|
 |
 |
|
|
 |
Student Publications
Author: Sami Makki
Title: History of English Language
Area:
Country :
Profile:
Program:
Available for Download:
Yes
Sharing knowledge is a vital component in
the growth and advancement of our society
in a sustainable and responsible way. Through
Open Access, AIU and other leading institutions
through out the world are tearing down the
barriers to access and use research literature.
Our
organization is interested in the dissemination
of advances in scientific research fundamental
to the proper operation of a modern society,
in terms of community awareness, empowerment,
health and wellness, sustainable development,
economic advancement, and optimal functioning
of health, education and other vital services.
AIU’s mission
and vision is consistent with
the vision expressed in the Budapest Open
Access Initiative and Berlin Declaration
on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences
and Humanities. Do you have something you
would like to share, or just a question
or comment? We would be happy to hear from
you, please use the Request Info link below.
For more information on the AIU's Open Access
Initiative, click
here.
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Introduction:
English is a Germanic Language of
the Indo-European Family. It is the
second most
spoken language in the world.
It is estimated that there are 300
million native speakers and 300
million who use English
as a second language and a further
100 million use it as a foreign
language. It is the
language of science, aviation,
computing, diplomacy, and tourism.
It is listed as the
official or co-official language of
over 45 countries and is spoken
extensively in other
countries where it has no official
status. This compares to 27 for
French, 20 for Spanish
and 17 for Arabic. This domination
is unique in history. Speakers of
languages like
French, Spanish and Arabic may
disagree, but English is on its way
to becoming the
world's unofficial international
language. Mandarin (Chinese) is
spoken by more people,
but English is now the most
widespread of the world's languages.
Half of all business deals are
conducted in English. Two thirds of
all scientific papers are
written in English. Over 70% of all
post / mail is written and addressed
in English. Most
international tourism, aviation and
diplomacy is conducted in English.
The history of the language can be
traced back to the arrival of three
Germanic tribes to
the British Isles during the 5th
Century AD. Angles, Saxons and Jutes
crossed the North
Sea from what is the present day
Denmark and northern Germany. The
inhabitants of
Britain previously spoke a Celtic
language. This was quickly
displaced. Most of the
Celtic speakers were pushed into
Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. One
group migrated to
the Brittany Coast of France where
their descendants still speak the
Celtic Language of
Breton today. The Angles were named
from Engle, their land of origin.
Their language
was called Englisc from which the
word, English derives.
An Anglo-Saxon inscription dated
between 450 and 480AD is the oldest
sample
of the English language.
During the next few centuries four
dialects of English developed:
Northumbrian in Northumbria, north
of the Humber
Mercian in the Kingdom of Mercia
West Saxon in the Kingdom of Wessex
Kentish in Kent
3
During the 7th and 8th
Centuries,
Northumbria's
culture
and language dominated
Britain. The Viking
invasions of the 9th
Century brought this
domination to an end
(along
with
the
destruction of Mercia).
Only Wessex remained
as
an
independent
kingdom. By the 10th
Century, the West Saxon dialect
became the official language of
Britain. Written Old
English is mainly known from this
period. It was written in an
alphabet called
Runic,
derived from the Scandinavian
languages. The
Latin Alphabet was brought over
from
Ireland by Christian missionaries.
This has remained the writing system
of English.
At this time, the vocabulary of Old
English consisted of an Anglo Saxon
base with
borrowed words from the Scandinavian
languages (Danish and Norse) and
Latin. Latin
gave English words like street,
kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese, wine,
angel, bishop, martyr,
candle. The Vikings added many Norse
words: sky, egg, cake, skin, leg,
window (wind
eye), husband, fellow, skill, anger,
flat, odd, ugly, get, give, take,
raise, call, die, they,
their, them. Celtic words also
survived mainly in place and river
names (Devon, Dover,
Kent, Trent, Severn, Avon, Thames).
Many pairs of English and Norse
words coexisted giving us two words
with the same or
slightly differing meanings.
Indo-European and Germanic
Influences
4
English is a member of the
Indo-European family of languages.
This broad family
includes most of the European
languages spoken today. The
Indo-European family
includes several major branches:
Latin and the modern Romance
languages;
The Germanic languages;
The Indo-Iranian languages,
including Hindi and Sanskrit;
The Slavic languages;
The Baltic languages of Latvian and
Lithuanian (but not Estonian);
The Celtic languages; and
Greek.
The influence of the original
Indo-European language, designated
proto-Indo-European,
can be seen today, even though no
written record of it exists. The
word for father, for
example, is vater in German, pater
in Latin, and pitr in Sanskrit.
These words are all
cognates, similar words in different
languages that share the same root.
Of these branches of the
Indo-European family, two are, for
our purposes of studying the
development of English, of paramount
importance, the Germanic and the
Romance
(called that because the Romance
languages derive from Latin, the
language of ancient
Rome, not because of any
bodice-ripping literary genre).
English is in the Germanic
group of languages. This group began
as a common language in the Elbe
river region
about 3,000 years ago. Around the
second century BC, this Common
Germanic language
split into three distinct
sub-groups:
East Germanic was spoken by peoples
who migrated back to southeastern
Europe. No
East Germanic language is spoken
today, and the only written East
Germanic language
that survives is Gothic.
North Germanic evolved into the
modern Scandinavian languages of
Swedish, Danish,
Norwegian, and Icelandic (but not
Finnish, which is related to
Estonian and is not an
Indo-European language).
West Germanic is the ancestor of
modern German, Dutch, Flemish,
Frisian, and English.
Old English (500-1100 AD)
5
West Germanic invaders from Jutland
and southern Denmark: the Angles
(whose name is
the source of the words England and
English), Saxons, and Jutes, began
populating the
British Isles in the fifth and sixth
centuries AD. They spoke a mutually
intelligible
language, similar to modern
Frisian--the language of
northeastern region of the
Netherlands--that is called Old
English. Four major dialects of Old
English emerged,
Northumbrian in the north of
England, Mercian in the Midlands,
West Saxon in the south
and west, and Kentish in the
Southeast.
These invaders pushed the original,
Celtic-speaking inhabitants out of
what is now
England into Scotland, Wales,
Cornwall, and Ireland, leaving
behind a few Celtic words.
These Celtic languages survive today
in Gaelic languages of Scotland and
Ireland and in
Welsh. Cornish, unfortunately, is
now a dead language. (The last
native Cornish speaker,
Dolly Pentreath, died in 1777 in the
town of Mousehole, Cornwall.) Also
influencing
English at this time were the
Vikings. Norse invasions, beginning
around 850, brought
many North Germanic words into the
language, particularly in the north
of England.
Some examples are dream, which had
meant 'joy' until the Vikings
imparted its current
meaning on it from the Scandinavian
cognate draumr, and skirt, which
continues to live
alongside its native English cognate
shirt.
The majority of words in modern
English come from foreign, not Old
English roots. In
fact, only about one sixth of the
known Old English words have
descendants surviving
today. But this is deceptive; Old
English is much more important than
these statistics
would indicate. About half of the
most commonly used words in modern
English have
Old English roots. Words like be,
water, and strong, for example,
derive from Old
English roots.
Old English, whose best known
surviving example is the poem
Beowulf, lasted until
about 1100. This last date is rather
arbitrary, but most scholars choose
it because it is
shortly after the most important
event in the development of the
English language, the
Norman Conquest.
The Norman Conquest and Middle
English (1100-1500)
William the Conqueror, the Duke of
Normandy, invaded and conquered
England and the
Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. (The Bayeux
Tapestry, details of which form the
navigation
6
buttons on this site, is perhaps the
most famous graphical depiction of
the Norman
Conquest.) The new overlords spoke a
dialect of Old French known as
Anglo-Norman.
The Normans were also of Germanic
stock ("Norman" comes from
"Norseman") and
Anglo-Norman was a French dialect
that had considerable Germanic
influences in
addition to the basic Latin roots.
Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin
had been only a minor influence on
the English
language, mainly through vestiges of
the Roman occupation and from the
conversion of
Britain to Christianity in the
seventh century (ecclesiastical
terms such as priest, vicar,
and mass came into the language this
way), but now there was a wholesale
infusion of
Romance (Anglo-Norman) words.
The influence of the Normans can be
illustrated by looking at two words,
beef and cow.
Beef, commonly eaten by the
aristocracy, derives from the
Anglo-Norman, while the
Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended
the cattle, retained the Germanic
cow. Many legal
terms, such as indict, jury, and
verdict have Anglo-Norman roots
because the Normans
ran the courts. This split, where
words commonly used by the
aristocracy have Romantic
roots and words frequently used by
the Anglo-Saxon commoners have
Germanic roots,
can be seen in many instances.
Sometimes French words replaced Old
English words; crime replaced firen
and uncle
replaced eam. Other times, French
and Old English components combined
to form a new
word, as the French gentle and the
Germanic man formed gentleman. Other
times, two
different words with roughly the
same meaning survive into modern
English. Thus we
have the Germanic doom and the
French judgment, or wish and desire.
It is useful to compare various
versions of a familiar text to see
the differences between
Old, Middle, and Modern English.
Take for instance this Old English
(c.1000) sample:
F�der ure �u�e eart on heofonum
si �in nama gehalgod tobecume �in
rice gewur�e �in willa on eor�an swa
swa on
heofonum
urne ged�ghwamlican hlaf syle us
to d�g
and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa
we forgyfa� urum gyltendum
and ne gel�d �u us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele so�lice.
Rendered in Middle English (Wyclif,
1384), the same text is recognizable
to the modern
eye:
7
Oure fadir �at art in heuenes
halwid be �i name;
�i reume or kyngdom come to be.
Be �i wille don in her�e as it is
dounin heuene.
yeue to us today oure eche dayes
bred.
And foryeue to us oure dettis �at
is oure synnys as we foryeuen to
oure dettouris �at is to
men �at han synned in us.
And lede us not into temptacion
but delyuere us from euyl.
Finally, in Early Modern English
(King James Version, 1611) the same
text is completely
intelligible:
Our father which art in heauen,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be
done in earth as it is in heauen.
Giue us this day our daily bread.
And forgiue us our debts as we
forgiue our debters.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliuer us from euill. Amen.
In 1204 AD, King John lost the
province of Normandy to the King of
France. This began
a process where the Norman nobles of
England became increasingly
estranged from their
French cousins. England became the
chief concern of the nobility,
rather than their
estates in France, and consequently
the nobility adopted a modified
English as their
native tongue. About 150 years
later, the Black Death (1349-50)
killed about one third of
the English population. The laboring
and merchant classes grew in
economic and social
importance, and along with them
English increased in importance
compared to Anglo-
Norman.
This mixture of the two languages
came to be known as Middle English.
The most
famous example of Middle English is
Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales. Unlike Old English, Middle
English can be read, albeit
with difficulty, by modern
English-speaking people.
By 1362, the linguistic division
between the nobility and the
commoners was largely over. In that
year, the Statute of
Pleading was adopted, which made
English the language of the
courts and it began to be used in
Parliament.
The Middle English period came to a
close around 1500 AD
with the rise of Modern English.
8
Early Modern English (1500-1800)
The next wave of innovation in
English came with the Renaissance.
The revival of
classical scholarship brought many
classical Latin and Greek
words into the Language. These
borrowings were deliberate
and many bemoaned the adoption of
these "inkhorn" terms, but
many survive to this day.
Shakespeare's character Holofernes
in Loves Labor Lost is a satire of
an overenthusiastic
schoolmaster who is too fond of
Latinisms.
Many students having difficulty
understanding Shakespeare
would be surprised to learn that he
wrote in modern English.
But, as can be seen in the earlier
example of the Lord's Prayer,
Elizabethan English has much more in
common with our language today than
it does with
the language of Chaucer. Many
familiar words and phrases were
coined or first recorded
by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and
countless catch-phrases are his.
Newcomers to
Shakespeare are often shocked at the
number of cliches contained in his
plays, until they
realize that he coined them and they
became cliches afterwards. "One fell
swoop,"
"vanish into thin air," and "flesh
and blood" are all Shakespeare's.
Words he bequeathed
to the language include "critical,"
"leapfrog," "majestic," "dwindle,"
and "pedant."
Two other major factors influenced
the language and served to separate
Middle and
Modern English. The first was the
Great Vowel Shift. This was a change
in pronunciation
that began around 1400. While modern
English speakers can read Chaucer
with some
difficulty, Chaucer's pronunciation
would have been completely
unintelligible to the
modern ear. Shakespeare, on the
other hand, would be accented, but
understandable.
Long vowel sounds began to be made
higher in the mouth and the letter
"e" at the end of
words became silent. Chaucer's Lyf
(pronounced "leef") became the
modern life. In
Middle English name was pronounced
"nam-a," five was pronounced "feef,"
and down
was pronounced "doon." In linguistic
terms, the shift was rather sudden,
the major
changes occurring within a century.
The shift is still not over,
however, vowel sounds are
still shortening although the change
has become considerably more
gradual.
9
The last major factor in the
development of Modern English was
the advent of the
printing press. William Caxton
brought the printing press to
England in 1476. Books
became cheaper and as a result,
literacy became more common.
Publishing for the masses
became a profitable enterprise, and
works in English, as opposed to
Latin, became more
common. Finally, the printing press
brought standardization to English.
The dialect of
London, where most publishing houses
were located, became the standard.
Spelling and
grammar became fixed, and the first
English dictionary was published in
1604.
Late-Modern English
(1800-Present)
The principal distinction between
early- and late-modern English is
vocabulary.
Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling
are largely the same, but
Late-Modern English has
many more words. These words are the
result of two historical factors.
The first is the
Industrial Revolution and the rise
of the technological society. This
necessitated new
words for things and ideas that had
not previously existed. The second
was the British
Empire. At its height, Britain ruled
one quarter of the earth's surface,
and English adopted
many foreign words and made them its
own.
The industrial and scientific
revolutions created a need for
neologisms to describe the
new creations and discoveries. For
this, English relied heavily on
Latin and Greek. Words
like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and
vaccine did not exist in the
classical languages, but
they were created from Latin and
Greek roots. Such neologisms were
not exclusively
created from classical roots though,
English roots were used for such
terms as
horsepower, airplane, and
typewriter.
This burst of neologisms continues
today, perhaps most visible in the
field of electronics
and computers. Byte, cyber-, bios,
hard-drive, and microchip are good
examples.
Also, the rise of the British Empire
and the growth of global trade
served not only to
introduce English to the world, but
to introduce words into English.
Hindi, and the other
languages of the Indian
subcontinent, provided many words,
such as pundit, shampoo,
pajamas, and juggernaut. Virtually
every language on Earth has
contributed to the
development of English, from Finnish
(sauna) and Japanese (tycoon) to the
vast
contributions of French and Latin.
10
The British Empire was a maritime
empire, and the influence of
nautical terms on the
English language has been great.
Words and phrases like three sheets
to the wind and
scuttlebutt have their origins
onboard ships.
Finally, the 20th century saw two
world wars, and the military
influence on the language
during the latter half of this
century has been great. Before the
Great War, military
service for English-speaking persons
was rare; both Britain and the
United States
maintained small, volunteer
militaries. Military slang existed,
but with the exception of
nautical terms, rarely influenced
standard English. During the
mid-20th century, however,
virtually all British and American
men served in the military. Military
slang entered the
language like never before.
Blockbuster, nose dive, camouflage,
radar, roadblock,
spearhead, and landing strip are all
military terms that made their way
into standard
English.
American English
Also significant beginning around
1600 AD was the English colonization
of North
America and the subsequent creation
of a distinct American dialect. Some
pronunciations
and usages "froze" when they reached
the American shore. In certain
respects, American
English is closer to the English of
Shakespeare than modern British
English is. Some
"Americanisms" that the British
decry are actually originally
British expressions that
were preserved in the colonies while
lost at home (e.g., fall as a
synonym for autumn,
trash for rubbish, frame-up which
was reintroduced to Britain through
Hollywood
gangster movies, and loan as a verb
instead of lend).
The American dialect also served as
the route of introduction for many
native American
words into the English language.
Most often, these were place names
like Mississippi,
Roanoke, and Iowa. Indian-sounding
names like Idaho were sometimes
created that had
no native-American roots. But, names
for other things besides places were
also common.
Raccoon, tomato, canoe, barbecue,
savanna, and hickory have native
American roots,
although in many cases the original
Indian words were mangled almost
beyond
recognition.
11
Spanish has also been great
influence on American English.
Armadillo, mustang, canyon,
ranch, stampede, and vigilante are
all examples of Spanish words that
made their way
into English through the settlement
of the American West.
To a lesser extent French, mainly
via Louisiana, and West African,
through the
importation of slaves, words have
influenced American English.
Armoire, bayou, and
jambalaya came into the language via
New Orleans. Goober, gumbo, and tote
are West
African borrowings first used in
America by slaves.
A Chronology of the English
Language
55 BCE
Roman invasion of Britain under
Julius Caesar
Roman invasion and occupation under
Emperor Claudius. Beginning of
43 CE
Roman rule of Britain
436
Roman withdrawal from Britain
complete
449
Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain
begins
450-480
Earliest Old English inscriptions
date from this period
St. Augustine arrives in Britain.
Beginning of Christian conversion of
the
597
Anglo-Saxons
The Venerable Bede publishes The
Ecclesiastical History of the
English
731
People in Latin
792
Viking raids and settlements begin
865
The Danes occupy Northumbria
Alfred becomes king of Wessex. He
has Latin works translated into
English
871
and begins practice of English
prose. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is
begun
Charles II of France grants Normandy
to the Viking chief Hrolf the
Ganger.
911
The beginning of Norman French
c.1000
The oldest surviving manuscript of
Beowulf dates from this period
1066
The Norman conquest
c.1150
The oldest surviving manuscripts in
Middle English date from this period
1171
Henry II conquers Ireland
12
1204
King John loses the province of
Normandy to France
English replaces Latin as the medium
of instruction in schools, other
than
1348
Oxford and Cambridge which retain
Latin
1349-50
The Black Death kills one third of
the British population
The Statute of Pleading replaces
French with English as the language
of
1362
law. Records continue to be kept in
Latin. English is used in Parliament
for
the first time
1384
Wyclif publishes his English
translation of the Bible
c.1388
Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales
c.1400
The Great Vowel Shift begins
1476
William Caxton establishes the first
English printing press
1485
Caxton publishes Malory's Le Morte
d'Arthur
1492
Columbus discovers the New World
1525
William Tyndale translates the New
Testament
1536
The first Act of Union unites
England and Wales
1549
First version of The Book of Common
Prayer
1564
Shakespeare born
Union of the English and Scottish
crowns under James the I (VI of
1603
Scotland)
1604
Robert Cawdrey publishes the first
English dictionary, Table
Alphabeticall
Jamestown, the first permanent
English settlement in the New World,
1607
established
1611
The Authorized, or King James
Version, of the Bible is published
1616
Death of Shakespeare
1623
Shakespeare's First Folio is
published
1666
The Great Fire of London. End of The
Great Plague
Publication of the first daily,
English-language newspaper, The
Daily
1702
Courant, in London
1755
Samuel Johnson publishes his
dictionary
13
1770
Cook discovers Australia
1776
Thomas Jefferson writes the
Declaration of Independence
Washington defeats Cornwallis at
Yorktown. Britain abandons the
1782
American colonies
1788
British penal colony established in
Australia
1803
Act of Union unites Britain and
Ireland
1828
Noah Webster publishes his
dictionary
1851
Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick
1922
British Broadcasting Corporation
founded
1928
The Oxford English Dictionary is
published
Summary:
It's never easy to pinpoint exactly
when a specific language began, but
in the case of
English we can at least say that
there is little sense in speaking of
the English language as
a separate entity before the
Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Little
is known of this period
with any certainty, but we do know
that Germanic invaders came and
settled in Britain
from the north-western coastline of
continental Europe in the fifth and
sixth centuries.
The invaders all spoke a language
that was Germanic (related to what
emerged as Dutch,
Frisian, German and the Scandinavian
languages, and to Gothic), but we'll
probably
never know how different their
speech was from that of their
continental neighbours.
However it is fairly certain that
many of the settlers would have
spoken in exactly the
same way as some of their north
European neighbours, and that not
all of the settlers
would have spoken in the same way.
The reason that we know so little
about the linguistic situation in
this period is because
we do not have much in the way of
written records from any of the
Germanic languages
of north-western Europe until
several centuries later. When Old
English writings begin to
appear in the seventh, eighth and
ninth centuries there is a good deal
of regional variation,
but not substantially more than that
found in later periods. This was the
language that
Alfred the Great referred to as
`English' in the ninth century.
14
The Celts were already resident in
Britain when the Anglo-Saxons
arrived, but there are
few obvious traces of their language
in English today. Some scholars have
suggested that
the Celtic tongue might have had an
underlying influence on the
grammatical
development of English, particularly
in some parts of the country, but
this is highly
speculative. The number of loanwords
known for certain to have entered
Old English
from this source is very small.
Those that survive in modern English
include brock
(badger), and coomb a type of
valley, alongside many place names.
The next invaders were the Norsemen.
From the middle of the ninth century
large
numbers of Norse invaders settled in
Britain, particularly in northern
and eastern areas,
and in the eleventh century the
whole of England had a Danish king,
Canute. The distinct
North Germanic speech of the
Norsemen had great influence on
English, most obviously
seen in the words that English has
borrowed from this source. These
include some very
basic words such as take and even
grammatical words such as they. The
common
Germanic base of the two languages
meant that there were still many
similarities between
Old English and the language of the
invaders. Some words, for example
give perhaps
show a kind of hybridization with
some spellings going back to Old
English and others
being Norse in origin. However, the
resemblances between the two
languages are so great
that in many cases it is impossible
to be sure of the exact ancestry of
a particular word or
spelling. However, much of the
influence of Norse, including the
vast majority of the
loanwords, does not appear in
written English until after the next
great historical and
cultural upheaval, the Norman
Conquest.
The centuries after the Norman
Conquest witnessed enormous changes
in the English
language. In the course of what is
called the Middle English period,
the fairly rich
inflectional system of Old English
broke down. It was replaced by what
is broadly
speaking, the same system English
has today, which unlike Old English
makes very little
use of distinctive word endings in
the grammar of the language. The
vocabulary of
English also changed enormously,
with tremendous numbers of
borrowings from French
and Latin, in addition to the
Scandinavian loanwords already
mentioned, which were
slowly starting to appear in the
written language. Old English, like
German today,
showed a tendency to find native
equivalents for foreign words and
phrases (although
both Old English and modern German
show plenty of loanwords), whereas
Middle
English acquired the habit that
modern English retains today of
readily accommodating
15
foreign words. Trilingualism in
English, French, and Latin was
common in the worlds of
business and the professions, with
words crossing over from one
language to another with
ease. One only has to flick through
the etymologies of any English
dictionary to get an
impression of the huge number of
words entering English from French
and Latin during
the later medieval period. This
trend was set to continue into the
early modern period
with the explosion of interest in
the writings of the ancient world.
The late medieval and early modern
periods saw a fairly steady process
of
standardization in English south of
the Scottish border. The written and
spoken language
of London continued to evolve and
gradually began to have a greater
influence in the
country at large. For most of the
Middle English period a dialect was
simply what was
spoken in a particular area, which
would normally be more or less
represented in writing
- although where and from whom the
writer had learnt how to write were
also important.
It was only when the broadly London
standard began to dominate,
especially through the
new technology of printing, that the
other regional varieties of the
language began to be
seen as different in kind. As the
London standard became used more
widely, especially in
more formal contexts and
particularly amongst the more
elevated members of society, the
other regional varieties came to be
stigmatized, as lacking social
prestige and indicating a
lack of education.
In the same period a series of
changes also occurred in English
pronunciation (though not
uniformly in all dialects), which go
under the collective name of the
Great Vowel Shift.
These were purely linguistic `sound
changes' which occur in every
language in every
period of history. The changes in
pronunciation weren't the result of
specific social or
historical factors, but social and
historical factors would have helped
to spread the results
of the changes. As a result the
so-called `pure' vowel sounds which
still characterise
many continental languages were lost
to English. The phonetic pairings of
most long and
short vowel sounds were also lost,
which gave rise to many of the
oddities of English
pronunciation, and which now obscure
the relationships between many
English words
and their foreign counterparts.
During the medieval and early modern
periods the influence of English
spread throughout
the British Isles, and from the
early seventeenth century onwards
its influence began to
be felt throughout the world. The
complex processes of exploration,
colonization and
overseas trade that characterized
Britain's external relations for
several centuries became
16
agents for change in the English
language. This wasn't simply through
the acquisition of
loanwords deriving from languages
from every corner of the world,
which in many cases
only entered English via the
languages of other trading and
imperial nations such as
Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands,
but through the gradual development
of new
varieties of English, each with
their own nuances of vocabulary and
grammar and their
own distinct pronunciations. More
recently still, English has become a
lingua franca, a
global language, regularly used and
understood by many nations for whom
English is not
their first language. (For further
information on this see the pages on
Global English on
this site). The eventual effects on
the English language of both of
these developments can
only be guessed at today, but there
can be little doubt that they will
be as important as
anything that has happened to
English in the past sixteen hundred
years.
References:
- A. P. R. Howatt with H. G.
Widdowson, Oxford, UK: A History of
English Language
Teaching, Second Edition , Oxford
University. Press, 2004
- Dr. Ali Alnosaily, History of
English Language II, Sana'a
University Catalogue, 2002.
- Kryss Katsiavriades, The Origin
and History of the English Language
1997, 2002.
- Prof. D. Damodar Takure, History
of English Language, Delhi, 1998.
- Prof. D. Damodar Takure, Lectures
in History of English Language,
Sana'a University
2003.
17
|
|
 |
dd |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
