A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Chapter 1: Continuity and change
By origin, English is a Germanic language, like German or Dutch or the Scandinavian languages such as Danish or Swedish. Its most common words as well as its fundamental grammatical structure are similar to those of the other Germanic languages. But English has undergone a number of more radical changes than the other Germanic languages, for instance German, which mak 656d36g es it strikingly different from them.
The historical development of English reflects the internal history (sounds, inflections, etc) as well as the external history, i.e. the political, social and intellectual forces that have determined the course of the development at different periods. The history of the English language is to a large extent the history of the foreign influences which have affected it. Nevertheless, in spite of the extensive foreign influences, English has always remained a Germanic language.
As A.Baugh and Th. Cable point out in their book, the History of the English Language is a cultural subject and “the soundest basis for an understanding of present day English is a knowledge of the path it has followed in becoming what it is.” (1978: 1)
It is important to study the history of the English language because the future specialists of English should know something about the structure and evolution of the English language, about the wealth of its vocabulary together with the sources from which the vocabulary has been enriched and is being enriched.
It is also important to know something about the great social, political and cultural factors which have influenced the English language: the English language of today reflects in its entire development the social, political and cultural history of the English people.
More precisely, it is necessary to study the history of the English language in order to understand certain phonetic, grammatical and lexical phenomena of the contemporary language:
- It is only by studying the history of the English language that we can understand the relation between pronunciation and spelling in contemporary English. It thus becomes clear to us why certain letters have no corresponding sounds in words like knee, gnat, night, sign, doubt, debt etc., or why certain letters are pronounced in different ways, e.g. the letter a, or the digraph ea in words like hear, dead, great, bear, hard, heart. Or, further, why one and the same sound can be represented by different letters, e.g. the sound [ʌ] can be represented by the letter u in words like run, sun, or by the letter o in words like come, son. Certain sounds can have an even more diverse representation, e.g. the sound [∫] can be represented by at least eight spellings: ship, sure, tissue, moustache, ocean, conscience, motion, fuchsia.
- There are grammatical phenomena which become clear only when they are examined from the point of view of their origin. For instance, irregular plurals like men, feet, geese, mice, or nouns like deer, sheep which have the same form in the plural as in the singular; or modal verbs like must, can, may which take no –s in the 3rd person singular Present Tense Indicative.
- In the field of vocabulary, we are struck by the similarity between a large number of English and German words. (house – Haus, winter – Winter, good – gut, bring – bringen, have – haben, etc), on the one hand, and between some English and French words (cousin – cousin, table – table, village – village, beauty – beauté, change – changer, etc), on the other hand. The coexistence of Germanic and Romance elements within one and the same language is explained by studying the history of the English language.
- The history of the English language is also of great help to us when studying the history of England. Thus, for instance, it is extremely interesting to study such important historical events as the introduction of Christianity, the Norman Conquest, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the British Empire, etc., in close connection with the enrichment of the English vocabulary. Thus, the Christianizing of Britain in 597 brought England into close contact with Latin civilization and made significant additions to the English vocabulary.
The Scandinavian invasions resulted in a considerable mixture of the two peoples and their language.
The Norman Conquest made English for two centuries the language mainly of the lower classes while the nobles and those associated with them used French on almost all occasions. And when English once again regained supremacy as the language of all elements of the population, it was an English language greatly changed in both form and vocabulary from that it had been in 1066.
In a similar way, the Hundred Years’ War, the Renaissance, the development of England as a maritime power, the expansion of the British Empire, the growth of commerce and industry, of science and literature, have each, in its way, contributed to make the English language what it is today.
In short, the English language reflects in its entire development, the political, social, cultural history of the English people.
- Moreover, a study
of the evolution of English will enable us to grasp the full beauty and
significance of the important literary works of different periods, e.g. G.
Chaucer in Middle English, W. Shakespeare in Early Modern English, etc. As C.
L. Wrenn puts it, “the aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare and Milton is
immensely quickened by an understanding of their language; the exact shades of
meaning of their words and phrases become clear only through the consciousness
of the semantic changes in the language”. (cited from
|
