HISTORICAL CONDITIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Early history of the British Isles

Archeological research has uncovered many layers of prehistoric population on the territory of the British Isles. According to historians, the first people to have inhabited the British Isles were Iberians, the inhabitants of the peninsula in southwestern Europe, occupied by modern Spain and Portugal. It was the Greeks who called them so, probably after the Ebro (Iberus), the peninsula's second longest river (after the Tagus).

But the earliest people whose linguistic affiliation has been established were the Celts (Note 11). They came to Britain in three waves and immediately preceded the Teutons. Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kins, kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practiced a primitive agriculture and traded with Celtic Gaul (modern France).

Normally, modern Celtic languages are divided into 2 groups, Gallo-Breton and the Gaelic. The former include Gallic, which was spoken in Gaul, and British represented by Welsh (Cymry) spoken in Wales, then Cornish in Cornwall (extinct since 18^th c.), and Breton in Brittany. The latter comprise Irish, Highland Scots (Erse), and Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man by a few hundred people.

In the 1^st century B.C Gaul was occupied by the Romans who had known about insular Celts from Pytheas’s records (see Lecture 2). Having occupied the country, Caesar made two raids on Britain, in 55 and 54 B.C. Although he failed to subjugate the Celts, Roman economic penetration to Britain grew. But it wasn’t until A.D. 43 that the country’s conquest and Romanisation started. The Roman occupation lasted nearly 400 years and came to an end in the early 5^th century A.D. when the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain due to internal and external causes. After the departure of the Romans, Britain remained unprotected from numerous enemies surrounding it such as the Picts and Scots from Scotland and Ireland and Germanic tribes from the mainland which made piratical raids on the British shores. Besides, the Britons fought among themselves which also weakened the country. So it is quite natural that they were unable to offer resistance to the enemies that attacked them in the middle of the 5^th c. A.D.

According to Venerable Bede (673-735), an ancient monastic scholar and historian who wrote the first history of Britain (Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king as assistants and allies in a local war. The newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts, and other Germanic people followed. They came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories.

According to Bede, the ‘newcomers were of three strongest races of Germany, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes (and also Frisians). It is uncertain whether they belonged to different tribes or perhaps constituted two mixed waves of invaders differing mainly in the place and time of arrival. They were called Angles and Saxons by the Romans and by the Celts but preferred to call themselves Angelcyn (English people) and applied this name to the conquered territories: Angelcynnes land (land of the English), hence England.

The conquerors settled in Britain in the following way: the Jutes or Frisians settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons occupied territories south of the Thames and some stretches north of it, and depending on location were called South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons (late also Mid Saxons). The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and most powerful of which was Wessex, the kingdom of West Saxons. The last people to settle in Britain were the Angles which occupied most of the territory north of the Thames up to the Firth of Forth, namely the districts between the Wash and the Humber, and to the North of Humber. They founded large kingdoms which absorbed their weaker neighbours: East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria

Since the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain the ties of their language with the continent were broken, and its further development went its own ways. It is at this time, the 5^th century that the history of the English language begins. The Anglos-Saxons occupied the territory of modern England and part of Scotland while Wales, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Cornwall remained Celtic.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1127