The aim of the study of the subject ‘‘The History of the English Language’’.

The aims set before a student of the history of the English language are as follows:

1. to speak of the characteristics of the language at the earlier stages of its development;

2. to trace the language from the Old English period up to modern times;

3. to explain the principal features in the development of modern language historically.

To achieve those aims a student will have to know the theoretical basis of the subject and to work with the text to apply the theoretical knowledge to the practical analysis of English texts at different periods of the language development.

The main purpose of studying the history of the English language is to account for the present-day stage of the language to enable a student of English to read books and speak the

language with understanding and due knowledge of the intricate and complicates "mechanism" they use.

2. Inner and outer history of the language ‘‘The History of the English Language’’.

The outer history of the language is the events in the life of the people speaking this language, affecting the language. The inner history of the language is the description of the changes in the language itself, its grammar, phonetics, vocabulary or spelling. The English language belongs to the Germanic subdivision of the Indo-European family of languages. The East Germanic group of dialects — Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian; North Germanic group of dialects — Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Icelandic; and the West Germanic group of dialects — the dialects of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others, originally spoken in western Europe.

The principal East Germanic language is Gothic. At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from the Vistula to the shores of the Black Sea. The Goths played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy and Spain. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century.

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark.

Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse.

The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish, and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic.

West Germanic is the group to which English belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and Low German. This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of the Germanic area, but did not take place in the lowlands to the north.

High German comprises a number of dialects and is divided into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100—1500), and Modern High German (since1500). High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther's translation of the Bible into it (1522—1532), and since the

sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.

3. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages. Phonetics The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by a sizable population in Western Europe, North America and Australasia. The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German. The oldest Germanic languages all share a number of features, assumed to be inherited from Proto-Germanic. Phonologically, this includes the important sound changes known as Grimm's Lawand Verner's Law, which introduced a large number of fricatives; late Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had only one, /s/.

The main vowel developments are the merging (in most circumstances) of long and short /a/ and /o/, producing short /a/ and long /ō/. This likewise affected the diphthongs, with PIE /ai/ and /oi/ merging into /ai/ and PIE /au/ and /ou/ merging into /au/. PIE /ei/ developed into long /ī/. PIE long /ē/ developed into a vowel denoted as /ē₁/ (often assumed to be phonetically [ǣ]), while a new, fairly uncommon long vowel /ē₂/ developed in varied and not completely understood circumstances. Proto-Germanic had no front rounded vowels, although all Germanic languages except forGothic subsequently developed them through the process of i-umlaut.

Proto-Germanic developed a strong stress accent on the first syllable of the root (although remnants of the original free PIE accent are visible due to Verner's Law, which was sensitive to this accent). This caused a steady erosion of vowels in unstressed syllables. In Proto-Germanic this had progressed only to the point that absolutely final short vowels (other than /i/ and /u/) were lost and absolutely final long vowels were shortened, but all of the early literary languages show a more advanced state of vowel loss.

4. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages. Grammar. Alphabet.

Grammar:

Proto-Germanic had six cases, three genders, three numbers, three moods (indicative, subjunctive , imperative), and two voices (active and passive). This is quite similar to the state of Latin, Greek. It is often asserted that the Germanic languages have a highly reduced system of inflections as compared with Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. As an example, there are less than 500 years between the Gothic Gospels of 360 AD and the Old High Germanic Tatian of 830 AD, yet Old High German, despite being the most archaic of the West Germanic languages, is missing a large number of archaic features present in Gothic, including dual and passive markings on verbs, reduplication in Class VII strong verb past tenses, the vocative case, and second-position (Wackernagel's Law) clitics. Many more archaic features may have been lost between the Proto-Germanic of 200 BC or so and the attested Gothic language. Furthermore, Proto-Romance andMiddle Indic of the fourth century AD—contemporaneous with Gothic—were significantly simpler than Latin and Sanskrit, respectively, and overall probably no more archaic than Gothic.

Alphabet:

· The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic alphabet, not to be found in languages of other groups. The word rune originally meant ’secret’, ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. The runes were used as letters, each symbol to indicate separate sound. This alphabet is called futhark after the first six letters. Runic letters are angular; straight lines are preferred, curved lines avoided; this is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of Greek or Latin, other have not been traced to any known alphabet, and the order of the runes in the alphabet is certainly original. The number of runes in different OG languages varied. As compared to continental, the number of runes in England was larger: new runes were added as new sounds appeared in English (from 28 to 33 runes in Britain against 16 or 24 on the continent).

5.Old English. Outer history. Principal written records.

Outer history

The history of the English language begins in the fifth century AD when the ruthless and barbaric Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, who up to that time had lived in western Europe between the Elbe and the Rhine, started their invasion of the British Isles.

The Celtic tribes, whose languages, the same as Germanic, also belonged to the Indo-European family, were at one time among its most numerous representatives. At the beginning of our era the Celts could be found on the territories of the present-day Spain, Great Britain, western Germany and northern Italy. Before that they had been known to reach even Greece and Asia Minor. The Romans invaded Britannia as it was then called in 55— 54 when the troops of Julius Caesar and others conquered the isles. No centralised government was formed, instead there existed petty principalities under the control of local landlords. In 407 AD, with the departure of the last Roman emissary Constantine hostilities among the native tribes in England began anew. To normalise the situation the local chieftains appealed to influential Germanic tribes who lived on the continent inviting them to come to their assistance, and in 449 the Germanic troops Jed by Hengest and Horsa landed in Britain.

The principal written records that came to us through the centuries date from as far back as the 8th century. They were written with the help of the so-called "Runic Alphabet". This was an alphabet of some 26 letters, the shape of which is quite peculiar. We have already said that it is assumed the Runic alphabet was composed by Germanic scribes in the II—III centuries AD and their angular shape is due to the material those inscriptions were made on — wood, stone, bone — and the technique of "writing" — the letters were not written but carved on those hard materials. Among the first Old English runic inscriptions we generally mention two: the inscription on the so called "Franks' casket" — a small box made of whalebone containing a poem about it1, and the inscription on the "Ruthwell cross" — a religious poem engraved on a stone cross found in Scotland. In the 7^th century the Christian faith was introduced and with it there came many Latin-speaking monks who brought with them their own Latin alphabet.

6. Old English. Outer history. Dialectal classification.

Outer history

The history of the English language begins in the fifth century AD when the ruthless and barbaric Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, who up to that time had lived in western Europe between the Elbe and the Rhine, started their invasion of the British Isles.

The Celtic tribes, whose languages, the same as Germanic, also belonged to the Indo-European family, were at one time among its most numerous representatives. At the beginning of our era the Celts could be found on the territories of the present-day Spain, Great Britain, western Germany and northern Italy. Before that they had been known to reach even Greece and Asia Minor. The Romans invaded Britannia as it was then called in 55— 54 when the troops of Julius Caesar and others conquered the isles. No centralised government was formed, instead there existed petty principalities under the control of local landlords. In 407 AD, with the departure of the last Roman emissary Constantine hostilities among the native tribes in England began anew. To normalise the situation the local chieftains appealed to influential Germanic tribes who lived on the continent inviting them to come to their assistance, and in 449 the Germanic troops Jed by Hengest and Horsa landed in Britain.

Dialectal classification

The Old English dialects are generally named after the names of the kingdoms on the territory of which the given dialect was spoken — the Northumbrian dialect, the Mercian dialect, the Wessex dialect, etc. Though the differences between the three types were later to assume considerable importance, they were at first slight, and records of the 8^th and 9^th centuries reveal that Englisc, as it was collectively called, had by that time emerged as an independent, language. The virtually complete geographical separation of England from the Continent was a factor favouring the further development of those characteristic features that already distinguished English from its parent Germanic language.

Among the principal Old English dialects the most important for us is the Wessex dialect, as the majority of Old English written records that we have can be traced back to that dialect. But the prominence of the Wessex dialect is also based on other extralinguistic criteria. As is known, efforts to unite England failed for a very long period of time, because as soon as one kingdom became great it was in the interests of the rest to pull it down.

7. Old English. Inner history. Phonetics. Spelling. Grammar. Vocabulary.

Phonetics

The phonetics of the Old English period was characterised by a system of dynamic stress. The fixed stress fell on the first root syllable: agane (gone); Ʒeseon (see); Ʒaderian (gather).

The vowels had the following characteristic features:

a) The quantity and the quality of the vowel depended upon its position in the word. Under stress any vowel could be found, but in unstressed position there were no diphthongs or long monophthongs, but only short vowels [a], [ej, [i], [o], [u].

b) The length of the stressed vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) was phonemic, which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel: metan (to mete, to measure) — metan (to meet) pin (pin) — pin (pain)

Spelling

The Old English spelling was mainly phonetic, i.e. each letter as a rule denoted one sound in every environment. Note should be taken that the letters f, s, Þ, ð could denote voiced consonants in intervocal positions or voiceless otherwise. The letter Ʒ could denote three different sounds:

[j] — before or after front vowels [ae], [e], [i] : Ʒiefan (give), Ʒēar (year), dᵆ y (day)

[Ɣ] — after back vowels [a], [o], [u] and consonants [1] and [r]: daƷas (days), folƷian (follow)

[g] — before consonants and before back vowels [a], [o], [u]: Ʒōd (good), Ʒlēo (glee)

Grammar

Old English was a synthetic language (the lexical and grammatical notions of the word were contained in one unit). It was highly inflected, with many various affixes. The principal grammatical means were suffixation, vowel interchange and supplition.

Suffixation: Ic cēpe (I keep) — pu cēpst (you keep) — he cēpð (he keeps)

Vowel interchange: wrītan (to write) — Ic wrāt (I wrote)

Supplition: Ʒān (to go) — eōde (went).

Vocabulary

Borrowings were mainly from Latin: a) The forefathers of English, when on the Continent, had contacts with the Roman empire and borrowed words connected mainly with trade: cīese (cheese), wīn (wine), ᵆppel (apple). b) They borrowed Latin words from the Romanized Celts: strᵆt (street), weall (wall), myln (mill). c) Some borrowings were due to the introduction of Christianity: biscop (bishop), deofol (devil), munic (monk).

New words appeared as a result of two processes: a) word derivation: fisc+ere = fiscere (fish —fisher) wulle+en = wyllen (wool — woolen) b) word composition: sunne + dᵆƷ = Sunnan dᵆƷ (sun + day = Sunday)

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 2863