pope Gregory (601) Angli and Anglia. Their language was always Englisc (derived from Angles in OE Engle, but used to describe the language of all invading tribes. • Anglecynn (Angles-kin) – Englaland – England and English. • Middle English (1066)– William, the conqueror (the duke of Normandy) brings dialectal forms of French.

  3. British Empire/ North-American Empire – cultural, political and economic influences. • Regional varieties: “Indian English, Caribbean English, West African English, etc.” • Growth and decay: in Shakespeare, nice meant “foolish” and rheumatism meant “a cold in the head”. • Phonetic and synthatic alterations through analogy – Great Vowel Shift (1450-1750) • This means that the vowel in the English word date was in Middle English pronounced similar to modern dart; the vowel in feet was similar to modern fate; the vowel in wipe was similar to modern weep; the vowel in boot was similar to modern boat; and the vowel in house was similar to modern whose.

  4. World language: “French is more loved, but less used”. English as the powerful Ugly Duckling (aesthetically inferior) • Assets: tendency to go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages (cosmopolitan vocabulary assimilation). Examples: brandy, landscape, uproar (Dutch); umbrella, vocano (Italian); alligator, mosquito, vanilla (Spanish), paradise, check, chess (Persian).

  5. Assets: inflectional simplicity – loss of pratically all personal endings, abandonment of almost any distinction between singular and plural, gradual discard of the subjunctive mode. • Natural (rather the grammatical) gender – process during Middle English period – living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all the other nouns are neutral. • Main liability: lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation. The advent of press (1475) and the creation of a postal system (1516) –standardization and study of the language spoken in London. Printed materials led to education, but it was all during the... Roosevelt (Simplified Spelling Board – Congress denied). • English Spelling Reform Proposal

  6. Lerer (2007) • African American Vernacular English (AAVE) • Archetypes

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