Facultad de Lenguas y Educación

Usos y Funciones de la Lengua Inglesa II

Unit 1 The History of English: From Old English to Middle

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 1. Before English

Figure 1 The Indo-European family tree of languages (alongside the Uralic family) as rendered by Minna
Sundberg in her web comic Stand Still, Stay Silent.

The English language belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family,
and as many other languages, it has gone through a lot of changes that have shaped it as we
know it today. We are going to navigate the different periods in which the history of the English
language can be divided, but before that, we need to have a brief look to the historical events
that took place before its appearance.

The original inhabitants of what is nowadays known as Great Britain were the Britons, the
Celtic people who gave the land its name and whose language was the British Celtic or
Brythonic. Then, in AD 43, the Romans arrived on the island.

By the middle of the fifth century, Britain had been a province of the Roman Empire for over
400 years and was governed from Rome. The official language of the government was Latin,
which was spoken by the Roman officials, military officers and settlers. The kind of cultural
and linguistic interchange between conquerors and conquered is usually under the control of
those who have the power, so it is not surprising that Britons ended up speaking Latin too.

From this period, previous to the emergence of the English language, many Latin words related
to military and administrative semantic fields as well as some British names for places and
some others related to natural phenomena were kept when the new language brought by the
Anglo-Saxon invaders appeared.

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In AD 449, the Angles landed in Britain1. They were one of the Germanic tribes, together with
the Saxons, the Jutes and the Frisians, who conquered the island during the fifth century in what
is known as the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

By then, the Romans had long gone in order to stop the different uprisings that were taking
place along the Empire, so these Germanic invasions were relatively fast and easy. The invaders
brought with them different spoken dialects, but also a set of common cultural features and
religious beliefs which were absorbed by the vast majority of the original inhabitants. With the
Anglo-Saxon invasion, the English language was born.

Figure 2 Germanic invasion

2. Old English

Old English (450-1066) is a fusion language to which the Germanic invaders contributed,
most particularly the Angles and the Saxons. These Anglo-Saxon invaders spread around
the island and created seven different kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Essex,
Sussex, East Anglia, and Kent. Texts which have survived from different parts of the
country indicate that a different variety of English was spoken in each one of these
kingdoms. However, although there was no standardised system at the time, all scribes
eventually used the same Latin-based alphabet, so there was some underlying consistency.
In conclusion, we can say that Old English never constituted a unified language, but a
collection of different dialects with some common features.

3. Old English vocabulary.

The chief feature of the Old English lexicon is the readiness to build up words from a number
of parts, a feature that has stayed with English ever since. Frequent use is made of prefixes and
suffixes, and compound words. For example, from ciric (church) and gang (journey, go) we
had ciricgang, meaning going to the church. (Crystal, 2005, p. 22).

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https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-Anglo-Saxon-countries

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Surprisingly, there is very little Celtic influence probably due to the fact that they were
destroyed and pushed back into Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and the Scottish borders. Still, a few
of the Celtic words used at the time have survived into modern English, sometimes with a
dialectal use, such as binn (bin) or luh (lake). Some names of places such as Thames, Exe or
Wye, Dover or even London, are also of Celtic origin.

3.1 Lexical invasions in Old English2

The early years of the English language were marked by invasions as different people arrived
on the island and conquered the territory, bringing with them their culture and their language.
As a result, a fair amount of new vocabulary was incorporated to Old English.

The most important lexical invasion came from Latin. The Anglo-Saxon people had already
had a first contact with the language of the Romans when they first arrived in Britain, but it was
not until the arrival of the Christian missionaries at the end of the sixth century that a significant
number of new words were introduced.

These Latin loans entered the Old English language in two waves. The first one, before the year
1000, came mainly from spoken Latin and were related to everyday, practical matters: e.g.,
epistol ‘letter’, lilie ‘lily’. The second wave arrived after 1000 and had its origin in the classical
written sources, so the vocabulary was more technical and scholarly: e.g., cruc ‘cross’,
grammatic ‘grammar’.

In the late eighth century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the
eastern cost of Britain and brought with them the second big linguistic invasion. They came
from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest
force. Viking expansion was finally controlled by King Alfred the Great and, in 878, a treaty
between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings was signed to establish the Danelaw, an imaginary
border which divided the country, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east, and the
Anglo-Saxons the south and west.

As a result of this contact, we can find a number of settlements with Danish names, a significant
increase of personal names of Scandinavian origin – most of them ending in -son, such as
Davidson or Jackson – as well as many words which were incorporated to the language, for
example landing, fellow or take. Some other words related to the Danish culture and law did
not survive and disappear after the Norman Conquest.

Some very common words in Present-day English entered the language at the time, e.g., both,
same, get, give. The Danish settlers also changed the personal pronoun system and the verb to
be.

4. Old English letters, sounds and features of grammar

According to David Cristal (2005, p. 16), “Although there is much in common between Old
English and Modern English, it is the differences that strike us most forcibly when we first
encounter edited Anglo-Saxon Texts. The editors have done a great deal to make the texts more
accessible to present-day readers, by introducing modern conventions of word spaces,
2 Crystal, D. 2019, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

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punctuation, capitalization, and line division but there are certain features of the original
spelling which are usually retained, and it is these which make the language look alien. Learning
to interpret the distinctive symbols of Old English is therefore an essential first step” (Crystal,
2005, p. 16).

4.1 Some features of Old English grammar

Old English was characterised by being a heavily inflected language. Nouns had three genders:
masculine, feminine and neuter, and were declined in four cases that indicated the function they
had in a sentence:

• Nominative: subject and subject complements.

Adjectives were also declined and could have up to eleven forms. As for verbs, they were
divided in seven classes of “strong” verbs (irregular verbs) and three of “weak” verbs (regular
verbs), and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. There were only two
tenses, present and past, and future references were made with the use of temporal particles and
adverbs. There were no auxiliary verbs and double negative constructions were possible.
Modals were not auxiliary but full lexical verbs.

Although adjectives usually appear before the nouns, as do prepositions, articles, and other
grammatical words, word order was not as relevant in Old English as it is nowadays, it was far
more flexible and the elements in a sentence could appear in different positions without altering
the meaning. The main syntactic differences affect the placing of the verb, which quite often
appears before the subject, and also at the very end of the clause.

4.2 Old English sounds

There is no record of the English language until the year 600, when the Anglo-Saxons were
converted to Christianity and learned the Latin alphabet. The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons
had used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally developed for scratching onto wood
or stone. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet, which
was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment.

Unfortunately, the Latin alphabet was a foreign one which was being used to record and
transcript Old English, a language whose sounds did not have a proper correspondence and
representation in the new alphabet. Therefore, it was in the scribe's hand to handle the characters
in such a way that represented the spoken words as accurately as possible. Thus, a significant
dissonance between the sounds of the language and the letters used to represent them emerged.

Christianisation also brought monasteries, which became the cultural centres of that time.
There, monks created, compiled, and hand-copied a lot of manuscripts for their distribution or
storage in other monasteries. This hand-copy process was long and tedious, that is why not
many manuscripts from that time have been kept. Also, there was not a standard version of the

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language, so each monk 'contributed' to the improvement of the language adapting some
spelling to better represent the pronunciation of some words according to their regional
variation. It is because of this that we can find different written versions of the same text and
even different spellings for the same words in the very same text.

Knowing how Old English was pronounced is a matter of guessing more than certainty.
However, we have some evidence as for what the pronunciation of Old English may have been
like.

1. Alphabetical logic: “We know a great deal about how the letters of the Roman alphabet were
pronounced and it seems reasonable to assume that, when the missionaries adapted this alphabet
to Old English, they tried to do so in a consistent and logical way. The letter representing the
sound of /m/ in Latin would have been used to represent the sound in English”. (Crystal, 2005,
p. 18).

2. Comparative reconstructions: “We can work backwards from later states of the language to
make deductions about how Old English must have sounded. Several of the sounds of Modern
English (especially dialect forms) are likely to have close similarities to those of Old English.
It is unlikely that there is any real difference in the way most of the consonants were pronounced
then and now. The chief problem are the vowels, whose values are always more difficult to
pinpoint” (Crystal, 2015, p. 19).

3. Sound changes: “We know a great deal about the kinds of sound changes which take place
as language progresses. It is therefore possible to propose a particular sound value for an Old
English letter different from one in existence today, as long as we are able to give a plausible
explanation for the change”. (Crystal, 2005, p. 19).

4. Poetic evidence: “The way in which poets make words rhyme or alliterate can provide
important clues about the way the sound system works. So can the rhythmical patterns of lines
of verse, which can show the way a word was stressed, and thus indicate what value to give to
a vowel appearing in an unstressed syllable”. (Crystal, 2005, p. 19).

4.3 The earliest English Literature

After having analysed Old English linguistically, we should mention the earliest English
literature written at that time. As some of the most relevant works of the time, we can mention
Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Seafarer. These titles were added by editors, usually in the
nineteenth century, since most of the poetry is anonymous and its manuscripts contained no
titles. Conversely, we know a bit more of the prose authors, such as King Alfred, but still most
of the surviving material, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is anonymous.

Kennings, a term coming from Old Norse poetic treatise, is something to consider when
analysing vocabulary in Old English. They describe things indirectly, allusively and often in
compounds. The meaning most of the times is not clear and we need imagination for its
interpretation. Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes great use of compound words, and
kennings were often used to satisfy the need of alliteration in a line or metrical structure.

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Some clear examples of kennings in Beowulf:

Figure 4: https://www.slideshare.net/kyung2/english25intro-to-beowulf

5. Middle English

The event that marks the end of the Old English period, and the beginning of the middle English
period, is the arrival of the Norman French in England following their victory at Hastings under
William the Conqueror in 1066. He was crowned as King William I at Westminster Abbey and
London became the new capital. English aristocracy was replaced by Norman aristocracy and
as a consequence, English became the language of the lower classes. The French-speaking
invaders became the ruling class, so that the language of the nobility, the government, the law
and civilised life in England for the next two hundred years was French.

After the loss of Normandy to France in 1199, a strong nationalistic feeling took hold of some
of the most important members of the ruling class who were forced to choose between their
land on the Island (England) or in the continent (Normandy). Those who chose to remain in
England started to pay more attention to English as a way of claiming a cultural identity
different from those who were forced out from the French territories. New English Lords started
to educate their children in both languages, English and French, so a future bilingual generation
was beginning.

Normandy was now occupied by lords and peasants coming from the central and south part of
France and with them came another dialect, Central French, the language of the French court,
which was considered a more prestigious variety. France was still the main commercial partner
of the inhabitants of the Island but now they had to deal with people who spoke a rather different
variation of the French they had known. This new dialectal variation also influenced the English
language, especially its spelling and pronunciation.

By this time, English had become the third language in its own country after French and Latin
and still did not have an official status and regulation. It was largely a spoken rather than written
language, so a myriad of distinct regional usages and dialects appeared, and indeed the

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proliferation of dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England
could not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.

It was during this period that basically all Old English inflections disappeared and syntactic
order started to become more relevant since with the absence of declension, word order was the
logical step in order to signal the relationship between words in a sentence. Progressive tenses
(-ing) also made their appearance late in this period.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the Hundred Year War against France (1337-1453)
had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy, the status of English rising as
a consequence. The Statute of Pleading (1362) made English the official language of the court
and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), and in that same year
Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological
turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of instruction in schools.

5.1 Middle English vocabulary.

At the very beginning of the period, we can still see influence of Scandinavian and Latin
languages, but it will be the French factor that will play the most important role. Inevitably, the
use of French by the English speakers brought some changes into the language and the number
of words used expanded greatly, with the French normally supplementing rather than replacing
the English. The Normans brought over 10,000 words to English (about three quarters of which
are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns formed with new French
affixes as con-, trans-, pre-, -ance, -tion, and -ment.

Another very interesting phenomenon started to take place during this period: a whole host of
new, French-based words entered the language and coexisted with their English equivalents.
Some of these words specialised or narrowed their meaning, also adding a better or worse
connotation to their original meaning. Others changed or broadened their reference so they
could be used in other fields, the French alternative often suggesting a higher level of
refinement than the Old English. e.g., liberty/freedom, labour/work, aid/help.

5.2 Middle English grammar

The most important change from Old English to Middle English is the decay of inflections, that
is, a change from a synthetic to an analytic type of grammar. Fixed patterns of words were
established to express the relationships between clause elements. There was already a tendency
towards subject-verb-object order in OE and this was now consolidated in some constructions
and extended to others.

Some other changes happened in prepositions, which became particularly critical when noun
endings were lost, and pronouns, with new forms introduced (they, their, them), whereas the
ending of verbs remained close to those of OE.

A comparison of English texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries with those produced in
the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries reveals the following differences between Old and
Middle English:

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 - Phonological:
o OE diphthongs become ME monophthongs, e.g., on heofonum > in hevene
(heaven)
o New diphthongs emerge in ME, e.g., dæg > dai (day)
o Initial /h/ before consonants disappears in ME, e.g., hræven > raven
- Morphological:
o The complete OE inflectional system of OE is simplified in ME.
o Loss of grammatical gender.
o Emergence of the unified definite article ‘the’
- Syntactic:
o Case functions are replaced by a fixed word order and prepositions.
- Lexical:
o First borrowing of French loan-words.
- Graphological:
o Increased use of Latin and Anglo-Norman conventions.

5.1 Middle English literature

The Middle English period has a much richer written documentation than that found in Old
English. A lengthy poetic history of Britain known as Lazamon’s Brut is one of the earliest
works from this period to survive, and in the fourteenth century, came the important texts of
Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Middle English poetry was very much
influenced by French literary traditions, both in content and style. Also, many of the works are
of unknown authorship, although this changed towards the end of the period, with authors like
John Wycliff and Geoffrey Chaucer among the most prominent names.

Regarding Lazamon’s Brut we can say that it is a poem of c. 16,000 lines telling the history of
Britain from the landing of Brutus (founder of the Britons) to the last Saxon victory over the
Britons in 689.

Figure 5 http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2017/04/22/episode-93-the-two-arthurs/

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Sir Gwain and the Green Knight belongs to the Arthurian legends and it narrates two adventures
– the arrival of a green knight at King Arthur’s court and the challenge he issues, and the
temptation of Sir Gwain, who takes up the challenge at the green knight’s chapel.

Figure 6 http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/large126560.html

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a unique work in which the author provides evidence about the
state of medieval grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation throughout 24 short stories.

Figure 7: https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-are-the-canterbury-tales

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Bibliography

BARBER, C. - J. BEAL, J. - P. SHAW, P. (2009). The English Language: A Historical

CRYSTAL, D. (2005). The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. Cambridge:

YULE, G. (2010). The Study of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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