The history and development of English

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Міністерство освіти і науки України

РЕФЕРАТ

з дисципліни «Історія англійської мови»

на тему:

«Історичні передумови Староанглійської мови»

Київ - 2014

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SECTION 1. Pre-Germanic Britain

1.1 The Celtic Period

1.2 The Roman invasion in Britain

SECTION 2. The arrival of Germanic tribes

SECTION 3. Scandinavian invasions

SECTION4. Old English(or Anglo-Saxon)

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

ATTACHMENTS

INTRODUCTION

The history and development of English, from the earliest known writings to its status today as a dominant world language, is a subject of major importance to linguists and historians, who cover the entire recorded history of the English language, outlining its development over fifteen centuries. But it`s important to mention that the history and the exact origin of English is rather disputable question as even now the historians keep on disputing about it.

The history of the English language is believed to begin with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5th c. of our era. But prior to the Germanic invasion the British Isles were inhabited by Celtic tribes and occupied by the Roman Empire, that made a certain influence on the Old English language itself. Contrary to the traditional idea that Britain originally possessed a 'Celtic' uniformity which first Roman, then Saxon and other invaders disrupted, it is also believed that in reality Britain has always been home to multiple peoples.

The aim of the paper is to observe the historical background of Old English in order to get to know what historical events leaded to the appearance of Old English and had an influence on it.

The object of research is the history of Britain and Early Old English before the appearance of Old English in 7th BC.

The paper is based on works of such prominent historians and linguists as Bede, Don Ringe, Dr Simon James, Terry Hoad and others.

SECTION 1. Pre-Germanic Britain

1.1 The Celtic Period

It was at the beginning of the Iron Age, between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, that Celts began to occupy the British Isles. They settled not only in Ireland, but throughout Great Britain. Economically and socially they were a tribal society made up of kinship groups, tribes and clans; they were engaged in agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul. These Celtic tribes were numerous (listed here by their Latin designations): Caledones, Damnonii, Novantae, Selgovae, Votadini, Carvetii, Brigantes, Parisi, Deceangli, Ordovices, Silures, Demetae, Cornovii, Corieltauvi, Dobunni, Durotriges, Dumnonii, Iceni, Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, Cantiaci, Atrebates, Belgae, and Regni.

Each of these peoples (themselves divided into many tribes) spoke its own Celtic language (Indo-European family). Intercomprehension must have been relatively straightforward from one person to the next, but more difficult the further one tribe lived from the other. For example, Caledonians, who lived in the north, probably had trouble understanding southern Celts [5].

There was no such thing as `English' during this period. The inhabitants of Britain - the Britons - did not speak English, but various Celtic languages. Modern Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic are Celtic languages and `survivors' of the original languages in Britain. In Northern France, a Celtic language that continues to be spoken is Breton.

The Celtic subgroup of the IE linguistic family is divided into three branches: Gaelic, Britonnic, and Gaulish (Gallic). Later they were absorbed by other IE languages[4].

1.2 The Roman invasion in Britain

In 55 BC, Julius Caesar landed to the south of the island of Great Britain, then still called "Britain" or Britannia (in Latin). But his two invasions (55 and 54 BC) seem to have had little effect on the history of Roman Britain, for they resulted in neither annexation nor colonial settlement. Then in 43 AD, the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain with four Roman legions (roughly 40,000 men). Occupation went no further north than Hadian's Wall (95 km long), which today separates England from Scotland; at the time, Britannia did not include Scotland (Caledonia) or Ireland (Hibernia).

The Romans believed that the Celtic "natives" were less developed and civilized than they were, and that it was their duty to make them conform to their lifestyle and cultural values. Thus they formed cities and created a vast network of roads covering the entire country, while a hierarchy of civil servants managed the country and the army ensured that order reigned.

Latin was the common language for both Romans and local inhabitants. However, Romanizing the island's inhabitants-whom the Romans called Brittones (or "Britons")-was done rather superficially, and old-time Celtic persisted, at least in the countryside. In other words, "Britons" continued to speak a variety of Celtic languages, with the exception of the local йlites, who were generally bilingual, and for whom Romanization was clearly successful.

Rural populations were not assimilated by the Roman occupants. Latin was no more than a foreign language, no doubt necessary to maintaining harmonious relations with the Romans. The Latinization of cities was more successful, but not to the extent that inhabitants had to change languages.

Then in the third century came the first Viking incursions on the island of Britannia. In the fourth century, following the great reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305), the province of Britannia was divided into Britannia Superior to the west and Britannia Inferior to the eas . Subsequent increases in Germanic attacks also contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire in Britain. Roman legions withdrew from the island permanently in 407 [5].

SECTION 2. The arrival of Germanic tribes

Beginning in 450, the Angles, a Germanic people from what is today Schleswig-Holstein (south of Denmark), settled on the southern coasts of Britannia and drove back the Celts to Cornwall and Wales. Once settled in England, the Germanic tribes borrowed a number of terms from the Celtic vocabulary. The legend of King Arthur has preserved the memory of the fierce resistance of "Britons" (synonym for "English").

Although all of these Germanic invaders-Angles, Saxons, Friesians, Jutes (from Jutland in Denmark), even Francs-came from different places, they identified themselves either as Angles or Saxons, whence the name Anglo-Saxon. To the north was the Scotti kingdom, which gave its name to the country, Scotland.

In seventh century in England there were seven major Germanic kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex (East), Wessex (West), Sussex (South), and Kent. At this time, Germanic tribes still spoke their original languages (Old Norse, Frankisch, Friesian, Saxon, Anglian, etc.), all of them stemming from common or Proto-Germanic. Thus, although English did not yet exist, the peoples who had settled there would become the ancestors of a language whose evolution was just beginning.

The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England. According to Bede the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories. The first wave of invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme south-east: Kent and the Isle of Wight. The second wave of immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons, who had been expanding westwards across Frisia to the Rhine and to what is known as Normandy. The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and the most powerful of them was Wessex. Last came the Angles from the lower valley of the Elbe and southern Denmark. They made their landing on the east coast and moved up the rivers to the central part of the island. Angles founded large kingdoms which had absorbed their weaker neighbors: East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria. The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives so far as language was concerned. After the settlement West Germanic tongues came to be spoken all over Britain with the exception of a few distant regions where Celts were in the majority: Scotland, Wales and Cornwall [1; 2-11].

Table 1. The waves of Germanic invasion

The languages spoken by the inhabitants of Germania were a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which linguists believe developed from a single language spoken some five thousand years ago in an area that has never been identified-perhaps, some say, the Caucasus. From this ancient language come most of the language groups of present-day Europe and some important languages of South Asia: the Celtic languages (such as Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic), the Italic languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian, descended from dialects of Latin), the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages (such as Russian and Polish), the Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian), the Indo-Iranian languages (such as Persian and Hindi), and individual languages that do not belong to these groups: Albanian, Greek, and Armenian.

The Germanic branch of the Indo-European family is usually divided into three groups:

North Germanic, that is, the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese;

East Germanic, that is, Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a fragmentary biblical translation from the fourth century;

West Germanic, which includes High German, English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian.

Within the West Germanic group, the High German dialects (which include Modern German) form a subgroup distinct from English and the other languages, which together are called “Low German” because they were originally spoken in the low country near the North Sea.

Surely the language spoken by the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain was precisely the same as that spoken by the people they left behind on the continent. But between the time of the migration and the appearance of the earliest written records in the first years of the eighth century, the language of the Anglo-Saxons came to differ from that of the people they had left behind[2;5-15].

SECTION 3. Scandinavian invasions

The Scandinavian attacks on Britain took place between 787 and 850. These people were commonly known as the Vikings and they were Germanic inhabitants in presently Denmark, Norway and Sweden. What is interesting therefore is that they were originally also neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons, and therefore spoke a closely related language (Old Norse) that they would have understood a lot of. We can call Old Norse and Old English cognate or related languages.

The Struggle of the English against the Scandinavians lasted over 300 years, in the course of which period more than half of England was occupied by the invaders and reconquered again. The Scandinavians subdued Northumbria and East Anglia, ravaged the eastern part of Mercia, and advanced on Wessex. The ultimate effect of the Scandinavian invasions on the English language became manifest at a later date, in the 12th and 13thc., when the Scandinavian element was incorporated in the central English dialects.

The Scandinavians raided towns and monasteries; they captured towns and cities and then proceeded to settle in these places. The army of Alfred the Great resisted them for seven years before taking refuge in the marshes of Somerset. However, fresh troops enabled him to attack the Scandinavians, under Guthrum, and defeat them convincingly. Alfred and Guthrum signed the Treaty of Wedmore in 878, and the Scandinavians (`Danes') agreed to settle on the east of the line, running roughly from Chester to London. This region would be subject to Danish law, and is therefore known as the Danelaw. The Danes also agreed to become Christians and Guthrumwas baptised. This began the process of the fusion of these two peoples, coming to a head in the next period of history.

This, however, was not the end of the battles. There were more Scandinavian attacks later on, and in the new millennium, England was ruled by Canute (or Cnut), the Danish king.

After taking over the land, the Scandinavians often lived peaceably with the English, and there were many intermarriages. They adopted English customs, and the English accepted them. More important for our purposes, however, is the language contact situation resulting in the English language accepting Old Norse (ON) words and forms. 

Many suggest that the contact between OE and ON might have led to the loss of many inflexions. Because the inflexions were different in OE and ON, they were often unhelpful in conversation between OE and ON speakers. They suggest that speakers might have deliberately not used the inflexions to facilitate communication. In situations of intermarriage, the children might grow up learning this `simplified' version of English[5].

SECTION4. The beginning of Old English

old english history

The Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) period extended from about 700 to the 11th century. Other Germanic nations joined the Anglo-Saxons already settled in Britain, such as the Jutes of Jutland (Denmark) and a number of Friesians. The Jutes took over the southern part of the island as well as the Isle of Wight off the south shore, while the Angles settled in the north of England and the Saxons in the southwest after confining the Celts to the west (Wales and Cornwall).

War led the numerous Germanic kingdoms to merge, obliterating the traces of Roman organization and changing Britannia to the land of the Angles and Saxons. Following the Christianization of the Welsh and Irish in the fifth century and Scots in the sixth, the Saxon kingdoms were evangelized under Pope Gregory the Great (590-604).

While the ancient Celtic nations were being driven back in the west of Britain , the Vikings returned in the eighth ninth 9th centuries to vanquish all the Saxon kingdoms except Wessex. As they spoke Old Norse, the Vikings brought with them new northern words.Thus England remained dominated by Wessex. In time, the Danes settled in the east of England and formed a kingdom called Danelaw.

In the ninth century, thanks in part to the influence of Alfred the Great (Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex from 871 to 878), the western Saxon kings became the first sovereigns of all England and West Saxon,the dominant language of prose literature. Meanwhile, the Catholic church had continued to christianize the region and had brought back Latin. The resulting English was then further mixed with Latin, Saxon, and Old Norse words. Named after these German and Danish warriors, the Germanic language Anglo-Saxon represents the first period of English, or Old English. The Anglo-Saxon language of these peoples remained, however, fragmented into dialects.

All in all gradually the Germanic conquerors and the surviving Celts blended into a single people. The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives as far as language was concerned; the linguistic conquest was complete[3].

Linguistically, the Germanic kingdoms gave birth to the three major dialectical groups found in Old English:

West Saxon (Wessex), as well as East Saxon and South Saxon

Kentish (Kent)

Anglian, including Mercian and Northumbrian

The region occupied by the Anglians was called Anglia and the language Englisc (whence English). The Jutes arrived from Denmark and settled mainly in Kent, while the Saxons remained in the region that still bears their name (Sussex: Southern Saxons; Wessex: Western Saxons; Essex: Eastern Saxons). Meanwhile, the Angles took over the area from the shores of the Thames to the Scottish Lowlands. This geographic dispersion explains in part the diversity of Old English dialects: West Saxon, South Saxon, East Saxon, Kentish, Mercian, and Northumbrian, the last two making up Anglian. The alphabet then in use is called the Runic Alphabet.

The Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary appears rather limited today, with approximately 24,000 lexical units to at least 500,000 in contemporary English, if not more than one million. Old English was influenced by Old Norse, Celtic, Latin, and certain Scandinavian languages.

Old Norse

Much of the vocabulary of Old English and Old Norse was identical. Today's English has roughly one million words that can be traced to ancient Scandinavian origins through Old Norse: bag, birth, bread, cake, to die, egg, happy, husband, law, to lift, root, same, to seem, sky, etc.

Celtic Languages

Borrowings from certain Celtic root words gave rise to some doublets in standard English: whole/hale, no/nay, shirt/skirt, screak/screech, edge/egg. Old English also borrowed some proper nouns from Celtic languages (Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Glasgow, Avon, etc.) as well as many common nouns, such as bannock, cart, down, and mattock. Most modern English words with Celtic origins-from Welsh, Scots Gaelic, or Irish-are fairly recent loan words.

Latin

One of the ways the influence of Latin can be seen is that many Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from Anglo-Saxon but using Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service. Words with Latin origins were numerous -there were roughly 150 of them . This Latinization of English enriched the language with many words and gave a " Mediterranean flavour" to the " Nordic language," or a "Latin flavour" to the " Germanic language."

Scandinavian Languages

There were also about forty words of Scandinavian origin introduced by the Vikings during their many invasions of Britain: are, take, cut, both, ill, ugly, etc. Of course the writing underwent numerous changes, but one can still recognize certain words: deor (deer), scort (short), disc (dish), mфna (moon), sunne (sun).

Though the most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. In the early 11 th century, Old English was a language that, despite its Celtic and Greco-Latin influences, remained firmly Germanic. Linguistic transformations of the next period, however, would produce an Anglo-Saxon unrecognizable in relation to the preceding one[4,50-59].

CONCLUSION

Considering the information in the paper we can safely draw the conclusion that Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years - from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that happened in England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages, Latin, Old Norse and Scandinavian languages.

The migration of the Germanic tribes to the British Isles and the resulting separation from the Germanic tribes on the mainland was a decisive event in their linguistic history. Being cut off from related OG tongues the closely related group of West Germanic dialects developed into a separate Germanic language, English. That is why, the Germanic settlement of Britain can be regarded as the beginning of the independent history of the English language.

REFERENCES

Albert Baugh &Thomas Cable “A history of the English Language”.

Don Ringe, “From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic”, Oxford University Press.

Richard Hogg and David Denison, “ A history of the English language” Cambridge University Press.

Саурбаев К.Г.,Кулагина А.А. “Сrosscultural Aspects of The English Language History (Historical, social and cultural backgrounds of the English language history)”:

http://www.slmc.uottawa.ca/

ATTACHMENTS

Pre-English Days (AD 1-450)

Anglo-Saxon invasions and consolidation in Britain

Scandinavian invasions

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