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Roman Influence “The Romans had been the ruling power in Britain since A.D. 43. They had subjugated the Celts whom they found living there and had succeeded in setting up a Roman administration. The Roman influence did not extend to the outlying parts of the British Isles.” – Paul Roberts
Roman Influence: 55B.C. – 410 A.D. Part of Hadrian’s Wall in Yorkshire Roman Baths in Bath, Somerset
Waning of Roman Influence “In the fourth century, troubles multiplied for the Romans in Britain. Not only did the untamed tribes of Scotland and Wales grow more and more restive, but the Anglo-Saxons began to make pirate raids on the eastern coast. Furthermore, there was growing difficulty everywhere in the Empire, and the legions in Britain were siphoned off to fight elsewhere. Finally, in A.D. 410, the last Roman ruler in England, bent on becoming emperor, left the islands and took the last of the legions with him. The Celts were left in possession of Britain but almost defenseless against the impending Anglo-Saxon attack.” – Paul Roberts
Celtic Influences “In Scotland, Wales, and Ireland the Celts remained free and wild, and they made periodic forays against the Romans in England. Among other defense measures, the Romans built the famous Roman Wall to ward off the tribes in the north.Even in England the Roman power was thin. Latin did not become the language of the country as it did in Gaul and Spain. The mass of people continued to speak Celtic, with Latin and the Roman civilization it contained in use as a top dressing.” Click on image for video
Anglo Saxon Influence: 449 - • “At the time of the Roman Empire—say, from the beginning of the Christian Era to around A.D. 400—the speakers of what was to become English were scattered along the northern coast of Europe. They spoke a dialect of Low German. More exactly, they spoke several different dialects, since they were several different tribes. The names given to the tribes who got to England are Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. For convenience, we can refer to them as Anglo-Saxons.” – Paul Roberts Click on image to see, hear video
The Anglo-Saxons: 449 A.D. - Tintagel, Cornwall, one of the places claiming to be the home of King Arthur Glastonbury, Somerset, another supposed home of Arthur
Influence of Christianity: 597- “We have no record of the English language until after 600, when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and learned the Latin alphabet. The conversion began, to be precise, in the year 597 and was accomplished, within thirty or forty years. The conversion was a great advance for the Anglo-Saxons, not only because of the spiritual benefits but because it reestablished contact with what remained of Roman civilization.”
Influence of the Danes, Vikings: 700s, 800s • “In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Norsemen emerged in their ships from their homelands in Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula. They traveled far and attacked and plundered at will and almost with impunity. They ravaged Italy and Greece, settled in France, Russia, and Ireland, colonized Iceland and Greenland, and discovered America several centuries before Columbus. Nor did they overlook England.After many years of hit-and-run raids, the Norsemen landed an army on the east coast of England in the year 866. There was nothing much to oppose them except the Wessex power led by Alfred. The long struggle ended in 877 with a treaty by which a line was drawn roughly from the northwest of England to the southeast. On the eastern side of the line Norse rule was to prevail. This was called the Danelaw. The western side was to be governed by Wessex.” • - Paul Roberts Click for video
Influence of the Danes “The linguistic result of all this was a considerable injection of Norse into the English language. Norse was at this time not so different from English as Norwegian or Danish is now. Probably speakers of English could understand, more or less, the language of the newcomers who had moved into eastern England. At any rate, there was considerable interchange and word borrowing. Examples of Norse words in the English language are sky, give, law, egg, outlaw, leg, ugly, scant, sly, crawl, scowl, take, thrust. There are hundreds more. We have even borrowed some pronouns from Norse—-they, their, and them. These words were borrowed first by the eastern and northern dialects and then in the course of hundreds of years made their way into English generally. It is supposed also—indeed, it must be true—that the Norsemen influenced the sound structure and the grammar of English. But this is hard to demonstrate in detail.” – Paul Roberts
Influence of the Normans: 1066- “Sometime between the years 1000 and 1200 various important changes took place in the structure of English, and Old English became Middle English. The political event which facilitated these changes was the Norman Conquest. The Normans, as the name shows, came originally from Scandinavia. In the early tenth century they established themselves in northern France, adopted the French language, and developed a vigorous kingdom and a very passable civilization. In the year 1066, led by Duke William, they crossed the Channel and made themselves masters of England. For the next several hundred years, England was ruled by kings whose first language was French.” – Paul Roberts Click on image for video
Influence of the Normans “One might wonder why, after the Norman Conquest, French did not become the national language, replacing English entirely. The reason is that the Conquest was not a national migration, as the earlier Angio-Saxon invasion had been. Great numbers of Normans came to England, but they came as rulers and landlords. French became the language of the court, the language of the nobility, the language of polite society, the language of literature. But it did not replace English as the language of the people. There must always have been hundreds of towns and villages in which French was never heard except when visitors of high station passed through.” – Paul Roberts
Influence of the Normans “But English, though it survived as the national language, was profoundly changed after the Norman Conquest. Some of the changes—in sound structure and grammar—would no doubt have taken place whether there had been a Conquest or not. Even before 1066 the case system of English nouns and adjectives was becoming simplified; people came to rely more on word order and prepositions than on inflectional endings to communicate their meanings. The process was speeded up by sound changes which caused many of the endings to sound alike. But no doubt the Conquest facilitated the change. German, which didn't experience a Norman Conquest, is today rather highly inflected compared to its cousin English.” – Paul Roberts
Norman Influence “But it is in vocabulary that the effects of the Conquest are most obvious. French ceased, after a hundred years or so, to be the native language of very many people in England, but it continued—and continues still—to be a zealously cultivated second language, the mirror of elegance and civilization. When one spoke English, one introduced not only French ideas and French things but also their French names. This was not only easy but socially useful. To pepper one's conversation with French expressions was to show that one was well-bred, elegant, au courant. The last sentence shows that the process is not yet dead. By using au courant instead of, say, abreast of things, the writer indicates that he is no dull clod who knows only English but an elegant person aware of how things are done in le haut monde.” – Paul Roberts
Norman Influence “Thus French words came into English, all sorts of them. There were words to do with government: parliament, majesty, treaty, alliance, tax, government', church words: parson, sermon, baptism, incense, crucifix, religion, words for foods: veal, beef, mutton, bacon, jelly, peach, lemon, cream, biscuit, colors: blue, scarlet, vermilion', household words: curtain, chair, lamp, towel, blanket, parlor, play words: dance, chess, music, leisure, conversation; literary words: story, romance, poet, literary; learned words: study, logic, grammar, noun, surgeon, anatomy, stomach, just ordinary words of all sorts: nice, second, very, age, bucket, gentle,final, fault, flower, cry, count, sure, move, surprise, plain.” – Paul Roberts
The Great Vowel Shift “The other change is what is called the Great Vowel Shift. This was a systematic shifting of half a dozen vowels and diphthongs in stressed syllables. For instance, the word name had in Middle English a vowel something like that in the modem word father, wine had the vowel of modem mean', he was pronounced something like modem hey', mouse sounded like moose', moon had the vowel of moan. Again the shift was thoroughgoing and affected all the words in which these vowel sounds occurred. Since we still keep the Middle English system of spelling these words, the differences between Modem English and Middle English are often more real than apparent.” – Paul Roberts
The Great Vowel Shift “The vowel shift has meant also that we have come to use an entirely different set of symbols for representing vowel sounds than is used by writers of such languages as French, Italian, or Spanish, in which no such vowel shift occurred. If you come across a strange word—say, bine—in an English book, you will pronounce it according to the English system, with the vowel of wine or dine. But if you readbinein a French, Italian, or Spanish book, you pronounce it with the vowel of mean or seen.” – Paul Roberts
Influence of Chaucer “For us Middle English is simpler than Old English just because it is closer to Modem English. It takes three or four months at least to learn to read Old English prose and more than that for poetry. But a week of good study should put one in touch with the Middle English poet Chaucer. Indeed, you may be able to make some sense of Chaucer straight off, though you would need instruction in pronunciation to make it sound like poetry. Here is a famous passage from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, fourteenth century: • Ther was also a nonne, a Prioresse,That of hirsmyling was fulsymple and coy,Hirgretteste oath was but by Seinte Lay,And she was cleped Madame Eglentyne.Fulwel she song the service dyvyne,Entuned in hirnosefulsemely.And Frenshe she spakfUlfaire and fetisly,After the scale ofStratford-atte-Bowe,For Frenshe of Parys was to hirunknowe.” Click for video
Influence of Caxton: 1475- “These two changes, then, produced the basic differences between Middle English and Modern English. But fliere were several other developments that had aneffect upon the language. One was the invention of printing, an invention introduced into England by William Caxton in the year 1475. Where before books had been rare and costly, they suddenly became cheap and common. More and more people learned to read and write. This was the first of many advances in communication which have worked to unify languages and to arrest the development of dialect differences, though of course printing affects writing principally rather than speech. Among other things it hastened the standardization of spelling.” – Paul Roberts Click for video
Middle English: 1100-1500 “Middle English, then, was still a Germanic language, but it differed from Old English in many ways. The sound system and the grammar changed a good deal. Speakers made less use of case systems and other inflectional devices and relied more on word order and structure words to express their meanings. This is often said to be a simplification, but it isn't really. Languages don't become simpler; they merely exchange one kind of complexity for another. Modem English is not a simple language, as any foreign speaker who tries to learn it will hasten to tell you.”
